In a rightward shift, New Zealand is rethinking pro-Maori policies

It is a rarity among once-colonized nations: a country that uses its indigenous language extensively, where a treaty with its first peoples is largely upheld, and where indigenous peoples have permanent representation in the halls of power.

But a decades-long effort to support Māori, New Zealand’s indigenous people – who lag far behind the wider population in health and wealth and have higher incarceration rates – is now in jeopardy.

Disenchanted with progressive politics, New Zealanders in October elected the country’s most conservative government in a generation, a government that says it wants “equal rights” for every citizen. In practice, this means scrapping a Māori health organisation, abandoning other policies that benefit the community and ordering government agencies to stop using the Māori language.

One member of the new government, a three-party coalition, has called for a possible referendum on the Treaty of Waitangi, an agreement signed in 1840 by Māori leaders and the British Crown and often described as the founding document of the country. Such a referendum, experts say, could erode the fabric of New Zealand society, send race relations to a new low and undo decades of work aimed at redressing historical wrongdoing against the Maori, who are now about make up 17 percent of the country’s population. five million people.

“What this government is saying is: how can we increase the errors?” said Dominic O’Sullivan, a Māori academic and political scientist at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia. “It’s an extraordinary turnaround.”

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has rejected such criticism. “It’s pretty unfair, to be honest,” he told reporters this month, adding: “We’re going to get things done for Māori and non-Māori, and that’s where our focus will be.”

In recent days, Mr Luxon has suggested that a referendum on the treaty is unlikely. His party, the National Party, is the largest and most powerful member of the governing coalition, and he must balance his coalition partners’ desire for widespread change in Maori affairs with his party’s unwillingness to embrace a potentially distracting and divisive vote. to ring.

Māori, deeply shaken by the changes, have taken to the streets. The Māori Party, an indigenous sovereignty party, organized rallies across the country in early December, bringing rush hour traffic to a standstill in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. In Wellington, the capital, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the parliament buildings.

Later that day, during the opening session of the New Zealand Parliament, Māori Party members performed a haka and pledged allegiance to the treaty before taking an amended oath to King Charles III, New Zealand’s head of state, in which they used another name for him, which also translates as ‘scabies’ or ‘rash’.

Kiingi Tuheitia, the Māori king, who has an important symbolic role, said he would organize a national hui, or gathering, for Māori in January aimed at “holding the coalition government to account”.

David Seymour, the leader of Act, the most right-wing member of the coalition government, denounced the demonstrations, saying the Māori Party was “protesting equal rights”.

New Zealanders needed “a healthy debate about whether our future lies in co-governance”, with the government making decisions alongside Māori, “and different rights based on ancestry”, he said in a statement.

Mr Seymour’s arguments echo those this year in neighboring Australia, which firmly rejected a referendum on indigenous representation in parliament. Opponents had argued that a modern Australia should treat everyone equally and avoid “special treatment” of its indigenous citizens, who are disproportionately likely to be poor, suffer from poor health or end up in prison.

New Zealand’s indigenous people also experience material hardship, poorer health outcomes and incarceration at a much higher rate than the population as a whole. But the country is an outlier in the extent to which its citizens have defended its indigenous culture.

The sweet sounds of te reo Māori, the language, have become almost commonplace on the country’s airwaves, in classrooms and even in official government briefings. Jacinda Ardern, long-time leader of the previous government, promised her daughter would learn it alongside English. And so many people have tried to learn the language that the country has experienced a shortage of teachers.

For some, including Mr Seymour and Winston Peters, who is himself Māori and heads New Zealand First, the coalition’s smallest member, there is a sense that the embrace of Māori language and culture has gone too far .

During the pre-election campaign, Mr Peters promised to replace the Māori names of New Zealand government agencies with English ones, arguing this was confusing to the wider population. (About 30 percent of the population speak “more than a few words or phrases,” according to the latest census.)

Mr. Peters disputed that this was an attack on the language, telling his supporters last month that “it is an attack on the elite virtue givers who have hijacked the language for their own socialist purposes.”

The Māori Party once tried to position itself as the middle-of-the-road party that could work with one of New Zealand’s two largest parties – the National Party and the Labor Party, which had been in power for six years until this year used to be. them under Ms Ardern – to give Māori a seat at the government table. But in recent years it has taken a path that is more radical, and what critics describe as more theatrical, with more ambitious policy goals.

That approach appears to have resonated with Māori voters, who this year elected Māori Party representatives to six of the country’s seven Māori electoral seats, after failing to award them seats in 2017 and two in 2020.

It’s unclear whether the party’s tactics will appeal to the wider New Zealand public – or risk turning them away altogether, said Dr. O’Sullivan, the academic. “You have to convince people that there is a cause they want to support, including a significant number of Maori people,” he said.

Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke is one of the Māori Party’s new crop of lawmakers and, at 21, is the youngest parliamentarian in New Zealand history. During her first speech in Parliament last week, she described how she was advised not to take the tensions in political life too personally.

“In just a few weeks, in just a fortnight, this government has attacked my entire world from every angle,” she said, listing proposed changes to Māori affairs. “How can I not take anything personally when it feels like this policy was made about me?”