Post-Treaty landscape charted in valuable new resource

Post-Treaty landscape charted in valuable new resource

A new interactive website and Facebook page will provide a resource for informed debate on a topic that may define New Zealand in the years to come—the post-Treaty of Waitangi Crown-Māori relationship.

The new website (www.PostTreatySettlements.org.nz) launched today at Victoria University’s Te Herenga Waka Marae will provide an invaluable resource as New Zealand charts its way through the uncertainty of the post-Treaty settlement landscape.

The website is a collaboration of Victoria University’s Institute of Policy Studies and Te Kawa a Māui (the School of Māori Studies), and includes a collection of essays on post-Treaty settlement issues written by a range of New Zealanders whose specialty areas include law, history, government, political science and Māori studies.

Associate Professor Dr Paul Callister says the website brings together a diverse set of high quality analysis which focuses on topics crucial in the emerging Crown-Māori relationship. Views presented by contributors include:

* Co-management of Urewera National Park would not be a good arrangement for Tūhoe, because it represents such a compromise over autonomy.
* At the end of the Treaty settlement process, the belief that we have finished dealing with New Zealand’s colonial history is misguided.
* Settlements can’t be ‘final’ when they are so manifestly not ‘full’.
* Chinese New Zealanders might hold the keys to New Zealand’s prosperity so should not be marginalised by a focus on the Treaty relationship.
* New Zealand places too much emphasis on the ideology of biculturalism.
* There is a real risk that the growth of Māori and iwi wealth will exacerbate, rather than reduce, Māori social class differences.

“The issues that will continue to arise in the Crown-Māori relationship are large, complex, and often very difficult conceptually and politically. In many of them there are strongly entrenched viewpoints, and in some cases there will be major difficulties in finding any consensus,” says Dr Callister.

“Ideally, many issues will be solved by informed debate rather than through political wrangling. It is against this background that the need for a resource like this is clear.”

The website also includes work from researchers from other New Zealand and overseas universities, as well as researchers and leaders from significant Treaty-related institutes and entities around New Zealand, such as Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Awa, an iwi authority representing around 15,000 descendants of Ngāti Awa. But the interactive site is designed to encourage engagement and debate in the wider community.

Dr Callister says the belief that the signalled 2014 end of the historical Treaty settlements process will usher in a new era in Crown-Māori relations and bring an end to grievances is misfounded.

“The reality is there is no convenient or clear cut off point from the past. The Crown-Māori relationship will continue to evolve organically—sometimes looking back, sometimes forward.

“That this process of evolution will often be fraught can be seen in the intense debate over such matters as the foreshore and seabed, the provision of Māori seats in the new Auckland supercity, and the Government’s support of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

Victoria University Pro Vice-Chancellor (Māori) Professor Piri Sciascia says that the website—a collaboration between two Victoria institutions—continues a tradition of Victoria taking leadership in the important debate about post-Treaty settlement in New Zealand.

“Into the future, New Zealand faces a new set of questions, and this website will seek to inform the answers to some of these questions. This is a very rich resource that provides a platform for discussion, the generation of ideas, and it is hoped, the formulation of policy direction.”

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