There was something a little off about wishing others a Happy 2024 this year. Putting aside the fact that the past three years have left us all a bit traumatised – for many Māori, under what has been deemed the most anti-Māori government of our time, wishing people a happy 2024 seems to just fly in the face of what we all know to be the case – happiness is quite far away. After the election and drawn-out coalition talks, we saw the new government’s 100 day plan – a plan dominated by bans, repeals and removals, an appetiser of what we already knew this government would serve up: a steadfast commitment to winding back as many as possible of the hard-fought wins by Māori over the past 50 years.
For many, this is a time to question who we are and where we want to head (I thoroughly recommend reading this piece by John Campbell). Arguably, at this point, the more important question is: How did we get here. By “here” I don’t mean colonial oppression – we’ve been there since 1853 (when the NZ parliament was formed in violation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi).
What I mean is: how did we find ourselves in the hands of such an explicitly hostile anti-Māori government. How did we find ourselves in the hands of a government with such disrespect for Te Tiriti o Waitangi that it has been compared to the darkest days of our treaty history where the treaty was declared “a simple nullity”.
It’s an important question to answer, if we don’t want to simply find ourselves back here again in another few elections.
It would be easy to focus on last year’s election for our answer and condemn Labour for a campaign that lacked lustre, clarity and backbone. It would be easy to focus directly on National, or ACT, or indeed New Zealand First, but the truth is: their actions have been thoroughly predictable, they are being the servants to white colonial conservatism that they have always promised they would be, and Labour delivered us right into their hands. And if we fail to really appreciate the role played by Labour, they will continue to deliver us into the hands of white conservatives at regular intervals.
There’s a famous quote by Thomas Jefferson: “The government you elect is the government you deserve”. But political analysts have, for quite a few years now, noted that democracy is deeply influenced by corporations (and as anyone studying empire and colonialism can tell you, wealth is racialised, which makes democratic influence racialised). Political researcher Daniel Nyberg, in 2021, detailed in his paper how corporate political activity, in the form of lobbying, donations and purchased media space, has severely corroded democratic processes and count as forms of sanctioned corruption. Numerous others have noted the increasing role that disinformation has played in warping democratic processes (in a way that was also racialised). International interest groups like The Atlas Network have, for a long time now, influenced domestic and transnational policies through their networks which include national leaders. Within Aotearoa, electoral processes for Māori voters have been heavily criticized for a number of years now, and of course as has been pointed out consistently since 2010 – the fact that Māori sovereignty was never ceded means that parliamentary processes that operate under the assumption of ultimate Crown authority are in breach of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. All of these make a mockery of democratic ideals – it’s not “the government you elect”, it’s “the government you are manipulated into electing”, “the government that you are coerced into electing“ and “the government elected by privilege and systemic racism”.
None of this was news to Labour. Labour understand full-well that sovereignty was never ceded to the Crown and they had the opportunity to address that injustice, but they refused to. It was simply “too politically risky” to stop politically colonizing us. It was also “too politically risky” to effectively address the disinformation systems warping public opinion, even when their own ministers and Prime Minister were subjected to its brutality.
Media is a source of both revenue and power, and while it’s true that the media must retain the capacity to independently report on political issues, it’s also true that the privatisation of media already limits their claim to independence. For both of these reasons, the government control of misinformation and disinformation angers conservative groups and Labour need to keep conservatives on side in order to win elections. The government failed to control disinformation it because it was too afraid to take on white conservatism and because it is also a product of white conservatism, leading to massive blindspots, some of which the government are fully cognizant of and happy to retain.
The biggest threat this planet faces is white conservatism. Not white people, white conservatism. White conservatism as a system privileges profit over people, and people over environment. It is a hierarchy of privilege, and at the top of that hierarchy we see wealthy upperclass people racialised as white. It also richly rewards non-white people who function to uphold the system (even though they will never reach the top of it, and even though it’s non-white people who are the most oppressed in that system). Seeing white conservatism as a system is the first step to understanding how it operates through both white and non-white people in distinct ways.
This helps to make sense of how 2/3 of the leadership of most anti-Māori coalition government of modern times is Māori. It helps us to see how justice does not just come from appointing someone who has Māori whakapapa to work within a colonial political system, but by redefining the political system itself. For many of you, you may be thinking of Shane Jones, David Seymour or Winston Peters when reading these words. Perhaps you’re thinking of Tama Potaka or Shane Reti, but it’s also true that Labour is full of Māori who opt for proximity to power over Māori political liberation – and who, at best, fail to dream big. They (at best) fail to see that they are ultimately conceding to white conservatism, and so they focus on the beads and blankets in place of political liberation.
They say justice delayed is justice denied. In this case, delayed political justice equals higher death rates, higher incarceration rates, higher child-uplift rates, higher poverty rates, higher homelessness rates. All around the world, where political self-determination has been denied to Indigenous peoples by colonial governments, the social, economic, health, and justice outcomes are the same. This is the trade-off made by successive New Zealand governments – Māori lives and freedom, for political power. When the Labour government refused to enter into discussions about a Tiriti-centered constitution, they did so with the full understanding that the political pendulum of this system unavoidably places Māori back in the hands of National again. Labour would rather share absolute power with white conservatives on a rotational basis than sustainably share power with Māori as Te Tiriti guarantees.
They choose to deliver us back into the hands of National on a regular basis, as a trade off to domination in the times in between. Even during Labour terms, the system still hyper-incarcerated Māori, still disproportionately took Māori children from their homes into systems of abuse, still plundered Māori lands and waters, but all of this was carried out under the guise of “kind” politics – a genre of colonization that the New Zealand government excels in and has been in place since colonization by military force because economically untenable (ie. the late 1800s).
“Kind” colonialism operates on a number of tenets:
- Allowing for lively debate and reform on the condition that ultimate colonial authority is never conceded or even questioned
- The co-option of the oppressed into maintaining colonial power
- The provision of “treats” (smaller rewards to provide the optics of progress)
- The fiction that colonization is ultimately beneficial to all
So to return to the question of “how did we get here?” We got here not just because of the last election, but because we have allowed successive governments to retain colonialism here in Aotearoa. We got here because so many of us drank the cool-aid that outside of a few bad-eggs, we are a progressive, non-racist, kind country. We got here because we have allowed the lie that there is such a thing as kind colonialism. We got here because we believed the fiction that white conservatism only exists on the extreme right, rather than across the entire western political spectrum. We got here because we (Māori) allowed our dreams to become whittled down to one where we are employed to administer the colonial system, and employed to address the harm of the colonial system, but never enabled to end the colonial system.
I don’t say this to disparage the importance of our previous wins in Te Reo, the return of ancestral place-names, or Māori ward representation, all of which have been important to stem colonial harm and commence healing – but rather to point out that these measures cannot be at the expense of political liberation, to point out that we can never take our eyes off that goal, and to point out that if we want to turn colonial harm off *at the tap* we have to change the system.
Nor do I say this to attack Labour. I say this so we understand the issue is not National, ACT, or New Zealand First – it is white conservatism. I say this to warn us that if we do not change the system, we will simply see more of the same – Labour relying on politics of fear to tell us to vote for them or face more National, all the while still violating Te Tiriti themselves, and all the while knowing that they will inevitably deliver us back into National’s hands later anyway. I say this to warn us that as time progresses, the conservative right that Labour will deliver us back to will be increasingly paranoid, and increasingly brutal.
I say this to highlight that problem is not who leads government but HOW WE DO government. The answer is not to simply vote Labour back in, it is to make the entrenchment of Te Tiriti the bottom-line of the next government. Then, and only then, can we truly aspire to happiness.
