Neither Wellington nor Parliament has ever seen anything like it before.
The Police said there were more than 40,000 but however many there were, yesterday’s Hikoi to Parliament was a monumental event.
It was almost three times the Foreshore and Seabed martch of 2004 and many,many times bigger than the anti-vax march of 2022.
It was also far more organised and disciplined.
And it is likely to end up redefining New Zealand politics.
What it did was display the power and passion of young Maori and it underlined how their numbers now make them a major New Zealand political force.
The big winners were Te Pati Maori who played a lead role in organising the Hui, and their co-leader, Rawiri Waititi, made the most overtly political pitch to them in his speech to the crowd.
Waititi called on young people to ensure they enrolled on the Maori roll.
That is a further reminder that Te Paati Maori consider their future dependent on winning the Maori seats.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins, whose party lost the seats to the Te Pati Maori at the last election, has all but conceded that Labour will now have to rely on the party vote in those seats.
“We won the party vote at the last election, and we’ll be working really hard to do so again at the next election,” he told media on Monday.
National needn’t worry about losing Maori support. It doesn’t get much anyway. It won only five per cent of the party vote in the Maori electorates last year.
Instead, its concern is to be seen by middle-ground voters as capable of avoiding any Maori-Pakeha confrontation.
That motivation was evident in yesterday’s announcement that the Justice Select Committee would close submissions on David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill on January 7 and complete its deliberations by the end of February rather than the six months originally proposed.
There were widespread fears, repeated by speakers at the Hikoi at Parliament yesterday, that six months would simply provide a platform for extremists on either side of the debate.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was careful to say the decision to truncate the Committee’s deliberations was a decision for the Committee, not him, which Parliament’s Standing Orders requires him to say, but the real politics of the Beehive mean that the National Party members of any Select Committee on an issue as sensitive as this would lend a careful ear to what the Beehive wanted.
That leaves open whether the Committee will end the public submissions before Waitangi Day on February 6.
In a statement yesterday, the Committee said it intended to make further decisions about the submission process.
In the meantime, it also intended “to consider and resolve criteria for submissions that will not be accepted due to offensive language.”
“The committee is conscious that the bill is controversial and intends to facilitate a measured debate,” the statement said.
Luxon conceded that there was a strong depth of emotion on both sides of the debate.
“So now it’s in the hands of the parliament,” he said.
“It’s now in the hands of the select Committee. They work through the timing from here on through.”
As for ACT, in what looked like political theatre, ACT leader David Seymour briefly emerged onto the Parliamentary forecourt while the Hikoi was all over Parliament’s lawn.
Speaker Gerry Brownlee, for reasons he wouldn’t reveal, barred media from the forecourt during the Hikoi, though MPs and their staff were free to come and go.
However, Seymour arrived with his social media team and later offered the video to media organisations.
National, NZ First, Labour, Green, and Te Pati Maori MPs also came to the forecourt, but without attendant social media teams.
Ngāti Toa leader Helmut Modlik, who has been prominent in various media opposing the Treaty Principles Bill, told the crowd that their tipuna (ancestors) had agreed to “empower and unify all the people of this whenua under Te Tiriti o Waitangi.”
Speaking of his own background with a German father and a Maori mother, he said: “To those who would divide us, you are too late. We are already one people.”
Waititi said no one had the right to debate rangatiratanga.
“Rangatiratanga belongs to us outside the House,” he said.
“But we have got to have a Kawangatanga strategy, and that strategy is everybody, te Iwi Maori, get on the Maori roll.
“We’ll make this a one-term Government.
“Each and every one of us has a responsibility to our mokopuna to turn up to ensure we don’t get another fascist Government like this one.”
Though he likes to pretend otherwise, Waititi is a highly partisan political orator, and his overt politicking clearly irritates both the Prime Minister and the Speaker.
However, Shane Jones saw something that went beyond politics with the thousands who had marched to Parliament.
“It was an extraordinary display. Flags fluttering, banners but by and large, a peaceful crowd,” he said.
“This is beyond the treaty principles, Bill.
“I think what has happened is that they’ve tapped into a sense of anxiety within Maoridom that their rights, their identity, are being imperilled.
“So we’ve going to work very hard to ensure them that, number one, identity is not only a personal responsibility, but we’re not doing anything to invalidate Maori identity.”
Jones has said that it was the Maori Land March of 1975 led by Dame Whina Cooper that awakened his own political consciousness.
But when Maori in their thousands last marched down Lambton Quay in 2004 to protest the Labour Government’s Foreshore and Seabed legislation, Jones was about to become a member of that Government.
“There were 30-odd years between Dame Whina’s march and the Foreshore and Seabed march, and there were 20 years between this march and the Foreshore and Seabed march,” he said.
“And every generation, it appears that Maoridom gathers their tribes together and reflects where they stand on particular pivotal issues.
“The Maori race is now very young.
“They didn’t grow up the way we did, but a lot of voting power is young people.”
What Jones didn’t say was both Dame Whina’s march and the Foreshore and Seabed march had profound impacts on New Zealand politics.
Dame Whina’s march led to the 1984 Labour Government’s decision to extend Waitangi settlements back to 1840. It also raised Maori consciousness, which created institutions like Maori language media and Kohanga Reo.
The Foreshore and Seabed march led to the establishment of the Maori Party.
Yesterday’s match marks the arrival of a new, much more confident generation of Maori ready to begin the move to a more substantial assumption of Tino Rangatiratanga or sovereignty.
If Seymour’s intention was to end the debate on the Treaty, he has failed.
It has really only just begun.
