The Treaty – a day off or a rip off

Tu Tangata, Issue 4, 1 February 1982, Page 27

The Treaty - a day off or a rip off

WHENUA/Land

Leviticus 25:23

“The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land belongs to me, you are only strangers and guests.’’

In assessing the Treaty of Waitangi it is not possible to divorce the legal considerations from an essentially spiritual and moral basis.

The maori chieftains were the guardians of their respective tribal lands and with the increasing flow of colonial settlers, it was perhaps inevitable that they would seek a committment from the embroyo government of the time to protect ‘Te Whenua’, the very essence of their being, their ethos. Conflict The resulting covenant with all its biblical connotations was presented and with the assistance of missionaries, signed by the Maori representatives. And so was born a conflict between the notions of legality and morality. Morally, the claims of the Maori are indisputable. Sadly the legal mechanisms to protect those claims were drafted in such a way as to completly break both the spirit and letter of the Treaty. Some obvious examples of this unilateral contravention were the 1862 Native Lands Act, which ended the Crown’s pre-emptive right and the 1953 Maori Affairs Act which extinguished a claim based on the customary title of the claimant, as against the Crown. Where to? So where do we go from here? How do we try to lift the dark clouds that have hung over the Waitangi skies and achieve something which is more than

promissory note for racial equality? To merely continue the long drawnout debate on the status of the Treaty will achieve little. Some practical avenues that offer promise are: to endeavour to include the Treaty in some form in the Draft N.Z. Maori Council Bill; to place the Treaty to one side and proceed to draft a current reciprocal committment in the form of a declaration or charter of rights, or formal treaty with a contractual basis; and to re-involve the Churches in the Treaty question and pursuit of alternatives, not merely because of their past involvement in this area, but to add the spiritual dimension to the deliberations and more closely re-align the concepts of legality and morality.

A note on the writer. Pauline Kingi has degrees in Arts, Criminology and Law. She has done advanced studies in Maori Land Law and International Law. She has been admitted to the Bar and from 1979-1981 was engaged as Research Director for the National Council of Churches, Maori Section’s Land Research and Advice Programme ‘Te Ropu Tomokia’ which was jointly sponsored by the NCC Maori Section and the Archdiocese of Wellington Secretariat for Evangelisation, Justice and Development. She has attended forums in Hong Kong, the Philippines and based closely with Aboriginal and Hawiian groups interested in adopting a Treaty of Waitangi model for their respective countries. She is currently the Maori Representative with the Auckland Regional Authority.