The Discursive Supremacy of the Treaty of Waitangi

On 18 July 2023, a squad of undercover skeptics attended one of Julian Batchelor's “Stop Co-Governance” rallies. The evening proved dramatic. We passed through a gauntlet of counter-protesters to reach the venue. One of us was stopped and questioned by a security guard at the door. When the talk began, protesters in the audience began shouting objections or slogans and disrupting the talk. In one case, there was even a scuffle. Batchelor spent the first half hour asking protesters to leave, declaring that he was “trespassing” them, and waiting for police intervention. The police officers seemed to take their time removing protesters one by one. Audience protest eventually died down, but resumed at the end of the talk, by which point Batchelor's supporters had become short-tempered and shouted insults. Leaving the talk, we then faced another gauntlet of counter-protesters chanting “go home racists.” Somebody even threw a rock at our car as we drove past. In my time with the skeptics, I've never attended an event where emotions ran so high.

Given the confrontational atmosphere, I thought the most striking aspect of Batchelor's talk was the extent to which Batchelor and the protesters shared a common discursive universe. Both Batchelor and the protesters accused each other of racism, suggesting a shared consensus that racism is bad. Even more strikingly, Batchelor and the protesters propounded the slogan “Honour the Treaty,” suggesting a shared consensus that the Treaty of Waitangi is the sole legitimate basis for discussing legitimate statehood in contemporary New Zealand.

While Batchelor and the protesters shared slogans and rhetoric, shared rhetoric does not imply similar beliefs. Batchelor and the protesters differ substantially both about what constitutes “racism,” and how to apply the Treaty of Waitangi to contemporary New Zealand politics. Batchelor's positions on these issues struck me as pretty far from the mainstream of New Zealand political life. Indeed: after listening to his talk, I can see why he gets protested. Some of his arguments were difficult to accept, but others were outrageous and offensive. The most eyebrow-raising bit of his talk came at the very end, where he showed a few PowerPoint slides on the benefits of colonialism. The supposed blessings of colonialism included the defence of the Maori language! (Batchelor did not say what he thinks colonialism supposedly defended the Maori language against)

Batchelor's interpretation of anti-racism, if I followed his reasoning correctly, forbids any public recognition of Maori collective rights. All citizens, he argued, must receive exactly the same rights and duties, with no exceptions for any particular circumstances. A reserved iwi seat in a local forestry council, according to Batchelor, destroys democracy, because anything that creates a uniquely Maori role in government divides Maori and other New Zealand citizens into separate categories, and anything that divides New Zealand citizens into separate categories, places New Zealand on the path to dissolution. Indulging in slippery-slope alarmism, Batchelor repeatedly argued that New Zealand was becoming “the Zimbabwe of the South Pacific,” a possibility once illustrated with a PowerPoint slide of a smirking Mugabe wearing dapper sunglasses.

I found it striking, however, that Batchelor and the protesters both repeatedly used the word “racist” as an insult, and thus apparently agree that “racism” ought to be opposed. Historically speaking, a rhetorical consensus against racism has not always existed. In the not very recent past, prominent politicians, newspapers and/or government agencies in various parts of the world have openly championed racial segregation, or the interests of one “race” over another.

Indeed, an exchange between Batchelor and a protester in the audience suggests a shared perspective even on recent historical events. Early in his talk, Batchelor objected to “Maori forcing their language and culture on other cultures,” hyperbolically declaring that public use of Te Reo is “not democratic, in fact, it's Apartheid.” A Pakeha protester in the audience loudly objected that “Apartheid is only when the powerful inflict upon the vulnerable, we are the Apartheid regime on Maori.” It struck me that both Batchelor and the protester used an Apartheid comparison as an insult, and thus both agree that Apartheid was bad. Insofar as I personally remember a time when Apartheid existed, the Apartheid regime is within living memory. The era in which Apartheid had defenders is also within living memory. In New Zealand, however, even a figure as marginal and extreme right as Julian Batchelor rejects Apartheid.

Batchelor's interpretation of the treaty of Waitangi contended that Maori have through the treaty ceded all sovereignty, and thus have no claim to any collective rights different from any other New Zealand citizens. While making this argument, Batchelor claimed that various key words in the Maori-language version of the treaty have been mistranslated. He argued, for example, that the treaty's second article, in which the crown guarantees tino rangatiratanga, does not imply any recognition of “sovereignty” or “chiefly authority,” but simply Maori rights to their own property. The Waitangi tribunal interprets the phrase tino rangatiratanga differently, but according to Batchelor their alternate interpretation just demonstrates the incompetence and corruption of the Waitangi tribunal. (Amusingly, Batchelor undermined his own ability to pose as an authoritative translator of Maori legal terminology by demonstratively proclaiming that he neither spoke Te Reo, nor had any desire to learn)

In the end, though, what I found most striking is that Batchelor accepts the treaty. Indeed, Batchelor posed as the treaty's sole true defender, claiming that neither the protesters, nor the government, nor the Waitangi tribunal, actually understand what the treaty “really” means. He argued against co-governance through an arcane discussion about which version of the treaty is definitive, and which translations of which Maori words are correct. He even accepted the Maori-language text as definitive. At one point in his talk, Batchelor held up a banner reading “Honour Te Tiriti”, which he claimed was left behind after a protest rally against him. I was struck by the fact that Batchelor and the people who protest against him share the same slogan.

The Treaty of Waitangi's evidently unchallengeable prestige strikes me as an instance of New Zealand exceptionalism. European colonial powers signed dozens of treaties analogous to the Treaty of Waitangi all over the world, but most are now dead letters, since other political documents have supplanted them. Admittedly, the Treaty has not always enjoyed its current prestige: as recently as 1981, protesters disrupted Waitangi Day ceremonies with the slogan “the Treaty is a Fraud”.

Which collective rights indigenous peoples should or should not enjoy can also be debated without reference to a 183-year-old document, particularly when that document declares that an unelected European monarch has sovereignty over Pacific islands twelve time zones removed from her palaces. Future generations of New Zealanders may find other ways to discuss their relationships to each other. Nevertheless, in 2023, it seems that nearly all New Zealanders, even New Zealanders espousing wildly different political opinions, can apparently agree, at least at the rhetorical level, that the Treaty of Waitangi is the legitimate foundation of New Zealand political life.

On balance, it's probably a good thing for a country when some minimal political values are held in common. The ability to articulate different political stances with reference to the Treaty of Waitangi provides New Zealanders with some shared points of reference. Not all countries are so lucky. And if a political force were to emerge that openly proclaimed its support for the idea of racism, or for Apartheid, well, surely that would be a step in the wrong direction.