What do Māori get from the Budget? Not as much as last year, sorry, but $825m more than the rest of us

The question posed in a Te Karere TVNZ headline – Budget 2023: How much was given to Māori? – was partly answered on the same day by a OneNews headline – Budget delivers hundreds of millions for Māori.

The New Zealand Herald put a more precise figure on it: Budget 2023 breakdown: Māori initiatives get $825m, Te Matatini kapa haka festival receives massive boost.

Nevertheless, Newshub reported the Māori Party was miffed that Māori had been short-changed: ‘Should have done better’: Te Pāti Māori Co-leader reacts to Budget 2023.

RNZ (without a question mark) headlined a report:  Budget 2023: What’s in it for Māori.

The article was providing an answer rather than asking a question.

An obvious part of the answer is that Māori will share the same benefits that are appropriated for public services for everyone.

But on top of that – as the NZ Herald headline above attests – there’s $825 million of Māori-targeted spending.

This is not as much as was appropriated last year, as Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson acknowledged: 

GRAHAM ADAMS: Te Pāti Māori – Kingmaker or Labour’s albatross?

• Graham Adams writes – 

 Chris Hipkins must be fast realising that with friends like Te Pāti Māori he really doesn’t need enemies. In fact, the strong possibility Labour will require its support to form a government is looking like a real threat to its chances of re-election in October.

When Chris Luxon last week ruled out coming to an arrangement with Te Pāti Māori in post-election negotiations it lost its crown as “kingmaker” — although some journalists persist in calling it that. Mostly it will now be seen as tied to the Labour-Greens bloc on the left.

After Luxon had drawn a line in the sand — and dubbed a union of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori a “coalition of chaos” — Hipkins felt moved to assert his own authority by warning Te Pāti Māori not to get too far ahead of itself in issuing “bottom lines” as conditions for its co-operation. Its demands so far have included some sort of wealth tax, the removal of GST from food, and withdrawing from the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.

In an effort to reassure voters that the tail wouldn’t be allowed to wag the dog too vigorously, Hipkins said Labour would release its own “bottom lines” before October “because, ultimately, the larger parties do need to be able to implement the commitments that they campaign on”. He reiterated the point at this week’s post-Cabinet press conference: “It may well be, as we get closer to the election, that there are some areas where we don’t agree with [Te Pāti Māori], where there are things that we take off the table.”

Te Pāti Māori’s co-leader Rawiri Waititi, predictably, didn’t take kindly to being told his party should “be careful” with its non-negotiable policies. He described it as “oppression”, and warned the Prime Minister:

“You don’t tell indigenous peoples what our bottom lines are.”

Hipkins’ instructions to Te Pāti Māori to play nice were bound to backfire. It’s simply not in its DNA as a revolutionary party to kowtow to anyone. In fact, its electoral purposes may be best served by continuing to show just how contemptuous it is of the conventional political hierarchy. Chances are that snaffling a government minister to its ranks in the form of Meka Whaitiri was just an opening move. Who knows what other disruptive tactics it has up its sleeve?

CHRIS TROTTER: Te Pāti Māori’s uncompromising threat to the status quo

• Chris Trotter writes –

The Crown is a fickle friend. Any political movement deemed to be colourful but inconsequential is generally permitted to go about its business unmolested. The Crown’s media, RNZ and TVNZ, may even “celebrate” its existence (presumably as proof of Democracy’s broad-minded acceptance of diversity).

Should the movement’s leader(s) demonstrate a newsworthy eccentricity, then they may even find themselves transformed into political celebrities. The moment a political movement makes the transition from inconsequentiality to significance, however, then all bets are off – especially if that significance is born of a decisive rise in its parliamentary representation.

Te Pāti Māori (TPM) is currently on the cusp of making that crucial transition from political novelty to political threat. The decision of the former MP for Waiariki, Labour’s Tamati Coffey, to step away from his parliamentary career at the end of the current term will be welcome news to TPM’s male co-leader, Rawiri Waititi, who took the seat from Coffey in 2020. There is a good chance, now, for Waititi to turn the Māori seat of Waiariki into TPM’s anchor electorate.

Graham Adams: Did Pakeha really crush traditional Maori medicine?

 

Jacinda Ardern claimed in Parliament in 2021 that her government was driving “foundational change”. As Exhibits A and B for this project — which would allegedly “make a long-term difference to how we see ourselves” — she cited the Matariki public holiday and the new compulsory school history curriculum that focuses largely on the Māori experience of colonisation.

The curriculum will be introduced to schools from next year but there is a much more pressing need for compulsory history lessons to begin immediately for our politicians, journalists and health leaders. After all, schoolchildren usually don’t get the chance to write columns in newspapers or take part in television programmes that — wittingly or unwittingly — mislead thousands of their compatriots.

Last Friday, an article by Rawiri Waititi appeared in the New Zealand Herald to mark Māori Language Week. It included:

“Part of colonisation and imperialism is to assert the dominance of the colonial culture and language. Colonisation meant that the whole system of Māori self-belief had to be attacked and derided. The Tohunga Suppression Act of 1907 is merely one example of our spiritual leadership being outlawed.”

“Voodoo economics” is among Seymour’s objections to public holiday – Waititi’s grouches are rooted in a sovereignty challenge

Have all members of Parliament taken the day off, on this  Queen Elizabeth II Memorial Day?

We ask because there were some objections to the Queen Elizabeth II Memorial Day Bill, when all stages were passed under urgency into law last Tuesday.

The legislation created a one-off public holiday to mark the end of the 70-year reign of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

The holiday is taking place today, the day of New Zealand’s State memorial service for the Queen.

When a party vote was called for on the question that urgency be accorded the Bill, Labour (64 votes); National (33); the Green Party (10) and Gaurav Sharma voted in favour.

ACT (10) and Te Paati Māori (2) voted against.

Tributes to Queen Elizabeth II from party leaders – now you can read parts of what Rawiri Waititi said

MPs from all parties paid tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth II in a special sitting of Parliament yesterday, the proceedings led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

The speeches were recorded by Hansard:

ADDRESS TO HIS MAJESTY KING CHARLES III—Condolences on Death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and Congratulations on Accession to Throne

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN (Prime Minister): I move, That a respectful Address be presented to His Majesty King Charles III to offer our condolences in the loss of our late beloved Sovereign Queen Elizabeth II, and to congratulate His Majesty on his accession to the Throne.

Others who spoke were:

Local government leaders can show Waititi how to dispose of democracy and adopt a Treaty-based system of representation

Maori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi was preaching to a powerful army of converts among local government leaders when he said New Zealand should forget about this democracy thing and adopt a Treaty-based system of government.

If he was accurately reported, Waititi expressed his belief that some citizens – by virtue of their race – should be more equal than others.

Can you guess which ones?

According to Newshub, he said:

“We need to start looking at how Maori can participate more equally and equitably in that particular space in a tiriti-centric Aotearoa. Not in a democracy, because… democracy is majority rules, and indigenous peoples – especially Maori at 16 percent of the population in this country – will lose out, and we’ll sit in second-place again.”

He rejected suggestions abandoning a simple democracy for a “tiriti-centric” system would lead to separatism.

“We’ve been on the road to separatism for 180 years. If we look at a tiriti-centric Aotearoa, we’ll probably be the best nation in the world heading down this track.”

Waititi is championing a Treaty-based system of government – and we shouldn’t be surprised that democracy is not the objective

Democracy means government by the people, or a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.

It is a state of society characterised by formal equality of rights and privileges.

And (in this definition, at least) it features 

 … the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges

Right there we can see why democracy might be problematic for Māori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi, who would have surprised nobody when he outlined his vision for a ‘tiriti-centric Aotearoa’ where the majority doesn’t rule over Māori

In other words, he wants Maori to be politically privileged.   

When he said this, he drew attention to a reality which Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her ministers won’t publicly acknowledge – that our democracy is being gradually debilitated by measures her government (and its predecessors) have introduced or may introduce, depending on the outcome of consultations with some “key” Maori tribes on the controversial governance proposals promoted in the He Puapua document.

This is a so-called “independent” report into how New Zealand could fulfil its obligations to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which the country signed up to in 2010.

Why Collins must ignore critics who claim she is playing the race card and keep challenging the PM on the meaning of “partnership”

Left-wing commentators are cock-a-hoop.  Labour is up 2.7% to 52.7%; National is up 1.4% to 27%; the Greens are down 0.8%; ACT is down 0.7%.

In the latest preferred leader poll results, Jacinda Ardern is down a bit but Judith Collins’s support has gone down by two thirds.

On The Daily Blog, Martyn Bradbury posted an item under the heading Why National’s Māori segregation bashing has failed in the polls.

He seized on the responses when TV3 asked voters if they thought Labour was being separatist, and National divisive…

Police and their Minister duck Maori Party question which drew attention to something troubling about children and the cops

Yes, we are aware of the Maori Party’s aversion to Parliamentary questions from Opposition MPs which aim to flush the PM and her government into the open on their programme of incorporating the “Treaty partnership” in their reform programme.

The Maori Party insists those questions are racist and has pressed the Speaker to rule them out of order.

It has also challenged the Speaker and Parliamentary protocol through expressions of dissent which culminated in one co-leader being ordered from the House for performing a defiant haka and the other walking out to show her support for her colleague.

This has won headlines around the world.

Not bad for an outfit which won 1.2 per cent of the party vote at the 2020 general election.

Māori Party co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi have also won publicity this week by declaring their intent to fight the Government’s proposed laws targeting gangs.