This is the editorial of Issue 9 of our physical publication, The Socialist
The government are playing the classics. It seems that every other day brings news of fresh attacks on Māori. Whether the demotion of Māori names from government agencies, funding cuts to health and community organisations, removal of equity policies, or breaches of land rights; it is relentless and comes from every direction.
The most brazen attacks come from the ACT Party, who are supercharging their former leader Don Brash’s poorly veiled language of ‘democracy’ to launch a slew of racist policies. What they possess, which Brash didn’t, is power within a government of coalition partners who are nominally supportive of their ideas, and happy to let them be the face of the attacks so long as they can distance themselves if things turn pear-shaped.
The apex of this dynamic is the Treaty Principles Bill – wherein the ACT Party aims to remove any notion of Māori sovereignty from the country’s founding document, then put this re-written version to referendum. This runs roughshod over all legal precedent and is designed to whip up anti-Māori fervour behind the old myth of an apparent Māori privilege. We know that in reality, the only noteworthy Māori privileges in this society include the privilege to die seven years earlier than non-Māori, receive harsher criminal sentences, and be abused for speaking the native language of this land.
Christopher Luxon claims that he is bound by the coalition agreement to take this bill forward to the select committee, after which the National Party will not support it further. He was not, however, obligated to have given the bill a full six-month select committee process, during which we can expect an exceptionally well-funded campaign from forces across the global right-wing to drive support for it. We should be wary that if this campaign succeeds without major protest, there remains a chance of Luxon changing tune in order not to bleed votes to ACT.
There are some factions within the political centre-right who push back against flagrantly anti-Māori rhetoric and policy, from quiet concerns voiced by former prime minister John Key, to scathing rants from former National Party press secretary Matthew Hooton. But it is crucially important to understand that Key and Hooton view anti-Māori attacks primarily as a strategical error – one with the risk of provoking resistance and distracting from their primary goal of moving ahead with economic austerity. Austerity of course also crushes Māori, workers, and the poor of every ethnicity, but manages to do so more discreetly.
Contrary to mainstream belief, the reason that racist attacks on Māori arise is not simply because they’re politically convenient or that individuals hold bigoted ideas. The underlying contradiction, which will continue to spark these attacks until it is resolved, is the threat of what te ao Māori represents. Former justice minister Henry Sewell understood that threat when he outlined the aims of the Native Land Court in 1865 – “to destroy the principle of communism upon which their social system is based and which stands as a barrier in the way of all attempts to amalgamate the Māori race into our social and political system.”
Māori, like other indigenous groups, have the most recent memory of a society of communal relations. A society within which the land was treated as an ancestor that sustained our lives, and before capitalism transformed the land into a commodity to poison and plunder. The threat of a return to those social relations is an existential threat to capitalism, and we pursue those social relations because capitalism is an existential threat to humanity.
New Zealand was not founded by conquest. It was founded by treaty. And despite having never been honoured, the mere existence of that treaty as a potential obstacle to profit haunts the capitalist class.
Attacks on Māori pave the way for future attacks on the non-Māori working class. But te ao Māori paves the way for a habitable future for all, based on human need instead of private profit. The Māori protest movement remains the most fierce and quickly mobilised in the country, and we are excited to join it in whichever forms it takes for the fight ahead.
Ake ake ake!
