We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
TE TIRITI, EQUALITY AND THE FUTURE OF NEW ZEALAND DEMOCRACY by Dominic O’Sullivan (Auckland University Press, NZ$39:99)
How can we really understand and interpret the Treaty of Waitangi? What influence does it now have on us and is it still relevant? Does anybody still think that once the treaty was signed it was adequate to say “we are now one people” Maori and Pakeha? Surely not. And there is also now the fact that Maori rights are being more fully understood and used than before. Many people have asked these questions, but Dominic O’Sullivan takes a very different approach. He is interested in how New Zealand / Aotearoa can and should become a commonwealth, a democracy in which both Maori and Pakeha participate evenly. Dominic O’Sullivan often refers to CTA [Critical Te Tiriti Analysis], looking closely at how the Treaty of Waitangi should now be interpreted and how it can enlighten us. So far so clear. But there is a major problem. Te Tiriti, Equality and the Future of New Zealand Democracy is very much a work for academics. Back in 2023 I reviewed on this blog Bain Attwood’s A Bloody Difficult Subject, about the Treaty of Waitangi. In 2025 I reviewed on this blog Eric Olssen’s The Origins of an Experimental Society. Both were scholarly and thoughtful, but I made it clear that inevitably they would probably be read only by specialists and students. I must say the same about Te Tiriti, Equality and the Future of New Zealand Democracy, but in this case the language is even more specialist. So, rather than giving my opinions, I will present O’Sullivan’s ideas by quoting what I believe are his major ideas.
On his opening page he reminds us that the idea of the Republic is that there is no one person ruling. He says “the book’s ambition is to help shift the treaty discourse toward the development of a republican commonwealth”. On page 7 he says “This book’s overarching question is… how might all and not just some people – Maori people as much as anybody else – reach a point where they can say that New Zealand is recognisably ‘owned’ by everybody, and that their share in an ownership is and meaningful and worthwhile…” And on the same page “Racism’s ultimate expression is a political order where some people do not count. Some people not counting is not compatible with democratic values. Those values are sometimes rashly and incoherently co-opted into the argument that equality means sameness of a kind that supposes cultural homogeneity: the presumption that equalily means ‘everyone should look and think like me.’ ”
In Chapter Two page 27 he discusses “Partnership and Sovereignty”. He opposes the idea of the Treaty as partnership which diminishes opportunities for Maori self-determination. The Treaty does not mention partnership. “The Crown is not, in fact, a routine protector of Maori interests. It repeatedly fails as a protector of rangatiratanga or as a site for the meaningful expression of Maori citizenship. The Crown may, however, be more of a political than constitutional impediment to an inclusive state with power and responsibility distributed as Te Tiriti imagines. So, it may be, as Shore and Kawharu (2014) suggested, that the ‘discourse of the Crown’ is ‘an impediment to constitutional reform’ (p. 32). Furthermore, they argue, the Crown itself is a ‘legal fiction’ and a ‘shape-shifting’ symbol whose definition is obtuse and whose meanings vary according to context’ (p.17). Its value may be its location ‘above the fray of every day political interests’ (Shore & Kawharu, 2014, p.27).” Personally I agree entirely with what Dominic O’Sullivan is saying here. Further he says [Pg 30] “The Crown is, in effect, the government of the day. The king enjoys no legal, political or even moral power to exercise the personal responsibility that might be read into the original Te Tiriti text. No monarch, since 1840, has intervened to protect Maori people from stage aggression or intrusion into their lives. Te Tiriti’s influence is only ever the product of legislation, judicial interpretation and moral persuasiveness. No monarch has or could have shown a personal political interest.” I interpret this to mean that the idea of “The Crown” is a fiction… and [unlike polite O’Sullivan] I would go further and suggest that New Zealand / Aotearoa would be better if we became a republic. However… [Pg 64] “A republic that simply replaces the king with a citizen as head of state would miss the opportunity to consider republicanism’s particular liberal emphasis and how it might support a stronger democracy – one based on a conception of Te Tiriti concerned with secure independence and meaningful inclusion rather than binary conflict. From this perspective, republican’s value is not so much its presumption that a citizen, not a king, will be head of state, but its presumption that non-domination is the organisational principle that should determine how public institutions work and relate to citizens. Changing the head of state may be minimally disruptive. However, self-determination requires profound conceptual disruption.”. Further [Pg 69] “It does not matter whether it is the king or a New Zealand citizen who is head of state. I propose that interpreting Te Tiriti to imagine New Zealand as a commonwealth means that it reflects neither a homogenous one people nor a state where people are partners in a racially constructed binary order – an order where rangatiratanga is for us and provides the only space where we may exercise authority because kawanatanga is exclusively for them. Instead the commonwealth could allow Te Tiriti to be more clearly expressed as an instrument concerned with who makes decisions, how, why, where and for whom, so that a genuine common good is upheld. This would mean political possibilities are not framed through the always shifting and obscure lens of the Crown as sometimes friend and usually foe. The commonwealth also means that as participants people may expect fair influence over setting the policy agenda – in other words, deciding what governments do, what is set aside and what is done by others.”
The main point in these quotations is…[Pg 79] “A commonwealth, in its truest sense, means that the colonial construct of race should not be used to rank people on a continuum of human worth, whereas colonialism either divides people in that was or assimilates them through the systematic undermining of culture and independent identity. Undermining may occur by setting illiberal boundaries on what is acceptable in public life – for example, by proposing that it is unreasonable for people to own land collectively or to privilege its environmental or spiritual value over corporate profit. Instead, the relational justice that the commonwealth might support means that Indigenous claims on the state ‘are not only about compensation or reparations, but also about the terms of association between them and the colonial state. The injustice of expropriation of Aboriginal lands, for example, is not only about the dispossession of property, or the violation of negative rights of non-interference, but a violation or denial of just terms of association.’ (Ivison, 2002, p.100)”
[Pg 99] “Participatory parity may give effect to differentiated citizenship by protecting independence and ‘voice’ (Fraser & Honneth, 2003). It means that people contribute to public life with parity of esteem. As a starting point, participatory parity rationalises a Maori entitlement to contribute to public decision-making according to their own values and aspirations. It presumes non-domination and a meaningful share in government. It presumes that participation from one’s own cultural perspective is a determinant of liberal equality. People cannot be required to express themselves in languages and according to value systems that are not their own.”
[Pg 113] “Tikanga matters as a lens through which people think and reason about what policy is for and what it should achieve. New Zealand’s stable and ordered political environment makes it conducive to thinking about what tikanga means in practice, even with prejudice as a strong counter-influence. The political environment also supports examining what it means to say that liberal democracy should, according to its own tradition, protect people from perpetual exclusion. Excluding tikanga means excluding people. With reference to selected cases heard by the Waitangi Tribunal, this chapter shows how and why tikanga is necessarily a constituent of political equality and guards against exclusion. Tikanga is, then, a precursor to democratic legitimacy, and to what makes the commonwealth capable of non-domination. The commonwealth is an entity that works for everyone, because it is everyone.”
[Pg 132] “Colonialism does not expect public policy to work in favour of Indigenous people and tends, in fact, to explain policy failure as a product of human deficiencies. It may do so because public policy is neither neutral nor objective. It is not necessarily made to serve an agreed public good and may be set to respond to the essential colonial assumption that some people’s self-interest may override what might be objectively defined as fundamental human rights, such as the rights to property, culture and self-determination. It manufactures crises to assert colonial authority as political ‘actors use framing strategies to (re) allocate blame for politicised incidents’ (Brandstrom & Kuipers, 2003 p. 282). Furthermore, ‘the reality of the crisis can only become (partially) accessible through some kind of mediation, through its performative construction by populist discourse’ (Stavrakakis et al., 2018, p.9).”
[Pg 166] “The amended Local Government Act 2002 should, therefore, begin with the assumption that Maori people are citizens and thus shareholders in the powers and responsibilities of local government. They are consequently entitled to see their values and aspirations reflected in how government works and sets and implements policy priorities. Their ultimate expectation is for the system to work in their favour as much as it does for anyone else. There is a presumption of equal political standing that contrasts with junior partnership as a lesser standing, requiring some people to be located on the margins of decision-making, akin to the role of a stakeholder in someone else’s project.”
[Pg 190] “Democracy means that people may hold whichever opinions they like. Nobody is compelled to offer reasons chosen only because others find them acceptable. Just as democracy cannot tell people what to think, it cannot prescribe the intellectual process one would follow to reach a position. Indeed, people may choose no intellectual process whatsoever and simply make rash decisions based on emotion over reason. Policy proposals concerned with protecting Maori rights are routinely opposed from this perspective, but the deliberative democratic presumption is that a policy proposal is likely to be objectively better if the political system encourages reasoned objection, reasoned support or reasoned refinement.”
[Pg 191] “Public participation and consultation are established features of New Zealand’s liberal democracy. The citizens’ assembly shows explicitly that democracy does not belong only to ‘them’ in a ‘them’ and ‘us’ binary and provides an instructive foundation for thinking about what it means to practise equal tikanga in public decision-making. More important are the principles and processes of deliberative reasoning that it raises, which could also be applied to other institutions of the republican commonwealth.”
Now while I have been cherry-picking quotations from Dominic O’Sullivan’s book, I might have missed some of his most important ideas; and certainly his concerns about Maori inclusion is important.
Having said all this, in its style it really is a hard book to read.
