Back in 2000, David Lange gave a speech for the Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture. Here is a link to the transcript: https://www.brucejesson.com/2000/11/
The last third of the lecture is really interesting. To think it was written 24 years ago, when it applies so much to today. This shows how the left have been planning this for so long.
David Lange:
This brings me to the preoccupation of successive governments with the Treaty of Waitangi.
It is with no disrespect for Māori feeling for the treaty that I have to say it means nothing to me. It can mean nothing to me because it has nothing to say to me. When I was in office I understood that the government had succeeded to certain legal and moral obligations of the government which signed the treaty, and that in so far as those obligations had not been met it was our responsibility to honour them. But that is the extent of it.
The treaty cannot be any kind of founding document, as it is sometimes said to be. It does not resolve the question of sovereignty, if only because one version of it claims one form of sovereignty and the other version claims the opposite. The court of appeal once, absurdly, described it as a partnership between races, but it obviously is not. The signatories are, on one side, a distinctive group of people, and on the other, a government which established itself in New Zealand and whose successors represent all of us, whether we are descendants of the signatories or not. The treaty cannot even resolve the argument among Māori themselves in which one side maintains that that you’re a Māori if you identify as such, and the other claims that it’s your links to traditional forms of association which define you as Māori.
As our increasingly dismal national day continues to show, the treaty is no basis for nationhood. It doesn’t express the fundamental rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and it doesn’t have any unifying concept. The importance it has for Māori people is a constant reminder that governments in a democracy should meet their legal and moral obligations, but for the country taken as a whole, that is, and must be, the limit of its significance.
Here I come to the dangers posed by the increasing entrenchment of the treaty in statute. The treaty itself contains no principles which can usefully guide government or courts. It is a bald agreement, anchored in its time and place, and the public interest in it is the same as the public interest in enforcing any properly-made agreement. To go further than that is to acknowledge the existence of undemocratic forms of rights, entitlements, or sovereignty.
The treaty is a wonderful stick for activists to beat the rest of us with, but it could never have assumed the importance it has without the complicity of others. It came to prominence in liberal thought in the seventies, when many who were concerned about the abuse of the democratic process by the government of the day began to see the treaty as a potential source of alternative authority. It’s been the basis of a self-perpetuating industry in academic and legal circles. Many on the left of politics who sympathise with Māori aspiration have identified with the cause of the treaty, either not knowing or not caring that its implications are profoundly undemocratic.
I don’t think it any coincidence that the cause gained momentum in the ’80s and ’90s, when the government retreated from active engagement in economy and society and in doing so weakened the identification between government and governed which is essential to the functioning of a democracy. It isn’t in the least surprising that undemocratic ideas flourish when democracy itself seems to be failing.
I think that in practice the present government will find it difficult to draw back from its public commitment to the treaty, and that this will almost certainly rob it of its chance to build a more cohesive society and a more productive economy. It has, in the public mind if nowhere else, adopted a goal whose pursuit is inevitably divisive, and it is spending its political capital on it almost by the hour. The result, if the worst comes to the worst, will be a fractured society in which political power will be contested in ways beyond the limits of our democratic experience.
This is the sum of it. In practical terms the government has done very little to change what it says it rejects about the last 15 years, and very little to equip itself with the tools it needs to build an alternative. What it has done may be the groundwork for greater change in the future, or it may be tinkering. It’s impossible to be sure. The government is diffident in its language and has not yet succeeded in associating itself with any unifying idea. On the contrary, it has become too clearly associated with an undemocratic and divisive goal which is likely to deny it more than one term in office. The conclusion which then must be drawn is that the last election has changed very little, and that democratic values are still at risk here.
