New Zealand’s future belongs to those who do not fear a nation carved out of unity and equity, writes Chris Trotter, and are willing to trust the carvers

By Chris Trotter*

Budget Week has thrown up two very different examples of political representation. In the House of Representatives what we have witnessed is the intentionally divisive squaring-off of Government and Opposition. Unity is not a realistic possibility under our system of representative democracy.

On the streets, however, New Zealanders have witnessed something very different. On the streets, the call from one of the largest indigenous minorities on earth (approximately 20 percent of the population) has been for “Kotahitanga” – unity. What’s more, among those for whom indigeneity constitutes the core of their identity, that unity is not only possible – it is likely.

What is it that causes peoples raised in the traditions of representative democracy to accept disunity? The most optimistic answer is that what many critics condemn as disunity isn’t disunity at all. The debates in Parliament, according to the optimists, are intended to improve the legislative process by requiring the governing majority to test its policies against the objections and/or proposed alternatives of the minority. What some perceive as petty squabbles are, by this reckoning, vital contributors to a much broader and more important unity – that of the citizenry’s faith and trust in the democratic system.

That’s the theory, anyway. But it is by no means certain that a majority of citizens are disposed to accept it. Many people find representative democracy’s angry parliamentary exchanges unedifying – to the point of being disgraceful. Many blame the party system for fostering and perpetuating socio-political divisions. They find it difficult to believe that ordinary, decent, citizens would not, given half-a-chance, coalesce naturally around a programme dedicated to the public good. Their instincts tell them that a political system which deliberately divides the nation is a liability, not an asset.

In the context of New Zealand’s democratic traditions, a cynic might point to the fact that between the mid-1850s and the mid-1870s – the period when the spirit of party and faction was suppressed by a franchise limited to Pakeha male property-owners (joined, after 1867, by four Māori Members of Parliament) – the spirit of unity was much more in evidence. Property-owners do, after all, share a unifying inclination to protect what they own from any political movement disposed to redistribute it among those who own next-to-nothing.

By the 1870s, the gravest threat posed to the “private” property of Pakeha New Zealanders was from dispossessed hapu and iwi. Indeed, nothing is more likely to create unity among Pakeha than the prospect of Māori coming together, under the aegis of the Treaty of Waitangi, to reclaim the collective property which the Pakeha, largely by virtue of controlling the Legislature, had empowered themselves to seize. It is no accident that the class antagonisms that would shape New Zealand for the next 100 years did not emerge as a significant historical driver until the Māori had been stripped of the power to defend their resources.

So, if our political system is, fundamentally, a process driven by the see-sawing struggle between those who own a disproportionate amount of property, and those who seek an equitable portion of the life-chances such ownership confers, then is the realisation of social and political unity a goal restricted to soft-headed idealists and hard-hearted revolutionaries?

As is her wont, the Goddess of History offers no easy or comforting answers. She will tell you that social and political unity is possible, but only when a nation is threatened with subjugation and/or annihilation. When an enemy threatens to destroy all that a people holds dear, then all other quarrels are momentarily, at least, set aside.

To the crowd assembled outside his royal palace on 1 August 1914, as war loomed over Europe, the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, declared:

“I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the expression of your loyalty and your esteem. When it comes to war, all parties cease and we are all brothers.”

In New Zealand, too, the unity generated by the outbreak of the First World War brought Government and Opposition together in a coalition that would last until 1919. Something very similar happened at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. And, although the global Covid-19 Pandemic did not inspire a coalition government, it certainly produced a high level of political co-operation between all the political parties. Economic measures that would normally have engendered bitter opposition were introduced quickly, and largely without rancour.

How far away that crisis-induced unity seemed on Thursday, 30 May 2024 when Nicola Willis delivered her first budget to the House of Representatives. Those controlling a disproportionate amount of the nation’s wealth would have been well-satisfied with the economic and social policies of the conservative coalition government. Those whose life-chances were being limited by those same policies looked to the opposition parties for succour. All the old ideological binaries were soon on display.

When it came to solving New Zealand’s problems, division and rancour were more in evidence on the floor of the House than unity and solidarity.

Not so on the streets, or in Parliament Grounds. There it was all unity and solidarity. Under the aegis of Te Tiriti, Māori from all over Aotearoa had gathered in defence of everything they hold dear: their language, their mana, and the rights guaranteed to them 184 years ago at Waitangi. In the eyes of those thousands of marchers, the Pakeha colonisers are, once again, making war on their people, and, once again, the spirit of Kotahitanga is breathing upon the flames in the flax-roots.

On display across New Zealand on Thursday, 30 May 2024 was an indigenous people that still has faith in itself, and continues to believe that its hopes are not in vain.

How different is the picture inside the Pakeha nation. There, the National Party, Act, and NZ First have thrown up a defensive palisade around the interests that elected them. Labour, the Greens and Te Pati Māori, far from walking forth gladly to find, in the words of James K. Baxter, “the angry poor who are my nation”, keep faith only with the thin social strata that long ago reconciled itself to the administration of a system it does not control, and can never own.

New Zealand’s future belongs to those who do not fear a nation carved out of unity and solidarity, and are willing to trust the carvers. Some New Zealanders will be required to step up, and others, perhaps for the first time in their lives, will be expected to step back.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.