Instead of ripping apart the fabric of society, co-governance arrangements are already in place and largely pass without notice<\/p>\n
One of the ironies of David Seymour, the Act party leader who\u2019s insisting on a referendum on \u201cco-governance\u201d between the crown and iwi, is that one of his own ancestors was a signatory to Te Titiri o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi). That doesn\u2019t quite make Seymour a hypocrite, and nor does it necessarily make him a disloyal descendant, instead it reveals one of the contradictions at the heart of New Zealand politics: that few politicians can agree on quite what our founding document means. At one end, Te P\u0101ti M\u0101ori (the M\u0101ori party) and the Greens pursue the textual meaning of Te Tiriti, the M\u0101ori language version reaffirming M\u0101ori sovereignty while carving out modest powers for the crown. At the other end, Act and the National party pursue the textual meaning of the English language treaty where the chiefs who sign apparently surrender their sovereignty to Her Majesty.<\/p>\n
What Act and parts of the National party ignore, of course, is that few chiefs signed the English language version, rendering \u201cthe Treaty of Waitangi\u201d a dead document. The courts deal with that fact in an admirably centrist manner, choosing to ignore both language texts in favour of extracting \u201cprinciples\u201d like \u201cpartnership\u201d \u2013 which is an approximation of co-governance \u2013 and \u201cactive protection\u201d. But the academic and activist consensus is increasingly critical of that compromise. Few historians and legal scholars would disagree that the relevant language version is the M\u0101ori Te Tiriti.<\/p>\n
Morgan Godfery (Te Pahipoto, S\u0101moa) is a senior lecturer at the University of Otago and a columnist at Metro<\/p>\n