Hi my name is David James and for a long time I’ve been working with my partner on treaty issues and explaining them to people so this is just an attempt at a very quick explanation of someone who’s that trip people up about the idea of equality under the treaty of waitangi . Let’s have a look at the articles of the treaty article 1 and I’m going to use the Maori text of the treaty because that’s the one that Mari people understood at the time and that they agreed to the English meant nothing to them it was the language of a tiny minority of people so in article 1 in the Indian treaty the crown is promised something called Caruana tunnel .
We could spend hours on sorting out what that means in detail but certainly it is a kind of Authority which the crown is being given in this country and it’s balanced against the authority which already existed here and which is described as – no run meteora time and that is the authority which the structures of the Maori world possessed and exercised and their spokespeople for that were the wrong a Tara the Chiefs so these two kinds of authority are being recognized and that’s where the Court of Appeal in 1987 said that we have a partnership arrangement and from the Maori perspective that was a partnership which was about co-creating and they share code governance now that’s a government-to-government arrangement it’s not about individual people.
It’s about two forms of government coexisting and working together in harmony its recognition of Maori us of people just as New Zealand has a seat in the United Nations despite the fact that we’re a very small country so Maori who would the majority in fact at the time we’re being recognized as a people alongside the people who lived under the authority of the crown so equality under article 1 & 2 is not about individuals it’s about the quality of people’s sharing the responsibility for the country article 3 of the treaty.
The last article talks a different language it talks about citizenship rights it’s about individuals and within article 3 we are all equal Maori have no more and no less rights than anybody else when people say one law for all absolutely under article 3 it is one more for all this is who makes the laws who has a hand in the making of the laws and it should be up here a partnership now into this country as citizens have come people from all over the world that is what makes us a multi-ethnic Society and people are entitled to all the rights of citizenship there they have they are able to maintain their own cultures so far as they don’t conflict with the laws of the country and Maori are there alongside all the rest of us as individuals traditionally government has been keen on Caruana Tana understands that it hasn’t the authority that was given to it it’s keen on individual citizenship rights and maintaining those government has never been able to grapple effectively with tino rangatiratanga and that is the challenge of the treaty for us today.