Beyond hurt lies love: Brashing the Treaty

I’ve been reflecting on the reception of Brash’s latest ramblings on the Treaty and New Zealand’s future since they came to light a few weeks ago. The response has been encouraging: rather than the shock of 2004, there’s been a bit of humour, a bit of anger, some inspired writing, but largely the thing has already faded. Thank goodness.

I do not claim any special right to write about the Treaty of Waitangi, or Don Brash, or New Zealand’s future. I am just a citizen of this country, someone who has lived here for almost thirty of his thirty eight years. I’ve been involved with progressive politics in the past but not these days.

For the third time, Don Brash has in recent weeks put his name to a reactionary campaign to try and undo some of the restitution made to Māori in recent years. News of this spurred my friend and former flatmate, Deborah Mahuta-Coyle, to write a vivid and very sobering open letter of a memory of the human impact of such thinking.

Racism is a hurt, a scar on the heart. The institutional racism of New Zealand’s colonial past is a simple historical reality, and while today things are better — they are not right. Racism today continues to create hurts between people.

It does not need to. Racism is not inevitable, it is not mandatory, it does not need to be a part of New Zealand’s future.

One of the reasons I love living here in New Zealand is because of the promise it represents. Small, peaceful, far away, wealthy. An indigenous culture that is in tune with the land and that has ways of dealing with difference and change that seem in many ways better adapted to today’s world than those arising from our European heritage.

Where is the leadership that tells that story? Not the false story of “one people” — but the story of a new people?

A people, a nation, that draws on the bests of the cultures and histories in these islands, and sets out to be a beacon of hope, peace and promise in the world? A society that might be characterised by love, not hurt?

That Aotearoa, that New Zealand, will be one where justice has been done and the wrongs of the past put right. Where endemic racism is something we remember but do not suffer from. Where the people at Don Brash’s stage of life have nothing to fear when they look at the reality of life and the direction we are all moving in.

Where another little girl like Deb doesn’t experience what she did. Where what pulls us together is our respect and empathy for each other, a shared national life that sees us all thrive.

That’s the promise of this place. Can we realise it?

Who is speaking for it?

Will you?