Waitangi Day - Looking Forward
AUTHOR: Peter Dunne
Every year, one certainty about Waitangi Day is that it will be mired in some form of controversy – be it protest of one form or another, debate about who has speaking rights on the marae and who does not, or comment about whether the day even merits the status we give it.
It is all so irrelevant. None of these arguments contributes anything to the development of our nationhood, or to our coming together as different peoples under the common flag of being New Zealanders. Because it is all so predictable, Waitangi Day is in danger of becoming another national yawn – nothing more than a good holiday break once everyone is back at work, for either one more trip to the beach or barbecue with friends.
Leaving aside the separate argument of whether we should have another National Day, it is time to move on from the tedious annual introspection over Waitangi Day. While we should commemorate what was an important historical occasion in the development of our country, we also need to move forward.
It is time to talk for more seriously than we have done to date about who we are, and what are our aspirations for the future shape of our country. This is a bigger issue than many of the short term matters so much current political debate obsesses on.
We are a young, exciting multi-ethnic country, with a unique Maori heritage, bolstered by European, Pacific and Asian influences. New Zealanders today are no longer anyone else’s carbon copy. We are like no other people on earth, a trend that will become even more marked in the future. We should welcome and embrace this, rather than slip into the comfortable conformity of middle age, or draw up the ramparts against further change.
This is the moment to begin the process of developing a constitutional framework and system of government that reflects the emerging face of contemporary New Zealand. The culture of a move to more open government that the Official Information Act has encouraged; the move to proportional representation in our Parliament through MMP and the adaptations we have made to it over the years; the maturing role of the Ombudsmen as guardians of the public interest; and, the increasingly sophisticated approach to Treaty of Waitangi issues over the last 30 years have all shown we are already well advanced in developing a genuinely New Zealand system of government.
But there are other issues we have to face up to. The high quality of recent local vice-regal appointments raises the inevitable, glaring question of how much longer we can accept the incongruity of a Head of State from another hemisphere, and in many senses another world. The move towards a republic is more than likely inevitable, but that does not mean it should occur without the active input of all of us. We need to start the national debate about the type of republic we want (whether, for example, do we have an elected Head of State, or one appointed by Parliament) and the process by which it is established. While these are not decisions for governments to make, but for the people of New Zealand to decide through a binding referendum, governments do need to take the lead in getting the process underway.
A serious commitment to doing so would not only recognise our growing sense of national identity, but would also take the process of constitutional development the Treaty of Waitangi began to its next stage. It is time to start the journey.