Waitangi Day 2014

The one day a year Maori get to have a say is the one day most Pakeha wish they'd shut up and stop reminding them of that fact. Talkback radio is tense with those who want selected memories and silence, struggling to believe the artifice of "New Zealand" is anything other than an endpoint - and those whose land was seized to create it voicing their longing for justice.

 

The Treaty has and remains broken by both the NZ government and the UK government for the purpose of advancing the interests of the European settlers by way of subduing and repressing the Maori - this is the source of the tension.  

The Europeans and later migrants on the one side insisting the colonial project is over by way of 19th century British warfare, that they and their colonial state have won conclusively and that the twin pillars of immigration (to suppress the Maori population and therefore diminish their democratic power) and freehold land (the system of European land ownership on a detached, absentee and money basis imposed over Maori land) is absolutely, unquestionably, unthinkably unchallengeable and unchangeable.  The Maori on the other side wondering when the very clear undertakings by the British government of its protection will ever eventuate following the colonial regime's effective abdication of the Treaty beginning substantially in 1860.