Co-Governance and its Opponents
Article and photograph by Byron Clark.
Aotearoa is on a long road toward decolonisation. These islands became part of the British empire with the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840 by representatives of the British Crown and iwi. Te Tiriti enshrined the right of Māori to tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty) but this commitment was not honoured. Land confiscations occurred throughout the wars of the 1860s and after. In 1877, Sir James Prendergast, chief justice of the Supreme Court, declared that the treaty was ‘worthless’ because it had been signed ‘between a civilised nation and a group of savages’ when he was adjudicating a case involving land that Ngāti Toa had given to the Anglican church on the understanding that a school would be built on it. It wasn’t until 1975, almost a full century later, that the Waitangi Tribunal was established, and such unresolved grievances related to breaches of Te Tiriti could begin to be addressed.
Since then, this country has moved slowly toward honouring Te Tiriti. Co-governance has been around for a decade. Tiriti settlements have created partnerships between iwi and local and central government to manage natural resources. Five iwi and the Crown manage the Waikato River Authority, and Ngāi Tūhoe and the Department of Conservation share guardianship over Te Uruwera’s forests and lakes, to give some examples. Plans for reform of how the country manages freshwater, drinking water and wastewater (previously called Three Waters) incorporate co-governance, with mana whenua having equal representation with local councils in a top-tier governance group. The false idea that that would mean iwi gaining a fifty-percent control of water resources led to a Pākehā backlash, with “Stop 3 Waters!” signs appearing on fences around the motu and at protests held by groups like Groundswell, whose leaders were caught out not having read the legislation they were so opposed to.
The most vocal opposition has come from Julian Batchelor, a former school principal and real estate agent as well as an evangelical pastor, who has been conducting a nationwide speaking tour. Bachelor has told audiences that co-governance is going to lead to “tribal rule” causing New Zealand ”to become the Zimbabwe of the South Pacific”
“I’m warning you” he told an audience in Nelson, “if you don’t mobilise, we’re going to get rumbled ... there’ll be a mass exodus of people out of this country ... everything will be plundered, infrastructure will decline, [and] corruption will be on the rampage.”
He had used the “Zimbabwe of the South Pacific” line a few weeks earlier in Dargaville, where his speech was preceded by one from Brad Flutey, an activist heavily involved in the occupation of Parliament grounds in 2022 and a sometimes co-host of the conspiratorial ‘Counterspin Media’.
Batchelor told the assembled crowd that co-governance was part of a war between "tribal representatives or elite Māori, and the rest of New Zealand". He wants to mobilise people. “I want to get 100,000 people to march to the Auckland Domain just before the election to put pressure on all the parties.”
"Co-governance has got to be expunged, which means taking every bit of cancer out of our body. It's got to go."
“I'd love you guys to get really wound up,” he told an audience in Warkworth in September 2022. “The problem we have is Kiwis are too passive.”
Bachelor has distributed a thirty page book at his tour stops, others have bulk-purchased copies to distribute. “I lay out from 1975, the beginning of the Treaty of Waitangi, right, into 2023 and show how the treaty has been twisted and contorted and fraudulently manipulated to give elite Maori massive wealth and assets that belong to all New Zealanders and how that's happened.” he told Reality Check Radio‘s Paul Brennan. Like Counterspin Media, Reality Check Radio is an ‘alternative’ news platform rife with conspiracy theories and misinformation. Bachelor suggested that the Public Interest Journalism Fund constituted a bribe to mainstream media outlets, making them “contractually required to push the government narrative” and leading him to get the word out via alternative media. “You've got a media in New Zealand that it's really a government media. It's a terrible thing. So I take my hat off to you guys for what you're doing, because it's so necessary to give the alternative voice.” Elsewhere he had described the media as a “huge player in this war to promote co-governance.”
Bachelor pushed back on Brennan’s attempts to link co-governance with a United Nations agenda. “People have asked me about this and I said, you know what? I know what's going on in New Zealand and I know that I believe 100% that what's happening with Maori and what's happening with Elite Maori has absolutely nothing to do with the WEF [World Economic Forum] or United Nations”
His book doesn’t shy away from conspiracy theory however. His research relies heavily on the work of Stuart C Scott, particularly his self published 1995 book ‘The Travesty of Waitangi’ a book that historian Vincent O’Malley has called “a deeply racist work, repeating all of the familiar tropes that writers of this kind like to peddle.”
“Their version of history goes something like this: Māori were a backward, brutish and barbaric people ("an extremely savage race", according to Scott) who were on the path to self-destruction through the ‘Musket Wars’ before an enlightened and humane British intervention in 1840 saved them from themselves.”
Also influencing Bachelor is the New Zealand Centre for Political Research, the think tank founded by former ACT politician Dr Muriel Newman which in 2016 ran advertisements in newspapers claiming “There will be no end” and “Kiwis must act ... now!” with regard to Māori gaining water rights.
Batchelor bases his arguments on the Littlewood Treaty Document, a version of the Treaty rediscovered in 1989 claimed to be the final English draft of the foundational document. This version of the treaty uses the word ‘sovereignty’ in the first article, while the second article says “the Queen of England confirms and guarantees to the chiefs and the tribes and to all the people of New Zealand, the possession of their lands, dwellings and all their property”.
Batchelor says pre-colonial notions of property should reframe how “possession” is understood, and suggests there is nothing in that document to say it was agreed that Māori have co-governance. It’s a moot point as the treaty that exists in law is Te Tiriti- the one in the indigenous language, which takes precedence in the case of any ambiguity.
Everywhere he has gone, Bachelor has been met with protest of one kind or another. Many venue bookings have been cancelled, with later tour stops only announcing the venue at the last minute. In Dunedin, a Scouts NZ hall was booked for the meeting under false pretences, and cancelled after the meeting began, once the Scouts organisation became aware of its true purpose.
“Some of our volunteers went down there, cancelled the booking with immediate effect, and asked them to leave because it doesn’t align with their values, and the values of the organisation.” Scouts NZ chief executive Chris Wilson told the Herald.
There have been numerous reports of Māori being denied entry to these meetings. Marlborough filmmaker Keelan Walker was stopped at the door by Bachelor who told him he could not come in because he wasn’t a “good Māori”, who would sit there and listen and “be respectful all the way through”. Other meetings have been disrupted from people who did get let in, or picketed.
A petition started by Kaipara District Councilor Ihapera Paniora calls on Attorney General David Parker to charge Bachelor under section 61 of the Human Rights Act, which makes inciting racial disharmony an offence. Due to the incredibly high bar that exists to protect freedom of expression, only one person, Richard Jacobs, has been charged under section 61, after he brandished a gun and called for a genocide of Māori in a video posted to YouTube.
Bachelor has not called for violence, but has suggested some of his followers are readying themselves for armed conflict. “I’m getting phoned by people once a week saying they’ve gone out and bought guns,” he told an Invercargill audience. “And I say ‘don’t use those mate’, let’s try to fight this peacefully and try to stop it, peacefully.” (Police have suggested the claims of people arming themselves are untrue)
That his rhetoric would lead people to believe arming themselves is the right course of action is not unbelievable, Bachelor has compared co-governance to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Right now, it feels like we are living in an occupied country,”
“We only have one chance. If Labour wins the next election, New Zealand as a nation is finished.”
It’s hard to say whether Bachelor’s tour is a symptom of an escalating anti-Māori politics or one of its causes. Likely it’s a bit of both. With the National Party coming out in opposition to bilingual road signs and the politicisation of an algorithm for setting hospital waiting lists which takes into account ethnic disparities in health, contemporary politics is looking similar to the “Iwi/Kiwi” era of the mid 2000s, with anything that even in a symbolic way moves further toward decolonisation being met with a backlash that the right opportunistically hitch themselves to.
The pushback against Bachelor, though, demonstrates that ultimately he and his followers are clinging to the past while others are looking to the future.
After Batchelor’s meeting in Kerikeri Māori environmentalist Reuben Taipari (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu, Te Rarawa, Ngāi Tūhoe) addressed the room:
"We [Māori] need support from everybody in all of the communities, for us to find the solutions.
"Because we don't want to be incarcerated. We don't want to be at the highest statistic for mortality. We don't want to be uneducated. We want to be a part of this community, of this country. We want to be a very strong positive part of this country. So there's no need to fear us."