I was honoured to be invited to be the keynote speaker at Waitangi Day commemorations in Te Matau-a-Māui Hawke's Bay last year hosted by the Waipureku Waitangi Trust at Farndon Park in Clive before an audience of up to 500 people. For Waitangi Day 2026 I am posting an edited version of my speech. 

I have been asked to speak to you today on ‘why the Treaty is important’. The short answer to that question is that the Treaty is the glue that holds our nation together. Without it what would we have? A long history of legal chicanery, dispossession, invasion, confiscation and racial discrimination – all directed against Māori. For a long time Pākehā preferred to ignore that history. The Treaty was viewed as at best a historical curiosity rather than a binding and enduring agreement. While Pākehā smugly congratulated themselves for how well they believed they had treated Māori, Māori viewed the relationship quite differently. For much of the period up until the 1970s a dominant Pākehā narrative was that New Zealand had the greatest ‘race relations’ in the world. In this line of thinking, Māori were lucky – privileged even – to have been colonised by those settlers who chose to come to New Zealand. Things could have been so much worse for them. Just imagine the French. 

With the rise of Ngā Tamatoa, the 1975 Māori Land March, Bastion Point, the Raglan golf course occupation, annual protests at Waitangi and the emergence of a new and much more critical historiography, that rose-tinted view of New Zealand’s past became much harder to sustain. For the past half-century our country has been immersed in a major process of historical reappraisal. We have had to look at ourselves in the mirror and what we see reflected back at us has not always been flattering. It has been a difficult, fraught, messy and protracted process but also an essential one for the future of our country. 

In the earliest phases of European settlement in New Zealand, the newcomers were hugely reliant upon Māori – to feed them, to defend them, to build their homes and roads. Pākehā would not have survived in this country without the active support of Māori. And they knew that. 

But as settler numbers surged after 1840, those newcomers increasingly came to expect that they could simply take what they wanted. Older relationships based on reciprocity and negotiation were swept away in favour of unbridled Pākehā hegemony. 

William Hobson’s English-language draft of the Treaty had Māori ceding sovereignty to the Crown. But it is the te reo Māori text signed by all but 40 or so of the more than 500 rangatira to agree to Te Tiriti that is the definitive document under international law, and that included no such provision. The signatories had granted the rights of ‘kawanatanga’ (governance) to the Crown, which was considerably less than outright sovereignty, while at the same time their own ‘tino rangatiratanga’ (full chiefly authority) had been assured them. As the Waitangi Tribunal concluded in its 2014 Report He Whakaputanga me te Tiriti:

In February 1840 the rangatira who signed te Tiriti did not cede their sovereignty. That is, they did not cede their authority to make and enforce law over their people or their territories. Rather, they agreed to share power and authority with the Governor. They agreed to a relationship: one in which they and Hobson were to be equal – equal while having different roles and different spheres of influence. In essence, rangatira retained their authority over their hapu and territories, while Hobson was given authority to control Pākehā.

But once settlers had effectively secured outright control and dominance over most of the country by the end of the 1860s, it was this notion that the Treaty was simply an instrument ceding sovereignty (or even, for those who believed Māori not sufficiently civilised to even do that, a ‘simple nullity’) that reigned supreme. In this conception, once power had been secured, the Treaty imposed no further obligations. It could be safely ignored. 

That view was reflected in the subsequent history of the Treaty documents themselves. After 1840 they were filed away and largely forgotten. In 1908 the Treaty parchments were discovered in the basement of Parliament, ‘buried in a heap of old papers and rubbish’, having been nibbled away at by rats and mice. Following the Napier earthquake in 1931, some officials suggested the Treaty sheets should be stored safely somewhere away from a major faultline. They were overruled. In 1961 they were put on public display at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington but in a way that exposed them to further light damage.