2024-11-21
6 分钟Andrew Mueller explains the origin of the controversial bill New Zealand’s Maori are protesting against. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
There will be people, perchance listeners, who may instinctively regard the idea of protests in New Zealand as some combination of absurd, outrageous, even insulting.
What, after all, could New Zealanders possibly have to complain about?
Their country is rich, orderly, beautiful and secure in its own expanse of ocean.
It is basically Australia without the worst things about Australia, that is the spiders and the Australians.
Thanks, Anna.
Get back to work.
Nevertheless, a throng of some 40,000 people gathered earlier this week outside New Zealand's parliament building in Wellington, the culmination of a nine day yomp across the country, a style of protest march known by New Zealand's Mori people as a hikoi.
And they were not doing this for fun.
At issue, as the protesters see it, is an attempt to kick away one of the founding pillars upon which this lavishly blessed nation has been built.
Last week, last week, Mori MPs announced their objections with a haka on the floor of the House of Representatives.
An extremely brief catch up is probably in order with due advance apology that summarising nearly two centuries of history in a paragraph or so is going to necessitate the omission of certain nuances.
Circa the mid 17th century, Europeans realized that New Zealand was there.
First the Dutch, then the British.
As was the case with Australia, the Dutch decided that it was all too hard or there were too many spiders, or the landscape was ill suited to clogs or whatever, and left it to the Brits who ran up their flag and acted like they owned the place, as was the style at the time.
However, very much unlike they did in Australia.
The British negotiated and concluded a legal agreement with the people who were already living on what the Dutch had called Nova Zealandia and what the British navigator James Cook anglicised to New Zealand.
The Treaty of Waitangi, the subject of this week's protests, was signed in 1840 by the Royal Navy Captain William Hobson, who became the first governor of New Zealand, and several hundred chieftains of New Zealand's indigenous people, the Maori.
While it does basically declare that Britain fully intended to help itself to New Zealand, the treaty did extend rights and protections to the Maori.
The treaty did not solve everything.
Indeed, certain infelicities in translation from English to the Maori language led to sputtering conflict between 1845 and 1872.