A Facebook post by the Auckland Council’s tourism arm encouraging people to hike in the Waitākere Ranges is another example of the council’s mixed messaging on the kauri dieback.

Waitangi Day: the annual acknowledgement of the partnership Māori and the Crown entered in 1840. On the same day, the Auckland Council did its best to jeopardise its partnership with local Māori, and negate the rāhui placed on the Waitākere Ranges by local iwi Te Kawarau-a-Maki which was designed to stop the spread of kauri dieback in their forests.

On the “What’s on in Auckland” Facebook page, part of Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED), an Auckland Council-controlled organisation, a post asked “Who’s up for a Waitangi Day trip?”. The suggested location was the Kitekite track in the heart of the Waitākere Ranges, and its short walk to the Kitekite falls. The post suggested taking your togs for a swim, packing a picnic, and hiking to the top of the falls for a view of the forest. It didn’t mention the rāhui or kauri dieback and how those using the track can prevent it spreading.

According to ATEED, the Facebook post was a mistake, created and published by an agency contracted by the organisation to help manage its social media. The post has now been removed and replaced with an apology.

“Unfortunately a pre-scheduled post on the Ranges appeared on the ‘What’s On In Auckland’ Facebook page, which is currently managed by a third party on our behalf. We have since removed this post and are taking steps to ensure this will not happen again, and apologise unreservedly for this error,” Auckland Tourism, Events & Economic Development general manager, destination, Steve Armitage said in a statement to The Spinoff. 

“We are abundantly aware of the devastation kauri dieback disease is having on the park and ever since the rahui was placed on the Waitakere Ranges have taken a number of steps to ensure we respect the wishes of Te Kawerau a Maki.”

ATEED’s Facebook fail is another example of the council’s bungled communication around the best way to stop the spread of the currently incurable disease. Massive confusion has been created by the council’s rejection of the rāhui’s complete quarantine of the Waitākere from human use. ATEED says it respects the rāhui, but the council won’t enforce it.

The rāhui is supported by much of the Waitākere community and the post was quickly criticised by Facebook users. The rāhui is endorsed by the Tree Council, Forest & Bird, the Independent Māori Statutory Board and Te Tira Whakamātaki – The Māori Biosecurity Network.

Even the council’s website says it “supports the principles of the rāhui”. But in December the council’s Environment and Community Committee chose to reject the official endorsement of the rāhui and instead close a limited number of high-risk tracks.  

The social media error was indicative of the council’s greater communications failure around the state of the Waitakere Ranges, said Te Kawerau a Maki executive manager Edward Ashby on RNZ this morning.

“A lot of the common questions, or observations rather, are, ‘Oh, there’s a rāhui on but this track and that tracks open so we thought that was fine. So there’s essentially council taking a track approach and we’re taking a forest approach and the two apparently don’t meet. There’s are an awful lot of people that are not respecting the rāhui, that are entering the forest, and in fact there are still people entering currently closed tracks as well. So it’s a social culture change, or behaviour change that needs to happen and that’s very hard unless we have a very organised communications strategy,” Ashby said.

Despite the council’s closure of 44 tracks people are still using prohibited parts of the Waitākere. Video monitoring revealed trampers walking right past the signs at the entry to closed tracks. The Herald reported on thousands of people who ignored the rāhui or didn’t know about it, and few chose to change their plans for a day in the ranges after they were told about it.  

There is significant confusion about the difference between the rāhui and the council’s restrictions, where each applies, and why the rāhui isn’t endorsed by the council. Yesterday, Waitangi Day, The Spinoff spoke to walkers on Beveridge Track, which is off limits under the rāhui but open according to the council’s restrictions. None of them knew the track was closed under the iwi mandate. They’d heard of the rāhui but had seen no information around the track to let them know it was under restriction. They said they wanted to observe the rāhui, but didn’t know where to start.

While the track to the Kitekite falls is not one of those closed by the council, it is covered by the rāhui, and there are a number of of kauri trees on the track. As an easy 1.8km walk on a well maintained track with a waterfall at its end, it’s an incredibly popular track. In January it was estimated that at least 500 people were using the Kitekite track every day, according to RNZ. It’s a well formed track and as part of the council’s $150,000 upgrade to stop dieback spreading it’s had a new walk-through boot cleaning station installed.

Some Māori believe the council’s decision to not back the rahui was one of cultural arrogance than of logistical difficulty. “The decision to not support the rāhui can be viewed as evidence that Māori practices of environmental management are not seen as equal to those that come from non-Māori New Zealanders,” Melanie Mark-Shadbolt and Dr James Ataria wrote on The Spinoff.

The council’s approach is contradictory. ATEED’s follow-up apology post says “we absolutely respect the significance of the rahui and the measures Auckland Council is taking to stop the spread of this incurable disease. There are still lots of places you can go walking in the bush Auckland.” But at the same time as unreservedly apologising for encouraging people to visit the Waitākere, the council refuses to discourage visitors by taking popular walks like the Kitekite falls off the map for walkers. When the majority of the 250km of the forest’s walking tracks remain open, the people will keep coming.

For many Waitangi Day is an opportunity to talk about tino rangatiratanga – Māori sovereignty and self-determination. But does sovereignty mean the same thing to all of us? 

Waitangi Day means many different things to many different people. To some it is a time of reflection on where we are as a country; for others it’s another day at the beach, a chance to enjoy a long weekend basking in the summer sun. For a vocal minority it is an opportunity to decry Māori separatism and push their claims for a ‘truly national day’ to celebrate who we are as a country without the protests. I enjoy the period leading up to Waitangi Day; it provides an opportunity each year to discuss where we are as Māori and reflect on the state of the relationship between Māori and Pākehā. It can be a messy process, but there is nothing wrong with that. We are a nation of many cultures, and many sovereignties. One of the questions to ask ourselves on this day is: how is tino rangatiratanga, guaranteed to us under article two of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, being practiced by Māori as a means of expressing our inherent sovereignty over our whenua, kainga, and taonga?

The idea of tino rangatiratanga is that as Māori we are in charge of our land, our resources, and our aspirations. It is about Māori acting with authority and independence over our own affairs. Tino rangatiratanga is a practice: living according to our tikanga, and striving wherever possible to ensure that the homes, land, and resources guaranteed to us under Te Tiriti o Waitangi are protected for the use and enjoyment of future generations. It is about ensuring that our communities are healthy, well-educated, and can live a good life. Prior to British settlement, rangatiratanga was all encompassing. Rangatira were responsible for the health and wellbeing of their hapū, and had abundant resources to provide this.

Today, however, only six percent of New Zealand remains as Māori land, with confiscations and land purchases of a dubious nature amounting to the gradual transfer of resources from Māori to British settlers. This has been a one way transfer of wealth. It cannot be disputed that our nation’s wealth was built on the back of stolen land and the settlement money paid to Māori – some $2.2 billion over twenty years – is only a fraction of a percent of the value of the loss suffered by Māori. The loss of wealth has destroyed the ability of hapū and iwi to provide for the health and wellbeing of its members.

This is an important point to make because central to the exercise of tino rangatiratanga is the importance of fostering economic development for whānau, hapū, and iwi. Research from the Harvard Project, a research project on indigenous economic development out of Harvard University, has established a clear link between the self-rule or sovereignty of indigenous nations and their economic development. The stronger levels of authority over their own affairs exercised by First Nations in the United States and Canada directly correlates with higher levels of economic development. Furthermore, it is a reinforcing cycle. Higher levels of tino rangatiratanga result in higher levels of economic development, which in turn strengthens the authority and independence of the indigenous nation or iwi.

The right to development is recognised both domestically and internationally. The Waitangi Tribunal has recognised that Māori hold the right to development under Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples also includes provisions supporting the exercise of the right to development. This right encompasses the ability of Māori organisations to pursue their economic development both independent of the Crown, and with the active support of the Crown. The loss of land, and the loss of the opportunity to pursue economic development activities on that land, has had very real and very detrimental effects on the ability of Māori to exercise our tino rangatiratanga as guaranteed under Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

It’s important to note that tino rangatiratanga isn’t perfectly analogous to sovereignty. Both concepts are grounded in their unique geo-political foundations, but tino rangatiratanga is a distinctly Māori concept whereas the early conceptions of sovereignty can be found in the French Catholicism of the 18th century, later adapted and enhanced by British scholars and imported into New Zealand in the 1840s. The legal concept of sovereignty deals more with soft power than it does with hard law. It is a power that is so often claimed, but incredibly difficult to quantify. Sovereignty is conceptualised by indigenous peoples as an inter-connectedness with the natural universe, communities, and individuals; the core premise of the Western conceptualisation of sovereignty is power and, in its most brutal form, sovereignty is power which can be enforced through coercion and armed conflict. This makes sovereignty not so much a legal concept but instead the coercion of the oppressed by the powerful through brute force.

In fact, the history of sovereignty has nothing to do with law but of conquest, power, subjugation, and the belief in the superiority of one race or class of people over another. In the early days of the settlement of New Zealand by the British the use of force characterised the struggle for sovereignty over these lands. Sovereignty is the reward for winning the war. It is the legal justification for the exercise of power and the subjugation of others. Modern judicial jurisprudence in New Zealand records that the sovereignty of the British Crown in New Zealand is unimpeachable, despite no clear justification for quite how they came to claim such sovereignty

The idea that sovereignty is therefore absolute is a popular opinion held by politicians in New Zealand – a continuation of the English tradition that the king or queen held absolute authority from God to rule as sovereign over Britain.

Te Tiriri o Waitangi demands a more nuanced view of sovereignty and, ultimately, power, in New Zealand. An absolute sovereignty residing in Queen Elizabeth II cannot hold in conjunction with the guarantee to Māori of the continued exercise of tino rangatiratanga following the signing Te Tiriti in 1840. The principle of partnership, a core principle of Te Tiriti, requires that power and authority is shared between Pākehā and Māori. This is not unique to New Zealand. Dual sovereignty models exist around the world. In the United States, a theory of Indigenous Sovereignty has been developed which characterises indigenous sovereignty as occurring along a spectrum of rights from participatory government, co-management, self-management, to full sovereignty.

Examples of each can be found in New Zealand: the Māori electorates; co-management regimes over natural environments such as the Whanganui River and Te Urewera; Whānau Ora and home-based health care programmes delivered to Māori communities by Māori providers; and proposals such as that of Ngāi Tuhoe to assume responsibility for the delivery of welfare services to its community. These are all examples of the exercise of tino rangatiratanga along this spectrum of indigenous sovereignty. You don’t have to look very hard to find Māori assuming responsibility for our aspirations and our development. Tino rangatiratanga demands this of ourselves. It is not for the Crown to provide it for us. It is for us to reclaim it.

Ka whawhai tonu matau – struggle without end. The reclamation of our tino rangatiratanga is a struggle without end. But it needs to be a struggle with a purpose. For Māori this means that the pursuit of sovereignty itself should not be the end goal. Sovereignty is as much about reclaiming power as it is the building of a more prosperous future for Māori. A future which builds towards our economic, social, cultural, and environmental development aspirations.