Waitangi Tribunal at 50 Years

I was 16 years old when Dame Whina Cooper in 1975 led the famous Māori Land March from Te Hāpua in the Far North to Parliament in Wellington. The hikoi protested the dispossession of Māori land after 1840, which had resulted in 63 million acres being removed from the tino rangatiratanga of iwi and hapū. That is 95 per cent of the country’s land area.

This historical record shows this dispossession was led by the Crown through practices such as dishonoured land deeds, armed invasion and confiscation (raupatu), and the activities of the Native Land Court. These practices breached the Crown’s solemn duty to honour Queen Victoria’s confirmation and guarantee of tino rangatiratanga in Article 2 of te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Fifty years later, 82 per cent of the claims made by Māori for this colonising violence have had, or are having, their historical issues fully addressed by official inquiry. Thus, our nation is close to achieving a post-colonisation reconciliation that is unmatched elsewhere in the world.

How has this extraordinary outcome been achieved in just five decades?

In 2023 and 2024, I had the opportunity to explore this question. Partners for a New Economy is a global philanthropic organisation. It generously provided a grant to study how principles of the Treaty of Waitangi might be applied to the Crown’s annual budget process. The project was hosted by the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre at the University of Canterbury, in collaboration with Dr Matthew Scobie and Professor John Reid.

Based on our research, my answer to this question can be simply stated.

Aotearoa New Zealand is close to achieving reconciliation of the land dispossessions made during colonisation because the Waitangi Tribunal has made wise recommendations based on its practical application of the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi.

The Waitangi Tribunal was created by the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, passed unanimously by Parliament in that year I turned 16. The language of ‘practical application’ and ‘principles of the Treaty’ come from the preamble of the Act, responsibly implemented by the Tribunal. On the Act’s 50^th anniversary, the Waitangi Tribunal’s wise and practical applications of te Tiriti principles deserve to be celebrated and proclaimed. Our project contributes to the celebration by describing sixteen principles our research found in Waitangi Tribunal reports.

A copy of this post including a table that lists these principles, grouped under four headings related to the preamble and Articles of te Tiriti o Waitangi, is available here. A full copy of our report is available here.