I have found returning to work this year, well, a bit tougher than usual. The weather doesn’t help but, if I were to guess, there has been a bit of a sense of dread about the global outlook: the US veto of a truce resolution for the Gaza vote in the UN, and the economic outlook. There are no guarantees on inflation coming down in 2024 and we are watching as many things to which our taxes have contributed over the past few years are, I guess (how do I say this?) one after another, cancelled, and replaced with other priorities and projects.

It can all feel too Sisyphyean, continually striving without the satisfaction of the results you were hoping for. Democracy: she’s tough. I write this on the day before Waitangi Day and, this year, there is a tension brought on by the (leaked) draft Treaty Principles Bill: a bill reportedly authored (today’s headline used the term ‘architect’) by the current Minister for Regulation and ACT Party Leader, David Seymour. Its non-authorised release, together with plans to disestablish the Māori Health Authority and the removal of te reo Māori from the public sector, has encouraged a call to action from Māori and for Te Tiriti o Waitangi partners to protest.

In a landmark occasion, Kiingi Pōtatau Te Wherowhero VII called for a national hui at Tūrangawaewae marae in Ngāruawāhia, with a mandate, collectively, to strengthen the resolve to hold the new coalition government to account. It was attended by thousands.

Since then, the debate has increased in tension. As I write, and follow the 1News live feed, the welcome for David Seymour at Waitangi is not exactly welcoming. Backgrounded by protest heckling that is, at times, more foregrounded, Seymour is currently saying, and I am paraphrasing here, that the bill is not stripping the Treaty of its commitment to partnership with tangata whenua; rather, it is the strengthening of tino rangatiratanga for all. Protest waiata from some attending means he ends his speech yelling into the microphone that the bill is about the best future for the country and it seems to be implied that the idea should be regarded as a good faith proposal and those who do not regard it as such, well, they are themselves acting in bad faith.

Even at a distance, I am struck by the ongoing claim that reforming the principles of the Treaty is to honour the intention of the various rangatira who signed it.

The differing contexts of 2024 and 1840 aside, I find Professor Anne Salmond’s commentary on the bill for Newsroom productive in situating and organising my own habits of mind. Discussing Seymour’s issue, that the current collectivist rather than individualist framing of the current principles does not uphold the rights of individuals, she writes: “This reflects a kind of logic that is more common in European ways of thinking than it is in te ao Māori. Neo-liberal theories that focus on the rights of individuals trace back as far as the 16th century, when the French philosopher René Descartes famously declared, ‘Cogito ergo sum — I think therefore I am’.”¹

Salmond further unpacks the way in which this ‘habit of mind’ sets up an analytical logic for encountering then organising the world in binary terms. Compare this, Salmond offers, to a relational logic where the world is ordered “into dynamic networks, animated by reciprocal exchanges — very like whakapapa in fact.”²

Salmond concludes that, given the presence of relational thinking in te reo, Te Tiriti is a relational document expressed in the language of chiefly gift exchange.³

What could this entry-point mean for tauiwi? What could it mean for built-realm discussions? For me, I reflect on how much is a habit of mind and how much is really a contestable idea — what is the litmus test when, on a spectrum of habit to idea, we have a sliding scale that can, and often does, look wildly different from experience to experience, from context to context, from moment to moment?

Place these questions within the built-realm context and the rubber hits the road, and the abstract becomes material with significant investment. I am not convinced that the architects of the bill have completely reconciled how much of the world is already organised to reward individualism of a certain kind, continually rewarding the individuals who succeed in it, while punishing, for some to the point of death, those who exist outside of it, present and past.

Individualism is the dominant habit of mind and, in terms of the built realm and, in particular, the question of housing and shared spaces, the past few decades have demonstrated its limits. It is critical to the future of the country and its people that debating ideas is contextualised by historical events, such as colonisation, and by a richer, deeper understanding of where our habits of mind stem from and how embedded they are.

Image credit

A series of project images from the NZIA’s 2023 Resene Student Design Awards: ‘Moving Mountains – Didactic Architecture for Aotearoa’ by Grayson Croucher. The project underscores the richness enabled in the built realm when architects honour the country’s history.

The jury citation for the Highly Commended project reads: “This is architecture as the embodiment of cultural knowledge, identity and history. The narrative is beautifully handled. The stories of our geography and the way landscape has been formed through legend are uncovered, valued and brought together to heal the difficult passages of our history. How that has been achieved with such evocative structures demonstrates a commendable depth of understanding.”

References

<sup>1. Anne Salmond, ‘Anne Salmond on the Treaty debate: Māori and Pākehā think differently’.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.</sup>