Geoff Parker: Wai 1040 Isn’t History - It’s Politics Backdated

The Waitangi Tribunal’s Wai 1040 inquiry is presented as a long-overdue correction to New Zealand’s constitutional history. Its central claim is stark: that Māori never ceded sovereignty in 1840, and that the Crown has governed without legitimate authority ever since.

That claim may be influential in contemporary politics, but it does not withstand historical scrutiny.

Wai 1040 does not uncover new evidence or forgotten documents. Instead, it applies modern ideas about partnership, power-sharing, and identity-based governance to the nineteenth century, judging historical actors by standards that did not exist at the time. This matters because the report is no longer treated as academic commentary. Its conclusions are now being used to justify far-reaching constitutional change.

At the heart of the Tribunal’s narrative is the assertion that rangatira did not cede sovereignty, but agreed instead to a form of shared authority with the Crown. Yet neither the Treaty texts nor nineteenth-century international law support that interpretation.

The English text of Article One is unambiguous: chiefs ceded to the Crown “all the rights and powers of sovereignty”. There is no reservation and no suggestion of divided authority. The Māori text uses the term kāwanatanga, which by 1840 was already in use to describe the governing authority exercised by colonial governors across the British Empire. It referred to practical governing power, not a limited administrative role subordinate to an ongoing Indigenous sovereignty.

Article Two, by contrast, guarantees all New Zealander’s (Maori included) property rights over lands, resources, and taonga. It protects ownership and use; it does not create a parallel state. No colonial-era treaty anywhere in the world established “complementary spheres of sovereignty”. That idea emerged much later, shaped by post-1970s legal and political developments rather than nineteenth-century understandings.

The Tribunal also portrays the development of unified Crown governance as a process that marginalised Māori authority. That framing overlooks a basic reality: a modern state cannot function with fragmented, ancestry-based jurisdictions operating side by side.

National and local institutions were not designed to privilege “Pākehā interests”. They existed to levy rates, build roads and ports, regulate sanitation and public health, and enable trade and settlement. These systems were universal in design. Māori were not excluded from them. They voted, stood for office, served on councils, and increasingly participated as citizens within a single legal framework. To recast the emergence of equal, universal governance as a denial of tino rangatiratanga is, in effect, an objection to equal citizenship itself.

The Māori Councils Act 1900 is often cited as evidence that Māori self-government was deliberately suppressed. In reality, the councils were conceived as limited local administrative bodies operating within a unified state, not as sovereign authorities. They struggled for practical reasons: small population bases, limited revenue, overlapping authority with national law, and internal disagreements among hapū. No comparable ethnic councils anywhere operated independently of national authority. To claim they were “stripped of power” is to misunderstand both their purpose and their constraints.

The Tribunal’s treatment of land rating policy follows a similar pattern of retrospective moralisation. Rates were applied to Māori land for the same reason they were applied to European land: to fund infrastructure that increased land value. Roads, bridges, drainage, and ports benefited Māori landowners directly.

Crucially, Māori land was not immediately or harshly rated. As Sir Apirana Ngata recorded in 1922, Māori land was first subjected to rates only in the 1890s, and then at concessionary levels. In 1894 it was rated at half the European rate, and for a period only leasehold Māori land was taxable at all. Full rates were not applied until 1910, and even then differential treatment persisted. As late as 1917, tax on leased Māori land remained below that imposed on European land.

These facts undermine the claim that rating policy was designed as a punitive or alienating weapon. Where arrears occurred, the causes were usually economic — fragmented ownership, uneconomic blocks, or land difficult to develop — not racial targeting. Exempting Māori land from rates altogether would not have preserved autonomy; it would have entrenched underdevelopment and isolation.

Much of Wai 1040 ultimately rests on alleged breaches of Treaty “principles” such as partnership, equity, and active protection. None of these terms appear in the Treaty itself. They were developed decades later by courts and the Tribunal, are elastic in meaning, and expand or contract to suit contemporary objectives. Applied retrospectively, they allow modern moral standards to be imposed on historical actors who could not possibly have met them.

Using those principles to justify land return, compensation, or constitutional restructuring is not historical analysis. It is policy advocacy presented as settled history.

The Tribunal’s recommendations — including the return of all Crown land and mandatory power-sharing based on ancestry — go well beyond remedying past wrongs. They propose replacing democratic equality with permanent ethnic authority. That is not reconciliation. It is constitutional transformation without broad public consent.

Wai 1040 report reflects a reinterpretation of the Treaty designed to legitimise parallel governance and racialised power in the present.

The Crown did not “deny sovereignty it never received.” It exercised the sovereignty it lawfully acquired in 1840 — imperfectly, sometimes clumsily, but in a manner consistent with how modern states came into being.

History should inform today’s debates, not be reshaped to legitimise them. If constitutional change is proposed, it should be argued openly, on its merits, and decided democratically — not presented as an historical fact that cannot be questioned.

Brian Priestley MBE said about the Waitangi Tribunal > “It would be hard to imagine any public body less well-organised to get at the truth"

Geoff Parker is a passionate advocate for equal rights and a colour blind society.