Peter Bassett: Understanding Te Tiriti — Or Just Selling an Anointed Version?

If the Treaty of Waitangi now governs schools, hospitals, councils and community life, there is one small problem: it doesn’t say so.

That gap — between what the Treaty actually says and what is now claimed in its name — is where Roimata Smail’s Understanding Te Tiriti operates, quietly turning modern policy choices into historical inevitabilities.

When Smail says understanding the Treaty is “fundamental for anyone who calls New Zealand home”, she is not talking about what the Treaty says.

She is talking about what has been built around it — and that distinction matters more than her readers are being told.

From Interview to Infomercial

Smail’s Understanding Te Tiriti — a 30-page booklet (A5 size, stapled, cost $25) — was released in 2024.

What is striking is not the booklet itself, but the way it is being promoted, amplified and insulated from challenge by Waatea News in a recent interview with Smail.

Waatea does not interrogate Smail’s claims. It celebrates them. She is presented as a guiding voice; the booklet is labelled “essential”; popularity is treated as proof of insight.

This is not journalism in any sense. It is pure endorsement.

The Bestseller Claim — Repetition as Proof

Waatea repeatedly describes Understanding Te Tiriti as “bestselling”, a word doing far more work than it deserves.

The booklet was propelled early by bulk purchases and private donations. New Zealand bestseller lists are shallow, time-bound, and easily influenced. None of this context is supplied to readers.

“Bestseller” here functions as a rhetorical device: if many people bought it, the thinking goes, the ideas must be sound.

That is marketing logic, not evidence.

Schools: Availability Rebranded as Authority

Waatea also leans heavily on the booklet’s presence in schools, allowing readers to assume educational endorsement.

But copies reached schools via private donation, not through any Ministry of Education vetting, curriculum approval, or professional review. No school was required to use it. No teacher was obliged to teach it.

A booklet sitting on a shelf is not a teaching mandate. Waatea quietly collapses that distinction — because collapsing it strengthens the narrative.

“Everyday Life” — The Central Sleight of Hand

According to Waatea, Smail, a human rights lawyer who has done work Waitangi tribunal work, “unpacks why the Treaty continues to matter in everyday life — from education to health, governance to community relationships.”

This sounds explanatory. It isn’t.

What Smail actually does is point to existing policy frameworks — in health, education, governance — and retrospectively anchor them to the Treaty via so-called “principles”.

The Treaty is not shown shaping these systems.

These systems are shown justifying themselves through the Treaty.

Policy becomes proof. Practice becomes destiny.

The High Table of Interpretations

Smail’s booklet does not stand alone. It sits at the bottom of a long table where interpretation has steadily replaced text.

At that table sit ideas that have gradually hardened into orthodoxy: that the Treaty confers ongoing partnership and shared sovereignty beyond its words; that it is a relational, evolving moral compact rather than a legal document with clear limits; that historical inquiry may legitimately morph into policy prescription; that the Treaty’s meaning adapts over time independent of parliamentary amendment; and that abstract “principles” can be elevated above the written text itself.

Together, these form an ecosystem. Each concept reinforces the others. Each treats interpretation as authority. None is elected. All are insulated.

What is missing from this ecosystem is not history, but contradiction — particularly those moments when Māori leaders themselves spoke plainly about sovereignty.

From Text to Belief

This is where the language shifts from law to creed.

The Treaty has apparently become anointed as aa “living document”, the legal equivalent of, say, the Whanganui River or Mt Taranaki.

Its words become secondary. Meaning evolves not by amendment or referendum, but by moral insight — possessed by a small, self-referencing group.

The booklet never tells readers they are being asked to accept a particular constitutional theory. It presents interpretation as inevitability.

Any disagreement, by implication, is ignorance.

Smail’s booklet advances her interpretation of the Treaty, drawn from the same academic and judicial lineage that dominates public institutions.

Only the Māori-language version is valid, she suggests. Other views — including text-based, limits-focused readings — are absent.

That absence is not accidental.

One such absent voice is Sir Apirana Ngata. In 1922, Ngata — New Zealand’s first Māori law graduate and later a Cabinet minister — explained that Te Tiriti involved the cession of governance to the Crown, the protection of property rights, and the extension of the rights of British subjects to Māori. His explanation was regarded as authoritative enough to be distributed by the Government to Māori households nationwide. It sits uneasily with modern claims of retained or shared sovereignty, which may explain why it is now rarely mentioned.

Nor was Ngata’s view an outlier. In 1860, twenty years after the Treaty was signed, more than 200 Māori leaders gathered at Kohimarama at the invitation of Governor Gore Browne. The Treaty was read again, its meaning discussed, and the hui concluded with chiefs formally pledging to do nothing inconsistent with their recognition of the Queen’s sovereignty and the union of Māori and Pākehā. That declaration — known as the Kohimarama Covenant — sits awkwardly with contemporary assertions that sovereignty was never ceded, and is largely absent from modern Treaty advocacy.

How Propaganda Now Moves

No conspiracy is required. Only alignment.

A booklet that affirms institutional orthodoxy. Media that mistake amplification for explanation. Moral reassurance in place of argument.

It’s as if the Treaty is a catch-all solution for running a democratic nation — a concept that the incumbent government appears incapable of robustly dismissing.

Readers are not told what the Treaty says. They are told what they should feel about it.

The Treaty matters. No serious person disputes that.

But before it is said to govern every aspect of modern life, one question deserves a straight answer:

Where, exactly, does the Treaty say that?

Until that question is faced — rather than managed — Understanding Te Tiriti will remain less a guide to a document than a guide to a belief system, peddled as civic literacy.

Peter Bassett is an observer of media, politics and public institutions, writing on how narrative replaces scrutiny.