February 08, 2023
MPs miss chance for treaty wananga
Māori Party co-leader Debbie Ngarewa Packer says politicians who treated Waitangi Day commemorations like a speed date got caught out.
Organisers wanted party leaders to stick around for a panel on Te Tiriti o Waitangi after their powhiri, but only Ms Ngarewa-Packer and Greens co-leader Marama Davidson took up the invite.
She says it’s not good enough to grab a hangi and take off.
“How often do we as a nation get to have a wananga? These are politicians that havebeen saying in the house ‘we needto have a longer conversation about co-governance,’ ‘oh, we’re just a little experiment.’ These politicians need to have some wananga and they should be having it as the crown with tangata whenua and where better than on the grounds of Waitangi so I think they got caught out,” Ngarewa-Packer says.
She also asks whether the media was at Waitangi to learn or for its usual headline hunting.