Te Pāti Māori calls for constitutional change
“Te Pāti Māori are calling to remove the British royal family as head of state, and move Aotearoa to a Te Tiriti o Waitangi based nation.”
Removing the British monarch as head of state could be done by Act of Parliament, as Barbados recently did. The Governor-General of Barbados simply became head of state instead of the Queen, but nothing else was changed. This step doesn’t necessarily need a referendum, although many Kiwis would demand one, and political parties would be unlikely to defy that.
Supposing we did jettison the Queen, though, the tricky thing is what comes next, as Aotearoa/NZ doesn’t have a written constitution. If we were proposing other transformational changes, then we would have to draft and adopt a written constitution.
Te Pāti Māori want a Māori Parliament which would operate alongside the present one in some manner. There have been different models proposed for this.
Te Tiriti was an agreement with the British monarch of the time, Queen Victoria. It granted to her, te Kuini o Ingarani, te Kawanatanga katoa o o ratou wenua – the government of the land. So ‘divorcing’ Victoria’s descendant Elizabeth II (and her successors) might also mean cancelling te Tiriti, as the British monarch was party to the agreement. But I guess you can get around that by rewriting te Tiriti, deleting references to Wikitoria te kuini from all three articles, and putting the essential remaining words into the new written constitution. Or maybe add a clause that says she and her successors have been divorced now and that the basic agreement lives on without them in a new republic.
So far so good. But by becoming a republic (a thing of the people) you can’t really negotiate with ‘the Crown’ anymore, because we would have gotten rid of that. Te Pāti Māori want to divorce the Crown and yet continue to hold the Crown to account for its breaches of te Tiriti.
One of the reasons why our political leaders have shied away from drafting a written constitution (and only talked about it) is that it would set off a whole lot of scrub fires that no one would know how to put out. Te Tiriti is one issue. But what powers would the judiciary get to rule on compliance with the constitution? What powers would a new head of state have, and would they be elected or appointed? Again, it’s all controversial, and people would justifiably demand a referendum to approve any draft constitution.
Te Pāti Māori have used Waitangi Day to boost their plans for constitutional reform. It’ll be interesting to see how this Tiriti policy pays off in opinion polls and at the ballot box in 2023.