Abstract
Over its history, democracy has continually been called upon to more fully realise its own ideals: by extending the franchise to those who had been excluded as second-class citizens; by addressing socioeconomic inequalities through the welfare state post-World War Two; by addressing the ‘counter-democracy’ (Rosenvallon, 2008) that characterises contemporary liberal democracies through invigorated channels for civic engagement. In these ways, democracies on the ground have responded to deep internal failings and contradictions in order to fulfil their own core values, and realise the promise democracy offers of full, free, and equal participation for all citizens as authors of the laws to which they are subject.
Despite these lessons learned, democratic scholars and actors have yet to meaningfully acknowledge and contend with how settler-colonialism has unfolded alongside and distorted the democratic project. In countries like Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and Australia, democracies took shape in the context of mass land theft, violence, and active suppressions and exclusions of Indigenous peoples and politics. Here, as elsewhere, democracies not only failed to realise their own ideals because of this fundamental contradiction but indeed used democratic institutions to further colonial aims.
Despite the 1840 Te Tiriti o Waitangi commitment by the Crown to uphold and protect Māori unqualified political authority (Article 2) and the 1852 New Zealand Constitution Act expressly stating the new settler government could not make laws affecting Māori lands (19.10), parliament often wielded law-making as powerful colonial instrument: to prevent proportional representation in parliament (1867); to outlaw Māori spiritual and medical practitioners (1907); to confiscate lands not being used according to ‘European standards’ (1953); to force land sales at a fraction of market value (1893); to refuse the right to trial for those resisting land confiscations (1863); to disproportionately confiscate Māori land for public works without rights to object or be compensated that were accorded Pākehā (1908); to make Māori exempt from low-interest loans, old age pensions, and half the unemployment benefit (1894-1928); to prevent Māori and Pacific families living in concentration in cities (1940s-1970s); to force all Māori children to attend English schools (1894); to make illegal land sales retroactively ‘legal’ (1894), and more. Explicit violence was also used, but so too the legislative procedures of a democratic system.
Majority rule, one of modern democracy’s most familiar tools, has also been used to suppress Indigenous rights and silence Indigenous voices. Though democracy is often conflated with majority rule mechanisms like voting and referenda, these are merely its bluntest of instruments. When taken alone, at best majoritarian decisions imperfectly achieve the fundamental aim of ‘rule by the people’, as they can silence up to 49% of a population and can harness demographic dominance for anti-democratic ends. This is why functioning democracies hold majority rule in check and balance with codified rights and rule of law, as well as independent institutions and various procedures to ensure that majority rule decisions are informed, and also cannot be used to suppress minorities or fundamental rights.
In 1840 when non-Māori were only a super-minority of 1–2% of the population, rangatira still saw fit to grant them the right to self-govern alongside them. Soon after, settlers began to arrive en masse, armed with colonial myths of the superiority and inevitability of British rule, the English draft of Te Tiriti o Waitangi published in British papers that falsely claimed sovereignty had been ceded, and often deeds to or promises of land that had been stolen. Only 16 years after signing Te Tiriti, populations were roughly equal; by 1871, the non-Māori population was more than quadruple that of tāngata whenua.
As demographics shifted, so too did common sense of the day. New Zealand historian Stephen Turner (2011: 118) writes, “settler dreaming… operates according to the logic of the weight of settler numbers. Living the dream—actively, productively, unselfconsciously—makes the place that dream’s reality.” This ‘dream’ borne and reinforced by now-majority settlers, at its most distilled, is “the pivotal settler colonial and national assumption: that the Crown always already had and continues to have superior underlying title to Indigenous lands” (Mackey, 2016: 240). Practices that reflect this core colonial myth run through our institutions, media, and everyday life, and our ostensibly democratic government reflects it in countless ways. Recently we’ve heard this stated more explicitly than ever before: when pressed in Question Time, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon proclaimed “the Crown is sovereign” (RNZ, 2024). While Opposition leader Chris Hipkins responded later that “Māori did not cede sovereignty” (Te Ao Māori, 2024), inflaming reactionaries, he still added the caveat that “that doesn’t mean that the Crown doesn’t have sovereignty now.” While all previous governments have been complicit in the colonial project, the current coalition government has actively sought to remove Māori representation at local councils, actively discourage or remove te reo from Ministries, disestablish the Māori Health Authority, unilaterally rewrite the Treaty principles to deny Māori collective rights, and erase mention of our treaty where it has been embedded in legislation.
Much of this has been done by weaponising the language and tools of democracy, mobilising majority rule or narratives of equal individual rights to deny Māori political authority, suppress Māori rights, and silence Māori voices. In 2024, as part of the coalition government agreement a minority party proposed to rewrite the Treaty Principles, the means through government gives legal and legislative expression to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, actively preventing Māori consultation on the Bill prior to initiating a public committee submissions process on the constitutional compact. In 2025, all councils who currently have assured representation of mana whenua have been required by national government to hold referenda to subject these seats to uninformed majority vote – though other assured representative seats are not subject to the same.
One treaty partner cannot impose its ways, language, culture, laws on others and call that ‘inclusion’. It cannot actively suppress Indigenous rights and voices or dictate terms for how treaty partners engage, and call this ‘equality’. To hold democratic values is to fiercely protect the ability of all citizens, not just the majority, to meaningfully shape our community. Fundamental rights, including Indigenous rights, by definition cannot be at the mercy of majority rule. And where a treaty established terms by which parliament could emerge in this land, this treaty is the context for our democracy, not the other way round. Indeed, democracy is merely the particular mode of self-governance chosen by settlers when granted the right to govern alongside tāngata whenua in 1840, and it exists within a Māori context: of ongoing sovereignties of iwi and hapū, and ongoing systems, logics, and practices of governance. Democracy is not, therefore, at odds with tōrangapū Māori (Māori politics) or Indigenous sovereignty; there are in fact many examples of coexisting sovereignties around the globe, including here before settler arrival; and within these, examples of how democratic ideals are realised in non-Western ways (Hokowhitu et al., 2021; Matike Mai Aotearoa, 2016; Schouls, 2024). And, crucially, the legitimacy of government thus depends on the extent to which it upholds Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the extent to which it upholds tino rangatiratanga, the unceded political authority of iwi and hapū. Every time legislation or the weight of numbers are used to suppress the rights, voices, and place of those who gave them their right to govern, the more it corrodes its own foundations.
What would it look like to have our democracy reflect its unique context of ongoing sovereignty of iwi and hapū? Many Pākehā political scholars, like me, may be drawn to ask what this means for design. However, understanding our democracy and our scholarship to reside within a context of ongoing Māori sovereignty calls for Pākehā to first and foremost break with patterns of presuming to lead in such inquiries: their obsession with control over the Māori-Pākehā relationship to date could almost be categorised as a form of compulsive disorder. Giving up such control requires a leap of faith on the part of Pākehā. In my view, however, nothing less will suffice if they truly want to gain the sense of belonging they so crave, the sense of identity that until now has proven so elusive. (Mikaere, 2004)
Imagining and making other futures will need to be in partnership with and ultimately led by tāngata whenua, and ceding ‘settler futurity’ (Tuck and Yang, 2012) – no longer working to secure the false and fragile claim to sovereignty – makes the future necessarily opaque and uncertain. But there is still clear and important work for Pākehā to do in our various sites of influence, to rein in where our ways dominate. Heather Came et al. (2020) describe this as akin to paring back the gorse so the ngāhere (native forest) can flourish. For a decolonial future, we are called to disentangle and weed out expressions of colonial dominance and suppression of Māori rights and voices within our democratic system; we are called to bring kāwanatanga and its democracy alongside tino rangatiratanga, so that these might coexist peacefully and for mutual benefit as Te Tiriti o Waitangi envisioned.
Such changes to our democratic system work to uphold treaty obligations that are the very terms our democracy’s legitimacy in this land; they also provide clear pathways to more fully realise democratic ideals we claim to cherish. Democracy bought through domination and exclusion has always betrayed its own ideals. By pluralising approaches to meeting needs and realising aspirations across our institutions rather than demanding all adhere to one people’s ways to participate in the polity, we more fully realise democratic ideals of freedom and equality. By ensuring majority rule does not silence and exclude Māori from collective decision-making, we more fully realise the democratic principle that all affected by decisions should be able to make them. With greater collective understanding of the histories that shape the structural inequalities of the present, and of our core Te Tiriti commitments to each other that for non-Māori still go unfulfilled, we come closer to achieving the democratic condition of an informed demos.
Finding rightful relationships and restoring balance between treaty partners is not only the bigger challenge within which our democracy sits – it is the only sure path to realising democratic aspirations. Yet deepening our democracy in these ways also calls us to likely create something altogether new: as Richard Day (2001: 195) observed regarding the fate of liberal multiculturalism in response to Indigenous claims, “in order to become what it says it wants to be, it will have to sacrifice much of what it has always been.”
