Some analysis by a social statistician. A note for myself.

On 20 November 2024 around 42,000 people crowded in and around Parliament Grounds nominally protesting against the Treaty Principles Bill after a Hīkoi which came from the North Cape and the Far South. What exactly was going on was more than just a protest against the TPB. This note attempts to contribute to the understanding of what was happening.

Who Were Protesting?

The police estimated the crowd as 42,000 people, presumably based on the number who marched along Lambton Quay, plus adjustments such as for those who went direct to Parliament Grounds. This was almost certainly the largest single protest in New Zealand’s history.[1]

I looked at one photo of the densely packed crowd. As best as I could judge, only about 5 percent looked non-Māori (which does not mean they lacked Māori ancestry). For caution, let us double that figure to 10 percent – say 4000 in the crowd. We also deduct another 4-8000, say, for those who came from outside Wellington. That would mean 30,000-35,000 of protesting Māori came from Wellington.

There are about 90,000 people of Māori descent in the Greater Wellington region. It looks as though at least a third of them were at the demonstration. Allowing for those who were not there because they were too young, too old, disabled, had other commitments or could not travel, and the total of the attendees and the sympathetic absentees must be around half the local Māori population.

Extrapolate that proportion to the national population (cautiously since Wellingtonians are likely to be more political) and we get about half a million Māori who were supportive of the demonstration – that is, 10 percent of the New Zealand population.

However, without a survey, we cannot estimate what proportion of the non-Māori population was supportive (nor what they think).[2]

How Does Te Pati Māori Fit in?

I have seen the Hīkoi dismissed as an instrument of Te Pati Māori. For the record, the party received about 88,000 list votes in the 2023 election.[3] Most of those participating in the protest did not vote TPM in 2023.

Obviously TPM hopes the Hīkoi will enable it to recruit more votes in 2026 (although it already holds six of the seven Māori seats). But equally obviously, ACT hopes its promotion of the TPB will help it recruit more votes from those who are uneasy with Māori aspirations. (It says it is gaining support from 2023 National supporters.)

It may be that TPM activists played a larger role in the organisation of the Hīkoi than their electoral weight suggests. But the Hīkoi was connecting with more than just TPM voters. It involved deeper issues than party politics.

What Were They Protesting About?

So what did the protestors think? There were very few placards, which suggests either that the crowd was unfamiliar with traditional modes of demonstrating or that they were from an oral culture. ‘Kill the Bill’ is only a great chant, not a manifesto.[4]

Both National and New Zealand First spokespeople said the protests were pointless since the Treaty Principles Bill would not pass a second reading. They are saying the TPB will be ‘killed’, but more slowly than the demonstrators were demanding – strangled rather than shot.

But were the demonstrators as naive as the spokespeople implied? It seems likely that the Hīkoi was treating the TPB as symbolic, reflecting a deeper concern.

The new National-led Coalition Government has rolled back a number of initiatives involving Māori that the previous Labour Government had advanced. ACT’s TPB is probably the most extreme and thus the most provocative of these rollbacks.[5]

Here, as elsewhere, the new Government’s policy objective has been to get the country ‘back on track’, the track being the policy framework at the end of the Key-English Government in 2017. It would appear to be responding to those who consider recent policy developments towards Māori have excessively favoured them.

I do not propose to evaluate this tension, but one can say, evident in its response to the Hīkoi, that the current government has no clear idea of a solution to the issue – perhaps surprisingly given that the current Cabinet has more members of Māori descent than any previous Cabinet.

Perhaps their inability illustrates that while there is a tendency to treat Māori as a homogeneous community, the fact is that it is deeply fragmented on most issues (as are non-Māori).

The irony is that the TPB may have done more to unite Māoridom than at any time in the last 150 years, or even further back given the traditional fractious relations between Iwi. It is always easier to unite against the government than to offer a coherent alternative.

Endnotes

1. There are higher estimates, up to 100,000.

2. I saw no Asians or Pasifika in the pictures of the demonstrators; presumably those who attended were at the back.

3. Because we do not know how those Māori on the general electorate rolls voted, we can do not know what proportion this was of the total Māori vote, but in 2023 the TPM won 30 percent of the list votes in Māori seats and 1 percent of the list vote in general seats.

4. ‘Honour Te Tiriti’ is also difficult to interpret.

5. ACT could have avoided the direct confrontation with Māori by proposing a bill which  focused on its third principle ‘the right to equality’. It chose not to.