Interview with Te Radar

Embedded content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_8816sczMw

"So yeah, people elect the governments that they want; well, they think they want. I don't know that they really know what they want."

Speaker

Te Radar

Transcript

We have got the best race relations in the world, haven't we?

Te Radar:It's funny. You always think that your family is doing okay, generally, don't you? And you look at other families and think, oh, they could do better, and they could do better. And you're sort of brought up in this myth of this wonderful senses of race relations in New Zealand, and it really is a myth. Because when you scrape the layer away, in fact when you actually talk to other races [laughs] it's not what you're told, it's not what you're sold. And it';s an interesting one.

So where along the way did this begin? Clearly with the relevance of the Treaty, and the power of the Treaty now, and the Treaty settlements; that is fantastic. But that's a totally different kettle of fish to ordinary day-to-day situations, and it's a totally different kettle of fish to people understanding and comprehending the beliefs, the language, the attitudes, those funny little cultural differences that other races have.

So we haven't yet, I don't think managed to meld a successful, or relatively successful, Treaty statement process to harmonious race relations. And in fact you could argue that those two things are butting up against each other. And in many ways, you could say a successful Treaty settlement process has actually perhaps hampered race relations.

Is there a 'redneck' New Zealand hidden under the carpet?

Te Radar: I don't even think they're bothering with carpet [laughs]. It's a thin threadbare mat, and has disintegrated to — and it is very much there. And a lot of it comes from — ignorance is a strong word — but an inability or a non-comprehension of the background, the stories, the issues. If people were to go out... and I don't really know anyone who has read a Treaty settlement, but they've reacted against them.

They've seen something, and they've gone, 'Well, how could that possibly be the case?' and you say, 'Have you read the background?' It's like getting into an argument with some friends, and you side with a friend of yours, and you think, how dare that other person do that. And then you find out what your friend did, and go, 'Geez, you're a dick. What did you do that for?'

But we signed a deal with Māori, didn't we?

Te Radar:It's always funny how people hang onto their ancestry and are proud of things that happened, but when your ancestors signed a treaty, you're quite quick to try to go, 'That wasn't us. We didn't sign that. That was those other guys. They did it ages ago, and they did it for this reason, and this reason, and this reason.'

Māori are over-represented in all the worst statistics. Is that because of the Treaty?

Te Radar: I don't think the over-representation of the stats is because of the Treaty, I think it's because of everything that went around with that; the colonisation, the disenfranchisement, the lack of opportunities presented to people, the act of discouragement of language and culture. Is that anything to do with the Treaty? I think that was a process of colonisation that was considered to the be thing to do at the time.

And then for people to say now, 'Well, they've got things back. So why does this still happen?' You know, there's an enormous amount of naiveté, and I don't hold... I do hold individuals responsible for that to a certain extent, but as a collective, you know, people are busy with their lives, and their day-to-day families, and their cares and their works. And they don't have time to sit down and go, 'Why don't I understand this?'

It's certainly not presented on television; you don't see documentaries about how these things — a process of colonisation and disenfranchisement and disengaged has led to high incarceration rates, but what you do see is angry people going, 'Bloody Māoris in prison, and it's their own fault. It's their fault.' It's the individual. And no one is looking back at this kind of —- well, people are, but you don't see on seven o'clock current affairs shows, where what they do is they rail against what they consider to be the right opinion of this amorphous group of middle New Zealand.

I spend a lot of time in New Zealand at all extremities of it, and I don't really know what middle New Zealand actually is. I don't even know that it really exists. I think it's far richer, and far more diverse than simply this amorphous group of people who don't understand things, and might be a bit racist.

There are racists out there, I know them, I've met them. And they're nice people, you know, they just don't have the historical background to fill it in. And when you don't have context, then what you have is ignorance.

Why aren't we urging our government to adopt the bi-cultural values of NZ?

Te Radar: Governments are really elected out of self-interest, you know. And if you're self-interest doesn't really apply to thinking a lot about other people... I mean, your self-interest doesn't want your taxes to be raised, because you're struggling as it is, and your self-interest doesn't want positive discrimination, because then you're not getting something, and self-interest doesn't want a culture that you don't understand, in a sense, you don't want to feel that that's being forced upon you, because that's not acting in your self-interest.

So yeah, people elect the governments that they want; well, they think they want. I don't know that they really know what they want. And I certainly don't think that what they want is often what they get. But it's an interesting one. How do you change the perceptions of a vast majority of the nation? That can't happen overnight.

I think it's happening a lot in schools, you know, with young kids. You see it a lot; the language is there, it's an acceptable thing. But there's more to understanding a culture than being about to say, 'Hello. My name is Te Radar. I'm from the Waikato. This is my river.' There's more than that.

Having said that, when you explain to someone what a mihi is, what it entails, and what the point of it is, suddenly they go, 'Oh. I actually think it's a shame we don't have it more in our European culture.' To say, Hi. I'm Te Radar. I'm son of a dairy farmer from the Waikato. I went to school in Hamilton. My parents came over... because suddenly then, now I know a little bit more about you, and I can put you within a context.

I go, 'Oh.' And I also then know, oh, well if you're from there, do you know so-and-so? 'They're my cousin.' Because New Zealand is really small; we are generally... when you go overseas, and you say you're from New Zealand, and someone said, 'Do you know Brian?'

You might not know Brian, but you may well know Brian's cousin. And I equate that same thing back to that sense of a mihi. Now when you explain that to people, suddenly it's not having someone's culture forced down your throat at the beginning of a speech; suddenly it's a thing that they understand.

So how should we celebrate our bi-cultural nation?

Te Radar: See, even the argument about celebrating Waitangi Day. I think it would be better if we had instigated some kind of a national dish. There's nothing like a national dish to bring a nation together. Thanksgiving in America, everybody eats turkeys. Terrible for the turkeys [laughs]. But you know... and people probably aren't going to dig a hangi in their lawn, but even a sense of a hangi or a barbeque or something like that.

Because in a way, one of things that I think makes it difficult for European New Zealanders is that we kind of lack traditions of our own; we don't have the food, and that long history of things. And so we find it very hard to celebrate ourselves, because we've got nothing to hang it on.

And so in a way when you see other people celebrating their history and their culture, and these long legacies, and various other things, it can feel kind of... and you think, well, why should they have that? Why should we be celebrating that? We've got stuff too. And you go, well name it. And you, we brought books, and we wear pants. It's like, oh shut up [laughs].

The Treaty enshrines Māori ownership and care for the land, but we aren't looking after our resources, are we?

Te Radar: I always enjoy bringing up the concept of kaitiakitanga when I speak to dairy farmers, and talk to them about the rise of corporate land ownership. And I say, there is a difference between an inter-generational family owning and running a farm for a long period of time, invested in a company, planting trees, because they know that those trees will bring back some swamp that their grandfather trained, that their grandchildren will then have a stake in.

And so bring it up in that context with them, and to say, now there is a huge difference then, when you have corporate ownership of mega-farms, and the owners of those farms may never set foot on that land. And they won't understand the fact that creek over there is kind of important, and that that hillside should be planted with trees, because it might cost a bit of money, but it doesn't really do anything, and it's actually going to make all this land a little bit different.

And it doesn't extend out to then the importance of that inter-generational link to squash clubs, and fire brigades, and schools, and all of that, and how that then affects the culture of an area. And again it's getting that sense of understanding into them. And you see people go, 'Oh yeah.' It's the same kind of thing in a way.

How can you have sense of guardianship of a place that people are transient in, in a way? If you are there, and your roots are very long, and very well established, you're going to care about it a lot more, than if you're passing through for a year or two years, or a couple of years.

Māori understand their ownership of water rights and beaches et cetera, but do Pākehā have a more conflicted view of what ownership means?

Te Radar: I wonder if one of the problems is that the history is so young. It's only 400 years, still a pretty long time, many, many generations. And so people say, 'Oh, they only just turned up a few hundred years ago. We would have beaten the, if they hadn't turned up.' And thankfully I think we are over the feeling, if they hadn't blown here in the wind, or drifted here accidentally when they were trying to cross to some other small island.

I think we're over this myth of the drift migration, and are now acknowledging Polynesians as the greatest navigators in the modern world. And people look at things — you look at this water here, and you go, 'How can someone own that?' You look at that island, you can see that Rangitoto, and you can say, 'Well, someone can own that.'But how do you own the seabed? No one can control the seabed.

But there is going to be ownership, because there's a value to that, there's a resource. There's the area, there's the fish, there's whatever is there. And once you put it into that economic context, people can understand it. But yeah, and there's a weird concept with ownership of public land. Who owns that? I don't know. Someone owns it. You can't just go and build a house on it. Yeah, I think there's a struggle.

You know, with a river, I don't know what happens in Europe, I don't think people owned rivers, or the bottom of a lake. So maybe within that, we've never had to deal with comprehending, well who owns that lake, or who owns that river, because we're not from a culture... for example, even in the UK, where things like that, you can't just walk along a riverbank, you can't go through places. Or Europe, where things are owned. We just assumed for a long period of time; it's almost in our European cultural DNA that these things are for everybody. The beach is for everybody.

Look at the other day. There are plenty of good causes in New Zealand, raising a lot of money to buy a tiny beach that no one is going to go to suddenly galvanised the nation. It's like, oh my God. And yet, at the same time no one could understand, even during that, why other people were saying, 'Hey, those other beaches, we'd quite like to have them back, because our people have lived here for all of this time, and we have a relationship with them.' Yet, as a country we go, 'We have a relationship with that beach that we're never going to visit, and God forbid that someone should own. And God forbid that a wealthy philanthropist should invest some money in it, so he can have a bach there for a few years, and then gift it back to people.'

You know, sometimes you just want to take the collective psyche and just rattle it, and go, 'Are you mental? Are you mental? Are not comprehending that this and that — they're the same thing.' If we had a whip around to help some iwi buy their beach back from some Russian oligarch who has purchased it, no one is going to invest, are they? They're going to, 'It's his beach, he bought it. You pay for it.' But, you know. God forbid a golden sand beach, somewhere at the top of the South Island that no one can access should be sold by someone.

What do you say to young Kiwis, who might have no relationship with Māori, about the Treaty relationship?

Te Radar: I don't even know anyone like that. I'm trying to think. What would you say to them? There again it goes back to, what is the responsibility of the state to educate people. We saw the other day, where they said, 'We're not going to make the history of the New Zealand Wars compulsory in high school.' Why not? Is it too complicated?

Well, that's the nature of human life. People are going to leave school, and have to deal with very complicated life situations. And so when you show how these things happen, for better or for worse, and create a sense of understanding, then through that, you might not have met too many Māori, but you might have learned about this, and gone, 'Oh, I can see that there were injustices perpetrated throughout this process.' And you then might have a better understanding of it.

How do you do it? Unless you actively get outside your social circles. And it's interesting where I live, the demographic has changed in the last five years. It's gone from a relatively. typical Auckland South Pacific suburb, to know my new neighbours have moved in; there's a lot of Chinese, Koreans, totally different cultures. What's their relationship with Māoridom going to be?

And if you say, 'What would you say to a young European kid who doesn't have any access to Māoridom?' 'What would you say to those young first generation Korean kids that are coming over?' Where do they get that thing, and what's their relationship with it going to be?

Because they've already got a difficult relationship, in a way, with European and New Zealand in general, and then once they get deeper into that... maybe they'll actually be better New Zealanders. I don't know. Maybe they'll immerse themselves in it more, because they'll understand what it's like to be an outsider, and in way Māoridom, it is the outside culture.

We have a unique way of expressing our anger and our dissent in New Zealand!

Te Radar: And I quite often use the example. I said, when people got really angry in New Zealand, and I'd just been over, and I'd been filming in Israel and places like that, and I saw what happened when people get angry, and I came back to New Zealand, and someone got really angry, and they took a chainsaw, and they went up a hill not far from here, and they chopped down a tree.

That, oh, the nation was furious. That's, in many ways, one of the most symbolic and angry acts we have. If that is what it gets to in New Zealand, that's great. And I say to people, when we get really, really angry, or particularly with Māoridom, when they get really angry, they don't blow stuff up, they get together, and they walk — quite often a really long way — to find the person they're angry with and go, 'We're really angry with you.'

And then hopefully the person will go, 'Oh right. Well we should probably have a cup of tea, chat about, and try to sort this out.' And they go, 'Come on, Auntie, let's get in.' And would drive home again. You know, that doesn't happen. I don't know if there's been... I know that there have been protest marches and thing overseas, but I don't know that anyone has walked the entire length of their country to find the leader and go, 'I'm really, really angry with you.' You can't turn down someone like that for a cup of tea and a chat.

Do our famous people, both Māori and Pākehā, provide us with our identity — as markers of our history?

Te Radar: Identity is a funny thing, isn't it? You try to look for things, for tokens, for signifiers to get a sense of what identity is, and it's very easy, I suppose, for people to say, 'Oh well, here are symbols. Here's Māoridom, and there's symbol, and through that we can understand what a country is.' And for Europeans if you were to say, 'Can you put your finger on a people on an image or something that sums up the country to you?'

I'm sure they would say, Edmund Hillary, who did most of his great work overseas. Being a beekeeper is excellent work, but climbing to the top of Mount Everest, or driving a Massey Ferguson to... actually to be fair, driving a Massey Ferguson to Antarctica is quintessentially Kiwi; it doesn't get any better than that.

Climbing Everest is all well and good, you know, I don't even like stairs. But to drive a tractor to the most far-flung part of the world; that's a great thing, and rightly so that he should be on a note. And so people know who he is on the $5 note.

But who knows who Apirana Ngata is? If you were to say to anyone, 'I'll give you a $50 note if you can tell me who this is, and what he did.' You would end up keeping your $50 notes, I would imagine; you would not give very many of them away. Or is he on the hundred? Who is one the $50? See, I don't even know. I don't deal with cash anymore, I'm an EFT-POS guy [laughs] you know?

Ngata is on the 50. Ernie Rutherford...Rutherford. You know, son of a dairy farmer, hated milking cows, thought I'd go and do something else. I'll split the atom, because, you know, anything to get away from milking cows [laughs]. Get out of Brightwater.

Interviewer: Brightwater [laughs].

Te Radar: Even Kate Sheppard.... that's not to say that it's a racist thing that people don't know who Apirana Ngata is. If you were to hold up a $10 and say to them, 'Who is this? What did she do?' How many of them could tell you what Kate Sheppard did? So is that just a general lack of knowing who we are.

Because, and this is something I've worked at a lot, I think as a country, we really fail to celebrate our history, all of it, all of it. And I think a lot of that has to do with the Treaty. Because when you talk about New Zealand history with people, they immediately think of the Treaty, and they stop thinking about it. They think, oh my God. If you say, 'I'm going to do a talk on the history of New Zealand.' They go, “'Oh my God. He's going to talk about the Treaty. I think I'd rather go and slam my manhood in a car door for half an hour.'

And in a way, there's all this rich history all around it, that we just don't celebrate. We don't go to our museums; our little towns have museums. If we were overseas and a sign says, Button Museum, 50 kilometres. We'll go, 'I like buttons, I'm going to drive to a button museum.' But how many of us, on that road that we drive backwards and forwards to our house and work, or wherever it is every day, how many of stop or take that little turnoff to that memorial site? How many stop and read that lichen-covered plaque that someone put up there, because they thought it was a good idea at the time?

And that's not a modern thing, you know. Questions were raised in the English parliament 10 years after the Battle of Rangiriri about the terrible, and decrepit, and ruinous state of soldiers' graves at that battle sight. There's almost been an active campaign to forget as much of our history as quickly as we can.

How can you understand your country, and the cultures, and the people that are contained within it, if you don't know anything about it? And so is that the role of the state? Should they be increasing that sense of history? Should we be broadening it out from studying the Treaty in primary school? I don't know if you study it in high school, been a long time since I've been to high school. Not really generally allowed on the grounds [laughs].

The New Zealand Wars is classic. How do you understand all of these issues that surround things, if you don't understand the cause of the wars? And it's a great history. You've got a colonial power building an iron steam battleship to sail up one of the mightiest rivers in the world to take this land, because they've seen the enormous wealth coming out of it.

And even the misunderstanding of that, where they think, oh the Waikato, it's just some bush, and some Māori, and they're probably living in a pa. Let's go and take that. There were settlements there with multiple windmills, and grain, producing huge amounts of food, staggering amounts of food. If you were to bring that history alive, and tell people about that, and say, imagine being a European up on the Manukau, and just looking at this stream of produce coming out from somewhere up in the Waikato, and being shipped off to Australia and sold for very good money, you know?

If we were standing here today, and somewhere up in the bush we could just tankers and tankers of milk coming out, and being flogged off as milk power, we'd be going, 'Something is happening up there. I want a part of that.' We're not going to go and build a steam battleship to go and invade it, but you know...

So to put it in context, so people actually understand what went on, and there was a lot of bad things happened on both sides. But we don't talk about them, and until you talk about it, there's no coming to terms with it.

Do Pākehā actively censor their history to tell only one side of the story?

Te Radar: See actively censoring something, that's a very... it's active; that is an active thing. Do we actively sensor our past? I don't think so. I think we're just New Zealanders, and we're just a bit lackadaisical about things. I don't know whether we actively censor it.

Could you argue that by not having it as mandatory curriculum thing in the school? Is that actively censoring it? Actually, maybe it is. You know a few years back, when the state broadcaster was supposed to have charter television to tell our stories about ourselves. What better stories to tell than these difficult stories? And they say, 'Oh, it wouldn't rate. You can't put it in prime time.'

Well, they're great stories. These stories that we would be telling are the equal of any of the stories you put in prime time, and many of them better. Why aren't we celebrating it? That's always been my question. I don't understand it. I don't understand why we don't have more about this, you know?

Culturally, here's the thing. If we were in America or Australia, no, actually not Australia. I was thinking of Ned Kelly, and then I remembered the Aboriginals. Not Australia. In America, then celebrate those - even if it's wrong. There's Custer's Last Stand, and there's Geronimo, and a lot of those stories are told. See, why don't tell... where's the movies about these battles?

You know [???] where's the movie about that? Rewi's Last Stand, was that 1925 that movie was made? That's nearly a hundred years ago. We have colour now, and sound, and digital technology. What a great story that is, why is that not a movie? The chase for Te [?Kooti] with Tītokowaru. Why are they not movies, or at the very least, feature-length dramas made with some platinum funding?

So, are you arguing do we actively censor our history? Then actually, if you think about it, by not telling these stories, by not saying to whoever is in control of the curriculum or that budget, by saying, you need to make more things about this story, then maybe we are. At the same time there's a difficulty in making those stories, because if you aren't — particularly Māori stories, if you aren't from the region, if you don't have the buy-in of the people whose ancestry you're dealing with, then it's very hard to tell that story.

And in a way, there's sort of almost an active censorship from that side as well. And I've dealt with it myself; the hurdles you have to go through to tell a story. It's like, that's not your story, you can't tell that story. And you say, well no one is going to, and your story will die; it will stay within your very small community, and then other people won't know that story. And they say, well all right. What right do they have to know that story anyway? Well, it's a very good story, and it will help people then understand a wider context of what goes on.

How important is Māori TV?

Te Radar: I did some work for Māori Television. We filmed a kind of — it was like chat show. I played the husband. I was Bevan, the husband of Beverly. We ran a B&B called Bevan and Beverley's. Beverly was played by Hori Ahipene, quite a large chap, made a very good woman. A very strange kind of little comedy.

But I remember, and this was an institutional cultural difference, as opposed to maybe a cultural difference as such, but I remember saying to the guy that ran that station, 'Oh, we're thinking of doing this, this week.' And he looked at me and said, 'Why are you telling me this?' I said, 'I thought you might be interested. I thought you might want to know what we're doing.' He said, 'If you think it's a good idea, then you do it.'

And it was so warm and so welcoming, and so unlike any other television institution I've worked for; it was phenomenal. And here's the other thing about MTS and Māori Television, it's there to support and enhance the language, but it's also there to support and enhance the culture. And the culture that you see within that, that's portrayed is very, very different from what you're going to see on any other channel.

It's showing a slice of New Zealand. I'm really jealous of it. I'm jealous of the platform they have to share their stories, and to share with the people within that community, because it doesn't really exist all that much on the state broadcasters. And there's a kind of... probably necessitated to an extent by very low budget and things, but there's kind of an honesty about a lot of what happens there. It's great.

It's that step up beyond community television, but it is very much community television. It has a heart, and it knows who it is. You're in the studio, and people come in. You saw it with Homai Te Pakipaki and things like that, people would flock in. The interesting there was, here was this great competition, and at the same time you had Idol and things like that, where people were being bashed, and crying and pulled apart, and torn up.

And here was this other competition where people just went, 'Yeah, I sing at the pub.' And they sing a song, and their friends are there going, yay. It is a great platform for New Zealand, that channel, and it is a shame that it's ethos doesn't extend further.

How do you think people overseas perceive New Zealand?

Te Radar: There is no denying that when you go overseas, some of the first things people bring up is Lord of the Rings. And you go, actually it is pretty much like that (laughs). We do go on enormous quests, and it is kind of wet, and we live in tunnels, and there are scary birds. Yeah. See, here's the other thing that people don't know about New Zealand... that bigger sense of New Zealand. It's just what exactly it was before people even turned up. It was wacky. It was a wacky place.

This was a world of birds, you know, cut off from everywhere else for hundreds of thousands of years. And you can imagine turning up here, if you'd sailed or rowed here from Rarotonga, or wherever it was that people came from, you'd just stand there and go, 'Oh my God. This place is mental.' And then poor old Tasman sailing up, and then thinking that giants lived here, and not even getting off his boat, and sailing away again. And a hundred and — what is it — forty or sixty years later, or something like that, you had the French and Cook turning up almost within a week of each other.

You know, the history of the place is so ridiculous, and the fact that we don't celebrate it, and the fact that we don't celebrate it with a smile. Because you get caught up with the injustices, and the inequalities and things like that.

But history is just good stories, and if we don't tell those stories, if we don't celebrate it, then we don't know who we are, we don't understand what's going on. I think that anything that helps to tell story, helps people understand who they are.

And so when you go overseas and then go, 'What's New Zealand like?' You could say, well it had these birds, or it's got this vibrant Māori culture. What I like to say, if you're going to sum up New Zealand — and it was a great statistic, and it was the most common method of prison escapes from prisons in New Zealand — and the most common method of escaping from a prison in New Zealand is walking away. That's New Zealand [laughs].

We're that kind of people. We just go, 'I'm really not into this. We'll cruise off.' And in many ways, sadly, there's a metaphor in there for a larger thing. When it comes to dealing issues as well, we go, 'We're not really into this. We're going to go and not think about it. We're going to walk away.' And until we stay and confront those things, tell those stories, meet people. And meeting people, it's really hard.

Most people have never been on a marae. Took me a long time before I got on one. It's really scary. And I think we're probably more comfortable... I gave a goat to a village in Rwanda, who then made me a king, and gave me a wife, and it was probably a more comfortable experience than the first I went onto a marae.

Maybe I've got more invested in it here. They then took my wife away, and said, you're not actually a king, and I had to come home. It's very disappointing, I felt very colonial for a while. But... yeah. It's a great country, you know? It's a great country. And people just need to understand its history to understand each other.

In order to meet our obligation to the Treaty, do we Pākehā have to give back lands to Māori?

Te Radar: Some people will. Some people won't. I think about it. I think about what was happening with the land that my great-grandfather arrived on to, in the Waikato, a dairy farm. We always just thought it was just some swamp, and some trees, and a hill. If someone came back and went, 'Well, actually it wasn't. There was a vibrant community here, and they'd been moved on after the Battle of Rangiriri, and they would quite like to have it back.' You'd think, oh shit. Oh, we've built a house here now, and I feel an affinity to it; we've been for four generations. It's difficult.

No one wants to give anything up. How do you deal with that? It's very hard. At the same time no one wanted to have it taken off them in the first place. If we were to go back... it's a stupid analogy, but it's still an analogy nonetheless, and possibly because it's so distanced. For everyone who was forced off that land in the Highland clearances, forced out, and that huge diaspora of Scots who were forced out, and sent all over the world.

If we were to go back there now and say, 'Hello, we used to live here five generations ago, and we were forced off, and we'd quite like to move back.' I can understand doing that, and going, 'Hey, where you've got your sheep living, that was my great-great-grandparent's place,' and, 'It's quite a nice trout fishing river there, and I'd quite like to move back.'

I'd feel a sense that, why shouldn't I? Why shouldn't I move back? Why should those people that have profited from that with this massive estate, why should they not let us back on? See when you create those analogies and people go, 'Oh, now I understand,' or, 'Not I can understand why they might want to come back there.' But no one wants to give anything up.

There are economic realities in terms of that. Things change, you know? And to go to someone say, 'You now immediately have to leave.' Because you see what happens in Africa when people are run off that land, and whatever that family's investment is, they've lost all of that; there's an inequality there as well.

It's very, very difficult to right these things, but I'd like to think we're well on the path to doing it right, you know? That Treaty for better or for worse, whatever people may think of it, it is a living document that has repercussions to this day. And there are always going to people who push it a little bit further than others might want them to, or don't push it far enough. But that's the robust nature of society.

Any errors with the transcript, let us know and we'll fix them digital-services@dia.govt.nz