Because it is their heritage coming to them in a direct line from their ancestors. What this means is that they may have more rights than some other New Zealanders.
Yes, my children’s grandmother was born in England, therefore they have rights to a British passport, rights to travel and rights to consular support and protection, even in New Zealand.
Rights are complex and many layered. Act New Zealand claims that rights under the Treaty of Waitangi are racist if they don’t apply to all New Zealanders and the justification they use for this is universal human rights.
New Zealand signed up to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, but I cannot believe that universal human rights is all that they believe in. If these are the only rights they recognise it would mean that all foreigners would have exactly the same rights in New Zealand as New Zealanders, including the right to vote, the right to stand for parliament, the right to enter and leave the country without restraint, the right to purchase property and the right to access services such as free hospitals, benefits and pensions.
The civil and political rights that are specific to New Zealand citizens are spelt out by the Bill of Rights Act 1990. It has a lot of crossover with the UDHR, but there are extra rights to some I have just mentioned and include the right to refuse medical treatment, to not be subjected to experimentation without consent and specific rights related to the justice system.
The fact that there are two overlapping types of rights outlined in these two human rights instruments already shows that more rights exist than Act’s limited understanding.
In New Zealand law, and the British law that it is founded on, there is also a recognition of customary rights based on traditional and customary use and activities. In New Zealand these rights are indigenous rights that are deemed to be in existence unless specifically extinguished by an Act of Parliament. This is where the controversy about who owns the seabed and foreshore comes in. The Crown thought it had passed legislation in the 19th century that had extinguished these hapū and iwi rights.
It turned out that they hadn’t and so various governments have set up frameworks for iwi and hapū to prove that they still exercise those rights. Some people have objected to this, and use the right of "access for all" to justify their position.
In reality the only argument they are able to muster is based on "I thought we had already taken that property generations ago".
You may have noticed that I said iwi and hapū rights rather than Māori rights. Those who argue that these rights are racist, do so as they claim it gives Māori rights that non-Māori do not have. However, customary title doesn’t give all Māori people rights.
As a Māori person I have no customary rights in the South Island where I was born. My only access to customary rights is in the territory of my hapū and iwi. Customary rights come through particular ancestors and it is through that descendant line that they have those customary rights.
There are also rights that other iwi have that my iwi recognises and vice versa, even if they are unknown to Pākehā people. In tikanga Māori and tikanga ā iwi there are rights and obligations related to activities involving the exercise of rangatiratanga, kaitiakitanga and manaakitanga. Some of these rights and obligations would have been evident to those observing the recent tangihanga of Kīngi Tūheitia at Turangawaewae Marae.
As a Waikato-Maniapoto person I defer to the local iwi of the area I live in. They hold mana whenua and exercise their tino rangatiratanga as part of their ancestral right, particularly as the Treaty partner over article-two issues where I live. Their tikanga and kawa hold sway and they have the right to expect me to defer to it.
The narrowness of Act’s belief is that Māori can only have the exact same rights that non-Maori hold, and only the rights that Pākehā give us. Most Māori would reject both premises as our rights don’t rest on Pākehā allowing us to have them.
Who endows us with rights is something for philosophers and theologians to argue. The United States constitution states that rights are endowed by God, the United Nations Declaration implies it is because we are born human and the Bill of Rights applies to all legal and natural persons.
Many Māori would argue we also have rights endowed by our ancestors and that we possess inherent indigenous, iwi and hapū rights and obligations, whether Act recognises them or not.
• Dr Anaru Eketone is an associate professor in the University of Otago’s social and community work programme.
