What does Waitangi Day mean to you?

As a kid, it meant fuck all. I never understood what the fuss was. There always seemed to be arguments and protests at Waitangi when politicians would go there. Why didn't they just have a day off like I was?

In fact this attitude was still present when I was at university. I just didn't appreciate what Māoridom meant for Aotearoa New Zealand. I didn't know what Māori had been through at the hands of the colonisers. I didn't properly know what colonisation was.

I don't think I have a proper understanding now. It's certainly better than it was. When I worked at the Green Party I went through a crash course in Te Tiriti training, it was three days long. At the end of each day I'd need to spend time on my own, pondering what I'd just learned. It was a form of grieving. Because I felt responsible. And the horrors that were inflected on Māori by white people echo down through the generations today.

During the heigh of the Black Lives Matter protests from last year I did a series of tweets. I said if you found the footage coming out of the protests distressing - the police using unchecked violence on citizens - and it made you turn away, you needed to reflect that you had the ability and choice to turn away. That being able to turn away and ignore it, even for a day, was a privilege. For a lot of people, they live that racism every day. And they live it here in Aotearoa New Zealand too.

I said just because we've benefited from white supremacy didn't necessarily mean we were white supremacists, but that we need to acknowledge that white supremacy had certainly helped white people get ahead.

When the curriculum changes for teaching our colonial past were announced, National was unsurprisingly opposed. 

Paul Goldsmith, who is National's education spokesperson, said that the proposed curriculum focused too much on identity politics and needed more "economic history".

Goldsmith was an historian before going into Parliament so he should know better. But it seems he doesn't. In an article in Stuff, he said it was important that we learned about New Zealand’s identity but not at the expense of other issues like economics.

"How did we make a living as a country? How in such a short space of time did we create one of the highest living standards in the world?”

How did New Zealand earn a living, Paul? Off the back of colonisation. And that British colonisation was funded by slavery. So that's pretty cool stuff.

If this makes you uncomfortable to think about then that's good. We need to be uncomfortable. Because the British treatment of Māori was horrific. And not enough people know. 

Understanding where we've come from and how we got here can help us make the future better for everyone. It's not about one rule for all, or no race-based advantages, it's about giving everyone the possibility of the same outcome. And at the moment that doesn't happen.

So while the stealing of land, the murdering of Māori and the attempts at systematically diluting Māori bloodlines occurred 150 odd years ago, the horrors continue. In fact huge numbers of Māori children were taken from their families by the Government from the 1940s right up until the late 1980s. Colonisation didn't end when the British stopped stealing land, colonisation continues.

When the Prime Minister visited Waitangi as PM for the first time in 2018, she asked to be held to account by Māori, and I don't pretend to know anywhere near enough to properly judge her, but by my reckoning, she still has a long way to go.

Aotearoa New Zealand has a long way to go.