I don’t doubt the goodwill behind either piece. But manaaki is not a constitutional theory.
If Te Tiriti matters, it matters where it is hardest, not where it is easiest. It matters when it forces the legitimacy questions that poetry avoids: who has authority, by what right, and with what limits?
Here is the sleight of hand that now shapes much of our debate. We begin with language almost everyone can endorse. We end with claims about political authority. The moral tone stays warm, so the constitutional claim slips through without being defended.
You can see the slide in Davidson’s framing. She speaks of a place to stand with dignity for those who are not tangata whenua, then grounds that in mana motuhake, understood as sovereignty and ultimate authority. Hipkins makes a similar move: shared values, then institutional conclusions, with disagreement implicitly framed as a failure of unity, even an argument against fairness.
Those claims may be arguable. But they are not self-justifying. Once you invoke sovereignty, you are no longer talking about kindness. You are talking about who rules. Disagreement with a particular constitutional settlement is treated as disagreement with decency itself. New Zealanders, being thoroughly decent people, baulk at that.
Put aside the lullabies about care and unity, and the argument is over whether we are one democratic people, or a country where whakapapa sets your political rank. That difference goes to the heart of equality.
A liberal democracy offers a tougher, deeper foundation: equal political standing. In a democracy, your civic status is not granted by another group’s permission, and your vote is not weighted by whakapapa. You are a citizen among citizens. You can argue, organise, persuade, and change the law through legitimate politics. You can lose and try again. That is the bargain that lets plural societies live together without permanent hosts and permanent guests.
Certainly, that bargain has not always been protected. And when it has been neglected, we have suffered, as individuals and a nation.
Nobody thinks the Treaty is irrelevant. New Zealand already lived through decades of dismissal. It did not age well.
By the 1970s, the country changed course. The Waitangi Tribunal and the settlement era marked a moral correction: grievances heard through lawful process, wrongs acknowledged, and relationships repaired where possible. It is one of the best developments in our modern history.
But recognising the Treaty is not writing a blank cheque.
Hipkins is right that Te Tiriti can shape national identity and call each generation toward fairness. Davidson is right that mutual obligation is real. Yet these soundbites do not answer the question: when citizens disagree, who decides, and how?
New Zealand’s constitutional structure is an asset. We are a Westminster democracy with an uncodified constitution. Parliament can make and unmake law. Each generation retains agency to govern itself. Edmund Burke warned that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation”.
That flexibility is a strength, but it also carries a risk. The danger in New Zealand is not reform itself. It is reform by drift. A “living Treaty” can become law without a clear moment of democratic choice: asserted by activists, adopted by institutions, normalised in practice, then declared morally beyond argument.
By the time the public notices, the change is presented as “settled”.
If this continues, backlash should not surprise us. A Treaty presented as unchallengeable and as demanding a single compelled way of seeing one’s place in the country will push ordinary New Zealanders towards opposition. That would be the worst outcome: a public that comes to experience Te Tiriti not as a shared foundation, but as a weapon.
So the task is not to choose between the Treaty and democracy. It is to hold them together in the only way that lasts.
The meaning of the Treaty cannot simply be declared. It has to be argued for, then carried by durable democratic consent. If a proposal is truly about shared dignity and mutual obligation, it should survive daylight: stated clearly, defended openly, and revisited through ordinary democratic means. If it cannot survive that, the problem is not public ignorance. The problem is legitimacy.
The way to protect the Treaty is not to weaken liberal democracy. Only liberal democratic beliefs could have produced Te Tiriti in 1840, with its unusual recognition of indigenous status, constraint on power, and mutual obligations. Undermining democratic equality is no way to uphold the Treaty’s mana.
None of this requires shrinking Te Tiriti into a symbol. It requires taking it seriously enough to treat it as something more than a slogan for a particular ideological end.
So here is the standard worth insisting on, especially this week. Te Tiriti should be honoured. Grievances should be heard. Duties should be real. Dignity should be shared.
But constitutional change must be explicit, not smuggled in under soothing words. Because the Treaty will endure only if the equal citizen does.
Jonathan Ayling is a strategy consultant and professional director. He is the former-Chief Executive of the Free Speech Union (NZ), and has worked as a ministerial staffer and senior Parliamentary advisor in both Government and Opposition.
Catch up on the debates that dominated the week by signing up to our Opinion newsletter – a weekly round-up of our best commentary.