GRAHAM ADAMS: Stanford’s sly Treaty move backfires

National on back foot over Education bill.

Among the welter of commentary surrounding the recent publication of Jacinda Ardern’s memoir, it was very noticeable that journalists avoided mentioning co-governance and race-based policy as a significant factor in her political demise. It’s a topic they mostly prefer to skirt if they can.

This is perhaps not surprising given she paid legacy media companies $55 million to promote co-governance by insisting the Treaty be treated as a “partnership” as a condition for receiving taxpayer money.

Having accepted that bribe meant they largely left the heavy lifting in examining co-governance in education, water management and other policy to independent media like The Platform and campaign groups such as the Taxpayers’ Union.

The Treaty clauses in the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No 2) going through Parliament now would no doubt have also been similarly overlooked if The Platform’s Michael Laws hadn’t interviewed Auckland University education professor Elizabeth Rata last month about their retention in the update of the original 2020 legislation.

Laws described their retention as “sabotage” of the secular underpinnings of our school education system given the bill’s emphasis on giving effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, including by promoting mātauranga Māori, local tikanga and te ao Māori — with their liberal infusion of spiritual elements.

Professor Rata said she was “shocked” and “incredibly disappointed” to find the clauses had been “fully embedded” in the new legislation given she had believed the government “was removing the Treaty from all legislation, except that concerned with Treaty settlements”.

The interview set off a firestorm on social media, and eventually sparked Mike Hosking’s interest on Newstalk ZB after he was inundated with emails fulminating against the clauses. 

The interview — headlined on the Newstalk ZB website as “Stanford refutes claims she’s entrenching co-governance in schools” — was possibly one of the most damaging any minister has given during the term of this coalition government. Veering between defensiveness, aggression and bluster, Stanford committed a spectacular act of political self-harm by insulting a substantial slice of the government’s voters who follow lobby group Hobson’s Pledge and are dedicated to New Zealand treating all citizens equally. She alleged her critics are “whipped up with hatred and lies... they are yelling at the sky... frothing at the mouth with hatred... it’s utter rubbish.”

Her intemperate language notwithstanding, Stanford was at least technically correct to say some of Hobson’s Pledge’s claims were wrong, including the accusation she has elevated the clause in the 2020 Act to “give effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi” to the status of a ‘paramount objective’. In fact, in the new bill, a board’s paramount objective in governing a school is “to ensure that every student at the school is able to attain their highest possible standard in educational achievement”.

That Treaty clause — which is a ‘primary objective’ in the current Act — has become a ‘supporting objective’ in the bill, making it look as if the emphasis on the Treaty in the 2020 Act has been removed.

However — and here’s the rub — schools can attain the paramount objective only by fulfilling the supporting objectives. It’s a cynical exercise in legislative smoke and mirrors that has left opponents of co-governance feeling, with justification, that they have been played. As Laws put it, the supporting objectives put the paramount objective into a “straitjacket”.

In Stanford’s mind, it’s up to Paul Goldsmith to solve the problem as part of the promised review of Treaty clauses in legislation (as agreed in National’s coalition agreement with NZ First). Unfortunately, she was unable to convincingly answer the question of why she hasn’t removed them herself while the legislation is being amended. Unless, of course, National doesn’t intend to remove them at all.

She appeared defeated by the enormity of the task — pointing out such clauses are seeded right throughout the bill: “in section 4, section 6, section 32…” — and unconvinced the clauses even should be excised.

The best she could do was acknowledge it was a “legitimate question” whether “mātauranga Māori and te ao Māori should be included in the [school] curriculum”. But having been voted into office to expunge co-governance and “Māorification”, it seems a little late in the piece for her to be mulling whether those excisions are actually needed.

With as little as 15 months before next year’s election, more and more of those who voted for the Coalition — and for National in particular — are losing faith it will get around to reversing enough of Ardern’s co-governance programme to convince them it is seriously committed to fulfilling its promises.

Stanford’s cloth-eared, ambivalent approach on Newstalk ZB isn’t going to help assuage voters’ fears. And she damned herself more directly during the first reading in Parliament on 10 April with her views about the importance of the Treaty’s role in education:

“The [Education and Training] bill makes it clear that giving effect to Te Tiriti is essential and key to support student achievement. The bill also makes the requirement that schools are achieving equitable outcomes for Māori students at the top of the list of how schools are required to meet Te Tiriti o Waitangi objective.”

That is certainly not what a majority of voters voted for in 2023.

Leaving aside the issue of what voters expected from the government, the deeper question Stanford needs to answer is one that was raised by Professor Rata in the Platform interview. She stated: “There is no substantiated connection between educational achievement and ethnic identity — and a school system that recognises the ethnic identity of children. It’s been claimed for 30 years but there are no longitudinal studies that support it. It is a false connection.”

Laws: “We have accepted as a truism, haven’t we, that the reason that Maori students don’t achieve in the educational system is because it is somehow biased against their culture and ethnicity — and this is aimed to redress that. You’re saying there is no empirical evidence to suggest that?”

Rata: “There have been many advocacy studies done over these decades which make the claim, but they’re very small, qualitative studies where a small number of people are asked, ‘How do you feel if you have an education that recognises your culture?’ Of course respondents always say, ‘Oh, it would make me feel good’ but real data about the causal link between practices and policies that recognise ethnic identity has not been established…

“Almost two generations of children now have been subjected to what I’d call an unconscionable experiment with this idea that if you recognise ethnic identity that will cause educational achievement. Well, it certainly doesn’t seem to have.”

The trouble for National — and Stanford in particular — is that all the evidence points to her and her party unquestioningly supporting the idea of a link between promoting ethnic identity and educational achievement. Her assertion quoted above that “The [Education and Training] bill makes it clear that giving effect to Te Tiriti is essential and key to support student achievement” leaves little doubt about where she stands.

As long as that belief is prevalent among National MPs, voters have serious reason to doubt the government will actually get around to removing the Treaty clauses in the bill.

National is going to have to also decide whether its most important constituency is its own voters or activists in the education sector, who fully subscribe to the belief that pandering to ethnic identity is essential to lifting educational achievement.

Last September, education sector leaders — including Te Akatea, NZEI Te Riu Roa, New Zealand Principals’ Federation, PPTA Te Wehengarua, Secondary Principals’ Council, Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, Pacific Principals’ Association, Te Rito Maioha Early Childhood New Zealand, Montessori Aotearoa NZ, New Zealand Kindergartens Network, and NZAIMS — issued a joint statement opposing any downgrading of the importance of the Treaty in education (and, for good measure, recorded their opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill as well).

The education sector is powerful but most of its members are very unlikely to ever vote for any of the coalition’s parties. So the decision who to back should not be particularly difficult for Stanford, or her leader, Christopher Luxon.

However, watching Luxon at his post-Cabinet press conference on Monday, it was hard to escape the conclusion he has no idea how much National’s voters are bridling at what they see as backsliding on the party’s promises to reject co-governance and “Maorification” in law and policy. Asked about the Treaty clauses in the Education and Training Amendment Bill, he made it clear — as Stanford had — that removing them is a secondary consideration to raising standards of literacy and numeracy generally. He is showing himself to be every bit as cloth-eared as his minister.

Submissions have closed but the Education and Workforce Committee will not report back to Parliament until 16 September. That leaves plenty of time for government supporters to make it very clear to the minister that the bill progressing as it stands is completely unacceptable to them. And plenty of time for National to calculate the electoral damage it will suffer if it doesn’t remove them.

After all, Act has already cast down a gauntlet this week by indicating that if it wasn’t bound by the constraints of being part of a coalition government it would have deleted the clauses. In fact, David Seymour has said Act fought to do that — but was overruled.

Graham Adams is a freelance editor, journalist and columnist. He lives on Auckland’s North Shore. This piece was first published at The Platform.