Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has described this morning’s Waitangi dawn service as moving and says he welcomes the shift away from a focus on politics.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of people gathered before dawn to commemorate 183 years since Te Tiriti o Waitangi was signed.<\/p>\n
Hipkins said the national day had a greater focus on reflection and celebration than years ago.<\/p>\n
The criticism that politicians had come to Waitangi in the past and used M\u0101ori as a way to increase their votes was a fair one, he said.<\/p>\n
Hipkins said he saw his role as lighting the path forwards and not playing in the uncertain space where politicians could create fear and division.<\/p>\n
“I think M\u0101ori have often been used as a way for politicians to whip up votes in other parts of the population and that’s something that I find abhorrent.”<\/p>\n
Asked to compare this year’s Waitangi commemorations to previous years, Hipkins said in the last five years there had been a trend for less politics on Waitangi Day.<\/p>\n
“I think there’s been a trend in the last five and a half years or so … for a bit less politics on Waitangi Day and a bit more reflection and a bit more commemoration and a little bit more celebration and I really welcome that.”<\/p>\n
Hipkins said he first attended Waitangi commemorations at Waitangi about 15 years ago and overall he had always found it “to be a pretty positive experience”.<\/p>\n
As prime minister his role was “to try and preserve a sense of unity and common purpose,” Hipkins said.<\/p>\n
“It’s easy to create division when it comes to race relations and we’ve seen that in the past; governments have tried to to avoid that, it tends to have come from those who are not in government who are trying to get into government and I think that’s most unfortunate.”<\/p>\n
“I didn’t mean to say the treaty is an experiment” – Christopher Luxon
\nNational Party leader Christopher Luxon said New Zealand was an intelligent country that could engage in proper debates.<\/p>\n
“I think what I’ve seen in reaction to some of our positions say on co-governance, is you end up with some lazy sort of baseless accusations of racism frankly,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Because that’s not what I’m doing, I’m having a conversation to say I’m interested in the ends of advancing all M\u0101ori and all non-M\u0101ori … the means by which I do that may be different.”<\/p>\n
The fact that National does not support co-governance of public services should not be misinterpreted as the party lacking ambition or aspirations for M\u0101ori in New Zealand, he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has described this morning’s Waitangi dawn service as moving and says he welcomes the shift away from a focus on politics. Hundreds of people gathered before dawn to commemorate 183 years since Te Tiriti o Waitangi was signed. Hipkins said the national day had a greater focus on reflection and celebration […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2807"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2809,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2807\/revisions\/2809"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}