Biological Citizenship in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Abstract

Aotearoa/New Zealand1 is a country in which equality in access to the political, civil and social rights of citizenship are formed from the recognition of difference. The contemporary governance of this difference is a partnership between the indigenous people and the incoming colonisers that is referenced back to the Treaty of Waitangi — a founding expression of the special relationship between Maori (tangata whenua — the people of the land) and Pakeha (tangata tiriti — the people of the treaty). Its contemporary prominence results from the continued and effective political protest by Māori at the dishonouring of the treaty by successive governments, the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975 by the state to investigate claims of Treaty infringements since 1840 and the slow incorporation into New Zealand parliamentary legislation of Treaty references since 1986. The document remains controversial, however, and the object of much scholarship and debate with the result that citizenship is an unusually weak thread in the national identity of Aotearoa/New Zealand.