Treaty of Waitangi - Effects

Effects

In November 1840 a royal charter was signed by Queen Victoria, establishing New Zealand as a Crown colony separate from New South Wales from May 1841.

The short-term effect of the Treaty was to prevent the sale of Māori land to anyone other than the Crown. This was intended to protect Māori from the kinds of shady land purchases which had alienated indigenous peoples in other parts of the world from their land with minimal compensation. Indeed, anticipating the Treaty, the New Zealand Company made several hasty land deals and shipped settlers from Great Britain to New Zealand, assuming that the settlers would not be evicted from land they occupied. Essentially the Treaty was an attempt to establish a system of property rights for land with the Crown controlling and overseeing land sale to prevent abuse.

Initially this worked well. Māori were eager to sell land, and settlers eager to buy. The Crown mediated the process to ensure that the true owners were properly identified (difficult for tribally owned land) and fairly compensated, by the standards of the time. However after a while Māori became disillusioned and less willing to sell, while the Crown came under increasing pressure from settlers wishing to buy. Consequently government land agents were involved in a number of dubious land purchases. Agreements were negotiated with only one owner of tribally owned land and in some cases land was purchased from the wrong people altogether. Eventually this led to the New Zealand Wars which culminated in the confiscation of a large part of the Waikato and Taranaki.

In later years, this oversight role was vested in the Native Land Court under the Native Land Court Act of 1862, and later renamed the Māori Land Court. It was through this court that much Māori land was alienated, and the way in which it functioned is much criticised today. Over the longer term, the land purchase aspect of the Treaty declined in importance, while the clauses of the Treaty which deal with sovereignty and Māori rights took on greater importance.

The treaty was never ratified by Britain and carried no legal force in New Zealand for over a century, finally receiving limited recognition in 1975 with the passage of the Treaty of Waitangi Act. The Colonial Office and early New Zealand governors were initially fairly supportive of the Treaty as it gave them authority over both New Zealand Company settlers and Māori. As the settlers were granted representative and responsible government with the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852, the Treaty became less effective, although it was used to justify the idea that Waikato and Taranaki were rebels against the Crown in the wars of the 1860s. Court cases later in the 19th century, especially Wi Parata v the Bishop of Wellington (1877), established the principle that the Treaty was a 'legal nullity' which could be ignored by the courts and the government. This argument was supported by the claim that New Zealand had become a colony when annexed by proclamation in January 1840, before the treaty was signed. Furthermore, Hobson only claimed to have taken possession of the North Island by Treaty. The South Island he claimed for Britain by right of discovery, by observing that Māori were so sparse in the South Island, that it could be considered uninhabited.

Despite this, Māori frequently used the Treaty to argue for a range of issues, including greater independence and return of confiscated and unfairly purchased land. This was especially the case from the mid-19th century, when they lost numerical superiority and generally lost control of most of the country.

However irrelevant in law, the Treaty returned to the public eye after the Treaty house and grounds were purchased by Governor-General Viscount Bledisloe in the early 1930s and donated to the nation. The dedication of the site as a national reserve in 1934 was probably the first major event held there since the 1840s. The profile of the Treaty was further raised by the centenary of 1940. For most of the 20th century, text books, government publicity and many historians touted it as the moral foundation of colonisation and to set race relations in New Zealand above those of colonies in North America, Africa and Australia. Its lack of legal significance in 1840 and subsequent breaches tended to be overlooked until the 1970s, when these issues were raised by Māori protest.