Nau mai, haere mai.

With Waitangi Day just under a week away, the news has been filled with various debates and disputes about the government’s Māori policies, ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill, and the likely fallout on the Treaty grounds on February 6.

Central to so much of this is a single, pivotal concept – sovereignty. Who holds it? Did Māori cede it in 1840? Can it be shared? But as Jack Vowles writes today, often overlooked in all this is what the word actually means.

“Why is interpretation of Te Tiriti so subject to debate?” he asks. “One answer is that we are confused by misunderstanding of the concept of ‘sovereignty’.”

This goes well beyond misinterpretations in the English text of the Treaty of concepts like kāwanatanga and tino rangatiratanga, or even that Māori in 1840 had no conceptual reference for what the British would have understood by the term “sovereignty”.

Rather, it means we need a better understanding of how “secular sovereignty” in a democracy resides in the people and is held in different places at different times – not simply by “the Crown”. As such, sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand is already being shared.

“If we can more clearly accept, define and clarify its constraints on popular sovereignty,” Vowles writes, “Te Tiriti’s promise that Māori iwi and hapū should govern themselves as much as is possible can be addressed under our existing constitution, and can be accommodated within its liberal democratic principles.”