Christopher Finlayson

We can work positively to address Treaty issues

As a lawyer, senior politician, author and even as a young boy fascinated by New Zealand history, Christopher Finlayson KC has seen the Treaty of Waitangi from many different angles. It’s given him a unique perspective on Te Tiriti and the place it holds in our special nation.

“I believe we should be the best small country on Earth,” he says. “We’ve got everything going for us – and the Treaty is part and parcel of that. We’re a wonderful country. We can recognise the past, we can work to address it and we don’t need to indulge in populist, nasty and exclusionary stuff.”

Christopher was a National MP from 2005 until his retirement from Parliament in 2019, when he returned to work as a lawyer. He served as Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations for nine years, settling an unprecedented 59 claims. 

He’s proud of the significant part he played in a 30-year period of bipartisan efforts to bring about resolution to historical injustices.

“I dealt with some of the more difficult ones, but I must confess it was work that I loved and the more I learned, the more I realised I wanted to deal with these things,” he says.

“I was convinced that we were doing the right thing; we were not ripping the scab off stuff that was best forgotten about. We were dealing with it in a very responsible way, and in a way that the country ultimately would benefit from.”

His first memories of the Treaty were reading about it as a boy growing up in Wellington.

“During school holidays at primary school, our family never used to go anywhere and so I’d wander off to the Khandallah Library. I’d sit there, read books and take books out and it was there I developed a great interest in New Zealand history.”

Besides that, though, he didn’t hear about the Treaty at school, or even later at Victoria University when he studied constitutional law. Christopher says the Treaty “came back into my life” when he started in private practice as a lawyer, initially through work around the fisheries settlement and then representing iwi. He feels it’s important for people to understand the Treaty and the history of what happened afterwards.

“It’s important stuff for all New Zealanders to know. You get people who get caught up and become overly-emotional. But if you just look at the facts you see that people were guaranteed the rights of British citizens, that they would have their treasures protected, and the various other components of the Treaty – and you see how we failed.”

It’s a view which was sheeted home to him after reading a biography of the Marquess of Salisbury, Robert Cecil, who served as Prime Minister of Britain three times. In the 1850s, as a young man, Cecil visited New Zealand and was appalled by what he saw. Andrew Roberts’ book, Salisbury: Victorian Titan, shone a light on Salisbury’s scathing criticism of the New Zealand Government of the time for its wars against Māori and for abrogating their “scrupulously-reserved land rights as prescribed by the 1840 Treaty”. Roberts also wrote that Cecil witnessed the New Zealand Government’s “crushing of the Māori, the sovereign nation who voluntarily entered into an agreement to live under our flag under specified conditions”.

Christopher reflected on those observations and what he had learned as a Treaty Settlements Minister, offering apologies on behalf of the Crown for painful moments in our history such as the invasion of the community at Parihaka, Taranaki, in 1881.

“The tragedy of New Zealand is property rights were never properly recognised and protected. If indigenous property rights had been protected, we would have been a far more successful country,” he says.

And judging by the amount of people who approach him thanking him for his work on Treaty settlements, he thinks the majority of people are in favour of responsibly dealing with the Treaty.

“I think most New Zealanders, if they have the facts presented to them, will approach it in a very positive way.”

It’s what keeps him hopeful that we can come to an understanding about the Treaty as a country. “Other countries have problems – we have a project and it’s an exciting project. We should all be positive. We don’t need to be Pollyanna-ish, but we all want to be positive because when we get through this, and if we honour what we’re dealing with now, we will be a strong country,” he says. “When I see my friends in various iwi I don’t see people who are power-hungry people – I see wonderful people who are making, and will continue to make, a massive contribution to this country, as they always have.”