The Hillary Symposium

Sacha is here in lieu of Anake Goodall, the Chief Executive of Te Runanga O Ngai Tahu, the organisation that services the tribe’s statutory rights and ensures that the benefits of the Settlement grow for future generations.

She understand that the role of reflection is to be provocative but in a nice way. It’s all too tempting to see a nice marae photo, but she thinks there are deeper issues that Ngai Tahu represents.

She’s like to draw some analogies between colonisation and climate change, and hopefully this is a provocative start. They’re both fundamentally connected to the land. They’re both potentially devastating in their effect. They both seem to be brought by external, unmanageable forces.

For Maori, it may seem that the process of colonisation was one that saw us being duped and unfortunate victims, but that’s not how Ngai Tahu sees it. They were dynamic in early trade settlements. They created the treaty framework. Throughout Ngai Tahu’s history, they’ve displayed a fierce dynamism to adapt and take initiative, and that’s how they see the reaction should be to climate change.

They also understand the role of the human agent to be transformative. We are the same as a shag perched on an ocean rock. The tide encroaches, and we are forced to fly away.

New Zealand’s history saw Maori as a dying race, and they saw their role as the provision of a pillow to smooth the transition.

There’s no room for apathy. We need collaborative and collective responses to climate change.

Ngai Tahu is a microcosm of the North-South divide. They have been locked into underdevelopment for a long time, and those pecularities are still there. But they also represent the cutting edge of the indentity of New Zealand. What is unavoidably New Zealand is the presence of our indigenous peoples. For Christchurch, that’s Ngai Tahu.

In order to have our contributions to that identity, there needs to be the notion of integrity.

We have a very high risk situation of using culture as a clip-on accessory. Culture can’t be tacked on. We need to design real and enduring solutions.

Don’t talk in metaphorical abstractions — we need fundamental pragmatism. If we do bad things to the Earth, then bad things happen to people. We need to understand the timeframe. We will not look for short or quick solutions; we are looking for the intergenerational good.

Some would say that the Galileo contribution to knowledge is that of exclusion: to remove factors until we have the bare minimum that our brain can comprehend. Ngai Tahu instead prefer to look at the complexity and interconnectedness of the system. That logic of inclusion, that ability to embrace complexities, is critical, and it’s something that Ngai Tahu has to offer.

How do we do this? It could be really hard, but it could be deceptively simple. The answer is about talking. They valued the opportunity to be here today and talk with everyone, and they hope to do more of the same. They’ve always been loud and they’ll continue to be so.

The Ngai Tahu experience is very much one that is based on intercultural exchange, but their pragmatism comes with hard bargaining.

The responsibility we have to safeguard is an ethic based on a primary right to the landscape. In terms of the diamond that we’re here to discuss, to make Christchurch carbon positive, we want to feel confidence to invest in the city. We want to offer hospitality to those who come to visit. We want our people to come to live in the city, in a place of culture and health on all dimensions. And ultimately, we hope to make this a great place to live for future generations.