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Matthew Scobie and Anna Sturman, "The Economic Possibilities of Decolonisation" (Bridget Williams Books, 2024)
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D
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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A
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to have both of the authors with me of a book published by Bridget Williams books in 2024 titled the Economic Possibilities of Decolonization. Now this is a really interesting book that obviously, as the title Possibility suggests, looks into the future, but does that by helping us understand the past and the present. So we're going to be covering a lot of topics, a lot of time to weave together, maybe also untangle a little bit. We'll see how this goes. Understanding what the political economy in the place that I usually refer to as New Zealand, because I'm very far away and am not the expert on these topics, but thankfully I have the experts with me. So I have Dr. Matthew Scobie and Dr. Anna Darman here today to tell us about the book. Matthew and Anna, thank you so much for joining me.
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B
Thanks for having us. Miranda.
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A
Could we start off please with each of you introducing yourselves a Little bit. And tell us why you decided to write this book and write it together. Anna, maybe you can start.
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C
Thanks so much, Miranda. Yep. So I'm Anna. I'm a political economist and a human geographer at the University of Sydney in Australia. But I am a PKEH New Zealander originally and hail from the south island of Aotearoa. So I will maybe pass to Matt to briefly introduce himself and then we can tell you the reason that we wrote this book together. Because it is a bit of a story.
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B
Yeah. So, thanks. I'm Matthew Scobeat. I teach and research in the business school at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. I've typically call myself a critical accountant, but I'm trying to start calling my field of work Mori, political economy. I'm also Ngai Tahu and Tauiwi. So Tauiwi means people from elsewhere. So I'm descended from lots of people in lots of places. And Ngi Tahu is kind of people of Tahu, or descendants of Tahu. And we can talk about that more later. And so just getting into, I guess, the first prompt for Anna and I to start writing this book together, it actually goes back, like all things 2020 and beyond, to the first lockdown. And I got a call from a leader in the iwi, which is a Ngi Tahu leader called Timarito, and he rang me up about three days into lockdown and said, matt, I need two pages on how the Crown uses crises to further its own power at the expense of Mori, and I need it in 24 hours. So I like brief. Yeah, quite stressful. And he's a person I have a lot of admiration for. And so I wanted to deliver that really well and think I could do it myself. So I got in touch with Anna, who was a good friend from the Internet, again, all things kind of 2020 and beyond to help. And our kind of working relationship started from there and spiraled out into this book.
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A
Wow, what a start. Anything, Anna, you want to add about your own background or kind of what you brought to this project?
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C
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Miranda. So sort of my entry into this particular set of ideas and why I think Matt called on me as a potentially useful person, is that my PhD in political economy was on agriculture and climate change in Aotearoa and on the development of our productive economy and some of the social and ecological costs of developing that economy and how they've been stabilized in different ways across time. And one of the pieces of the puzzle that I was trying to put together there was how this emerging productive economy developed in relation to the existing MORI economy and MORI labour, MORI people. And it was one of the main criticisms of my thesis, actually, from one of my examiners, was, hey, you haven't spoken about this. And in effect, what Matt and I were able to do was take some of the thinking that I'd done about the economy more broadly and put it into conversation with ideas that he'd been working on and we were able to write together about this topic in a way that I could never have done by myself. So it was a really amazing opportunity to first get to work with Matt on something that I think really matters, but also to sort of round out a piece of thinking that I'd done across a few years and, yeah, hopefully produce something that's genuinely useful. Yeah, so that's sort of the overarching narrative of how we came to write.
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A
About this together that I think speaks to so many people, the kind of satisfying, like, oh, you get to do more than you thought you could by doing it in collaboration. So that's a lovely introduction from the both of you for the project, but it's this idea of useful that I think I want to pick up on next because obviously, Matthew, with that initial brief, there's a very clear kind of audience, you know, a specific person saying, I'm going to read this once you put it together, but then obviously once the project expands, expands. And Anna, the point you just made about hoping the end result is useful. Useful to whom? Who do we hope reads this and what do you want them to take away from it?
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B
Yeah, that's a question that we come back to a lot, but potentially not as much as we should regularly. For all of our work as academics, who is this for and who is our audience? And that affects how we write and why we write. But for this one, we were quite particular. 1. I don't know if that little two pager we did ever got read by anyone, but it resulted in this, so that made it worthwhile. But for this, first we had to kind of do a book proposal and we were required to write this. So it was good to be kind of forced to think about in the first place, but it's very local, so we're very happy to be being interviewed right now in an international context, but we were aiming this for kind of a New Zealand audience mostly and people who want some tools to understand the relationship between colonialism and capitalism and then change that relationship. And so we were thinking about kind of students, activists, Mori in particular, Mori leadership And then we were also, to some extent, writing to the people we would hope read outside of that demographic, like our academic peers, other theorists from overseas, and other people trying to understand those relationships and maybe use one case study to then think about how that applied in their context. And so maybe Anna has some particular thoughts on making the book work both for that audience as well as for our kind of political economy peers.
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C
Yeah, I think a thing that I really hoped for this book and I think has come good in the reception that it's had in the way people have spoken to us about it, is it starts to draw some links between the settler colonial contexts that were established through the British Empire through this particular wave of expansion of capitalism at a period in time where things are really, you know, coming apart at the seams. So we're trying to provide this really foundational analysis that is like, very grounded in a particular place, but hopefully is able to link together ideas.
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People who.
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Want to change things for the better, but need a slightly more critical understanding of how these colonial and capitalist ideas, frameworks work. Yeah, and I think, you know, it's a short book. It's a short book, given how much we're trying to do with it, but it packs a punch, I hope, and is able to deliver those ideas to the people who need them.
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Yes, I will say it is book length, as it is longer than those initial two pages, but it's not sort of a doorstopper. There is, as you said, quite a lot packed in. And so I want to start unpacking some of those ideas a little bit to discuss them. So if the end goal then is to understand sort of how we got here now and looking at the impacts of colonialism and capitalism on, well, everything really Maori in New Zealand, we obviously have to kind of know what the beforehand is to understand the change. So can you both maybe tell us a bit about what Maori economies were like before colonialism?
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This is my main kind of field of. Of research and practice to some extent. So I'm happy to talk here with about six caveats, and I'll walk through those caveats one by one. So one, the kind of sources that we are required to rely on to know how something happened in the past is subject to a lot of different lenses. Right. So an important source for me is this book called the Economics of the New Zealand Mori by Raymond Firth. And he was a PKEH or a New Zealand European anthropologist, economic anthropologist. And so I'm reading this through his lens. And that already comes with a whole lot of potential problems. So typically when I rely on what he's writing, I'm looking at his sources. And I'm also looking at Mori, who are around today. Mori scholars, Mori political economists, who rely on Firth as well. Right. So I trust their interpretations more than my own because they're more grounded in their kind of Mori worldviews and practices. So that's one. Then the next is like generalizing from across all of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Very diverse kind of arrangements all throughout, from the kind of subtropical north to the almost subarctic south. Very different kind of peoples arranging their economies in different ways. And one of the big parts of this is, for example, where I'm from in the south island, we have what's called the kumara line pretty close to where I am sitting right now. I think it's just around Te Wai Hora, a big kind of lake, and south of that you couldn't grow kumara, or that's what the evidence suggests. So there was no organized agriculture south of there. It meant people south of there arranged their economies quite differently to people north of there for a long time. Then there's difficulties around periods of time. And how do we kind of cast back periods of time and use kind of archaeological evidence and oral histories to do so? And then using today's concepts to understand it's very tricky, right? Not to say, oh, that's just like this, or that's just like that. These things that are familiar to us, and you can kind of reduce and overly simplify things in some ways by doing that. And the last one, I think is really important for us, the last caveat is, or not really a caveat, is that none of this. Sometimes the way we talk about economies and how they've evolved over time is that it was inevitable that they would become how they are today. And this is incorrect. So the way capitalism is unfilled is not inevitable. And it's not inevitable that Mori economies would evolve into this form that we have now. All of that was the result of kind of structural forces and human actions that we will discuss later in this interview. So with all of those caveats in mind, I'll get to the question which was a lot of these concepts are fairly human, right? So, yes, Mori did have forms of property rights, Right. But they weren't kind of individual fee simple title that could be bought and sold on a market. Right. We might call them taonga. Taonga are kind of treasured resources that have all these sorts of obligations within families, within communities, and within larger Groupings of people into the past and into the future. Right. So this creates these kind of intergenerational obligations. And those were. Some taonga had kind of individual rights around them, some taonga had small collective rights, and some had large collective rights. And these were all organized in different ways in different places. But taonga were worked through forms of labor, just like we have labor today, but no such thing as a wage back then. So it wasn't the typical form of wage labor that we see now. The fruits of one's work weren't necessarily alienated and then kind of compensated in a particular way. Of course, there was exchange. There were extensive trade networks between, like both within communities and between and among communities. So pounamu, which is greenstone, so if you know a New Zealander, there'll be a high chance they'll be wearing a piece of pounamu. And if it is pounamu, it comes from very specific locations in the South island, but you can find that all across the world. And when European visitors first arrived, it was all across the country. Right. So there were these extensive trade networks. But that wasn't mediated by profit. Right. It was mediated by different things. It might be enhancing one's mana or prestige, or enhancing the mana and prestige of your community or your people. It was organized along whakapapa lines. So whakapapa is a structured genealogical relationship among all things. And everything has a whakapapa, and you can connect all of those things, and they have different sorts of obligations. So all these things still happened. And in some cases they were similar. Right. We still labor, we still exchange, we still have particular property rights, but in many ways they were quite different as well. And it's hard to pinpoint every aspect of that. But hopefully we've given a little bit of a sense of how things were different. And maybe again in the future, the.
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Even at the last minute.
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Phew. Find a Marshall's near you. That is a very helpful, as you said, sense. Obviously I asked you a very large question, but that gives us something to work with for the rest of our discussion. Anna, is there anything you want to add before we continue?
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No. As ever, Matt has comprehensively answered the question.
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Perfect. All right, well, let's keep going then to pick up, of course, on what happens when Europeans do start to turn up. What do some of those initial changes look like for the political economy? Matthew, you've just described, taking specifically your point that kind of the way we've ended up now wasn't inevitable. So what did this sort of initial set of interactions I suppose, consist of?
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C
So I'll take the colonial expansion into Aotearoa question first and then hand to Matt to patch over any holes I leave. But I think just to emphasize again what Matt said about there being a continuity but a gradation of change toward the capitalist organization of land and life. So when Europeans first turned up, it really was that the interactions that were taking place were still very much happening on the terms of Iwi, on the terms of the Maori inhabitants of the land. And I won't go into a drawn out history of the different sort of waves of settlers who turned up over time. You know, there were some whalers, there were people coming over from the Sydney colony nearby in New South Wales, various stragglers from the many waves of people being sent across the world at that time. It probably bears emphasising that Aotearoa is, you know, on the other side of the world from the United Kingdom, where a lot of these settlers were coming from. And the time that Aotearoa was being settled by these colonial forces was around the time that a lot of other huge world historic changes were taking place in the global economy. You're looking at ripples and reverberations from the American Revolution, from the ongoing situation is a terrible way to put it, but the ongoing situation with regards to British imperialism in India, there's so many other things going on in the background that the small group of people who made their way to Aotearoa weren't sort of organised in a systematic way in the beginning. And it was a long, drawn out process of the people who tried to colonise the land, trying to get the British Crown to back them in, essentially. And there's some really great work that's been done recently by our colleague Katherine Coman, Dr. Catherine Coman, talking about how finance was implicated in this extension of power across Aotearoa. But to sort of crunch it right down, it's just important to emphasize that the balance of how things were organized in the land for a really long stretch of time, like over decades from the first Europeans arriving, was still undertaken on the terms of Mori. And I think we say in the book, and Matt, feel free to jump in and correct me that that actually sort of the first reaction of Mori was to become more like themselves in response to the incursion of these colonial forces. Am I right in paraphrasing us when I say that?
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That's effectively what we said and it's borrowing vocabulary from some of my Ngi Tahu colleagues. It actually comes from Marshall silence, I think, originally. But Ngai Tahu really like to take that on board because the. The exact quote is the first commercial impulse of indigenous peoples is, rather than becoming European, to become more like themselves. And they're so. They're sort of saying, yes, there are all these new tools, there are all These new opportunities, but they were doing what they always did more. And I think potentially what Anna's getting at, and I'll pass it back to you here, is. Is in those first kind of relationships, right? Extending out those relationships of exchange to these newcomers, just like that always done, markets were seen as an opportunity to.
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Take on rather than an imperative. Yes, exactly.
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Okay, that's helpful to understand at this point the reactions on to these people kind of turning up and going, okay, how are we going to respond to this? Part of the. Why it's hard for, I think all of us to sort of going back to Matthew's point earlier, like untangle the lenses to figure this out, is that obviously a lot of things have changed since that moment. So how do we get from kind of that point to colonial capitalism really intensifying kind of one way of being and stomping out a lot of these Maori political economy that you've been telling us about.
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C
So the key to all of this is the land right under everything, the land. And whoever has control over the land is able to organize their society to reproduce themselves in relation to that land in a way that makes sense to them. And so the key struggle at the heart of the expansion of colonial capitalism across Aotearoa is the question of when the land was taken. Taken from Mori in different ways. And we have a number of waves of action that took place across the 19th and 20th century. So, Matt, do you want to jump in here with me on this? Because you remember the timing so much better than me. We have the initial period from the start of the 19th century through to basically treating between Mori and the British Crown over the terms of Te Tiriti or the Treaty of Waitangi. And that was basically the foundational document that attempts to negotiate how people will coexist on the land of Aotearoa. Sorry, Matt, please jump in here. Sorry, Miranda. My brain has gone kaput.
- [26:32]
B
Happy to jump in. I have to teach this every day in my classes. And so this period of time leading up to Te tiri, which is 1840, is when we'd say it was like the contact period. And I just want to walk back the kind of impression I gave in answering the last question, that it was like a cheery kind of opening of the world for Mori. There were lots of violent kind of engagements as well, but it wasn't kind of systematic. And so we use kind of contact and we say, just like capitalism wasn't inevitable in Aotearoa or in the world, systematic colonization wasn't either. So just because you have contact doesn't mean you have systematic colonization. But when it started to become systematic was this point in time of 18:40. So we could talk for hours and hours endlessly about Te Tiriti. But I think the main thing that Anna and I want to get across is this idea of preemption that was built into it. So preemption basically set up the Crown as the single buyer of Mori land. And that's so the big first wave of dispossession. And this is largely Ngai Tahu. So Maiwi was through preemption, where the Crown purchased land through contracts. And many of these contracts, some of them were relatively voluntary, some of them were quite coercive, some of them were quite dodgy. And there were promises made during the kind of negotiation and signing of those contracts that were not kept by the Crown. So Ngi Tahu's primary, for want of a better word, grievance, was that the promises that were made were not kept in these purchases. But what came after Te Tiriti, after preemption, when Mori stopped selling their land and stopped entering into these contracts, was what we call ropatu, or invasion and confiscation. And so that was the next big wave of dispossession. After the preemption, sometimes that's called conquest by contract. Then came the kind of violent confiscation. And when that was, you know, violent, devastating for Mori, devastating in some ways for the Crown and its reputation. And there were people, many Mori, but PKEH as well, European settlers, who didn't like what the Crown was doing and how it was behaving. But it was also very expensive. And mori in the. In the territories that were invaded, resisted, defended their land fiercely. And so then they brought in this thing called the Native Land court, which effectively individualized title, among other things. And to test your title, you had to pay kind of survey and legal fees. And these got so kind of substantial because the process was so drawn out that when even if you kind of won your case and had your kind of individual title recognised, then you had to pay lawyers and surveyors for that and that, you know, the way to get cash was to sell land. So this was the kind of three waves of disposition. There were others, as Anna said, that went into the 20th century, but these were the big ones kind of in the late 19th century, and the vast majority of Mori land was dispossessed through this way.
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C
Yeah. And just like a final. Sorry. I think the dual dynamic of people being divorced or alienated from their land was co constituted by the construction of this property framework enforced through the colonial state. That sort of became the terrain through which people had to negotiate and navigate their claim to place, to having control over a place. And so why the colonial capitalist framing is so important, is it because it keeps reminding us of this systematic quality to the process that was going on on an individual level? This is a devastating process to think about. But it's also the construction of this new regime that appears sort of universal from the time that we exist in, but was actually very deliberately constructed in this way to make it really difficult for mori to be able to exist in relation to the land in a way that would satisfy their pre existing way of structuring their economies in society.
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Yeah, I think the systemic nature of this is definitely very important. So I'm glad that you've both emphasised that if we sort of fast forward obviously skipping over a bunch of things, but as the both of you mentioned earlier, that's necessary to make this book not a doorstopper and to be useful to where we're at now. Coming up more towards the present, what does this Maori political economy look like now or more recently, sort of within this systematic system of colonial capitalism and maybe beyond it a bit as well?
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B
Yeah. So Anna and I talk a lot about within and against and beyond and what those terms mean. So we might be able to unpack that in a bit. But probably one thing that I didn't draw attention to and I think might put into place the most recent discussion is that the mori kind of self refer as tangata whenua. Right. So you may have heard this word around the world. I'm not sure how far it's traveled. But tangata whenua kind of means people born of the land. So tangata is people. Whenua is land. But broadly understood, whenua is also the word for placenta. So you bury the whenua in the whenua to establish connections with that land. And that kind of is all organized around whakapapa, which I introduced before, this structured genealogical relationship among all things. So tangata whenua. And so whenua is sometimes dispossession isn't even the best word I've started using following others like severance or severing. So you sever the whenua and then all we can get back is property. Right. So we did have this intimate relationship, tangata whenua, with land and we get back property and that's a different thing to get back. And it creates a different kind of orientation for a political economy. So that brings us today. But I'd also say that all of the things I mentioned before never stopped. They were never completely erased and they never will be. So there are a lot of Mori economic practices that might not even be considered or self considered as economic practices, but certainly are. So these happen at the marae. So marae are like gathering places where people come together and make decisions and. And they host kind of large scale events. At these large scale events, lots of people are fed, lots of people are honoured, the dead are farewelled, and these are substantial kind of occasions. Lots of people have to be fed. You need an economy of sorts to keep everyone fed. And so that's always happened. Another strong practice for Ngai Tahu in particular is mahinga kai. So kai is food and mahinga or mahi is work. So mahinga kai is the place where food is worked. And that was one of the promises in the contracts that mahinga kai would be kind of continued because that was the Ngi Tahu economy. So yes, those practices were challenged in some communities. They disappeared because wetlands were drained, rivers were dammed, farmers put up fences and private property was kind of given this particular status. That meant people could stop Mori from practicing the Mahingenkai that their ancestors had always practiced. But it still continues, Right? So there are still all these Mahingenkai practices that are not just continuing, but are being revitalized right now. So that's one aspect of kind of Mori political economy. These kind of diverse practices that you might not think of as part of the economy, but are a very important way of continuing cultural practices and meeting particular needs. Then there's the big kind of. Well, there's lots of Mori owned businesses that we might consider part of the Mori economy. And these may make profit, but that might not be the primary purpose of those entities. And I see those as important for sustaining people within the contemporary moment. But I don't spend much time working with them or researching them. And then another type of organization is called the Post Settlement governance entity. So when. I'm trying to figure out how much context to give, basically since the 90s there have been what we call treaty settlements, which are a way to provide very limited compensation for some of the losses we've talked about already from the Crown to Mori for breaches of te Tiriti or breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi. And so the Crown didn't know who to give this limited compensation to. We could think of it as a reparation of sorts. And so they kind of required. But also there are arguments to be made that Mori had plenty of agency in forming these organizations, this kind of entities where the settlement could be given. And we call those now post settlement governance entities. There's lots of similarities between all the different ones, but there are differences between them as well. And the one we talk about in the book is Terunanga or Ngaitahu or the kind of the Council of Ki Tahu, because that's the organization that I am a registered member of and I did my kind of PhD research with as well. And so they control quite large asset bases now. They're often split into like a distribution arm and a kind of holdings or a corporate arm. They, they have to work their assets in certain ways and this creates all sorts of opportunities because those that surplus that is generated by those activities can be distributed in the form of scholarships and language revitalization and cultural revitalization. And importantly, I think this is overlooked particularly by critics of post settlement governance entities can be put into strategy and legal teams to continue to demand accountability from the crown to honor the treaty. But they also create all sorts of contradictions. Right? When you give property back and you give cash back, that again creates a different orientation for that political economy to revolve around something different to whakapapa and taonga and mana, those concepts I introduced before. And sometimes those things can work together and sometimes they can't. And so these can be kind of, you know, excuse my pronunciation, but like Faustian packs or dancing with the devil. And yep, they, they can do great things and they can lift people's livelihoods, but they can also create new sets of problems that Mori have to continue to work through as well. Thursday Night Football is on Christmas night and it's only on Prime Video. Wide open touchdown. 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- [40:17]
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Yeah, I don't think there's any sort of one perfect solution for this entanglement that you're both describing. But what could happen going forward? What might you both hope happens in the future in terms of economic relations and realities?
- [41:35]
C
Maybe I could start with. If I could just take us as this often happens in conversations between Matt and I, I'm going to take us to a higher level of abstraction just for a moment because I think, and this does go to the question of what we hope might happen in the future and why it's important to be thinking about this stuff right now at a higher level of abstraction than these specific firms and entities and processes that Matt has just set out for us. There remains in Aotearoa a Maori political economy of what I would call social reproduction or ways that the communities are able to sustain each other. And actually to go all the way back to the very first question, which is, how did this work come about? I know that you were asked for the two pager map, but I remember this really came alive for us when we were writing about how Iwi were mobilizing to provide care for their communities during the COVID pandemic. And we had this flash of insight and we're like, oh, it's in moments of crisis when the capitalist economy is sort of unable to provide what people need to survive, that we see these forms of social and ecological care that sustain the economy more broadly sort of coming out into the open and revealing themselves, making themselves known, and this question of crisis and response and finding inspiration for ways to care for each other, hopefully into a different Economic future, I think, is really important. As we all know, we haven't just been through Covid here in Australia around that time. We went through black summer bushfires, then there's been Covid and then there were floods, and then there's been a genocide. And so many forms of political, social, economic crisis continue coming. And so into these moments, into these ruptures, we see forms of care and community and economy coming through. And I think one of the founding ideas for us here is trying to generalize out from those flashes into what could be built to move into as a sustainable alternative from where we are now.
- [44:05]
B
Yep, absolutely. I'm really glad you brought that up, Anna, because it was foundational to the move from this two pager to this book. And so much was playing out. And that's not just for Mori and it's not just for Aotearoa or Australia. Earlier, everywhere we saw kind of mutual aid became everyday vocabulary, not just kind of a. What's the word? An obscure anarchist text from the early 20th century. And so that's again, why we ended up getting to the point where the first sentence. Right, the first sentence of the book, I think is the future of Aotearoa depends on how Mori engaged with capitalism. Because all these things were changing around us as we were writing. And I won't say that Mori were staying the same. That's certainly not the case. Mori were adapting, just like Mori always adapt. But there were these particular features of the Mori political economy, as Anna says, that kind of were bubbling up when they needed to, they always existed. But there were. And we could talk about the earthquakes in Christchurch where this created these ruptures for Mori, what we'd call rangatiratanga, leadership and self determination to kind of bubble up and show that they have different ways of organizing that can deliver, not just for Mori, but for everyone around. So that was influential for us. I would say inspiring, but that might be a bit cheesy. It was influential for us in times where we need to be influenced and we need to be inspired, because there's a lot of darkness around as well.
- [46:02]
A
Yeah. Especially in those particular moments, kind of acutely, more than just chronically the rest of the time, as much as the abstraction is definitely, I think, a helpful way to frame these sorts of ideas and discussions. I admit I'm not a particularly abstract person, so can we talk for a moment about the kinds of implications that these sorts of thinking would have for like law or policy, like somewhat more concrete things.
- [46:31]
C
Yeah, maybe I'll start with an Abstraction. And then as is our dynamic duo effect, Matt will pick it up basically. Yeah. If you're talking about a different form of political economy, then you're talking about a different form of state or a different form of power that's able to organize society around that. Right. So at the same time as we've been thinking about these ideas, thinking about how treaty settlements had different iwi, are navigating these conversations in the background. There's also been a process of constitutional transformation happening in Aotearoa. And we've been really cognizant of that really broad, deep conversation going on and seeing that as an indicator of how important it is to continue pushing to link the colonial with capitalism. Because constitutional transformation implies economic transformation and economic transformation implies constitutional transformation. So I think there are very real questions about how you actually take some of the resources from the capitalist economy and use those to build a base for a state and an economy that offers an alternative. And I think maybe I'll pass to Matt because this is literally his area of specialization in how those power and resource transformations might happen in the context of Maori.
- [48:19]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're just starting on this kind of big project. The book was like a short provocation and now we're thinking what are the kind of pressure points where we might put pressure on the current form to make room for more Tino rangatiratanga, more mori kind of self determination, but to get from abstract to something a bit more concrete. I can't talk much about law because I'm not trained in law, but there's a lot happening in that space. Tikanga in the law it might be called and tikanga or mori kind of law or sometimes translated as normative ethics, but we can call it mori. Law is being used in the courtroom, for example, at all levels of the court and other kind of more practical things. There are mori seats, sometimes appointed, sometimes elected on local councils. And so if they're say appointed by the local iwi, the local kind of mori grouping, then that would put some decision making power into local government. Then there are things like co governance arrangements where there might be a particular resource like a lake or a mountain that is CO governed by some setup between. It's different in every case. But a local government, a regional council, the Department of Conservation and local IWI or HAP or WHNAU representatives, IWI being kind of the largest grouping, HAP being a smaller one, and WHNAU being kind of a very large family. And so those are some kind of practical ones. That are happening on the ground now. What we didn't talk much about in the book, we kind of gave a little tiny hint of it and it shows you how long it takes to write these things. But we hinted at some reactionary kind of parts of New Zealand that were starting to react and organized against all of the things I just mentioned. Unfortunately, those reactionary powers have. Have taken a lot of the halls of power and these reactionary forces are very, very strong. And a lot of what I just described as being systematically kind of unpicked in very destructive ways. So you may have seen kind of the Toitu Titiriti Hikoi, potentially the largest kind of protests in New Zealand history, potentially that was to defend the treaty against some of the systematic unpicking that's going on now. And the last one I want to talk about, probably that you've heard of overseas is the kind of legal personhood. So it's often put forward overseas for obvious reasons, because that's an easier way for people to connect with abroad as like an environmental kind of movement where you give rivers or mountains rights of personhood. But that actually came out of the treaty settlement process in Aotearoa, New Zealand. And it was a compromise, right? A compromise by the Crown and what MORI leadership wanted. So those are some of the different kind of changes in law and policy. More broadly, what we're thinking about next is going through kind of tax policy, fiscal policy, central banks and monetary policy, markets and how markets are set up and carbon markets and biodiversity markets in particular. But all of that work is at quite early stages. The main one is what Anna mentioned is the constitutional transformation, which has been going probably forever. But the fairly impactful Matik in my report came out around 2016, I think, and led by the kind of an iwi chairs group, independent Group for Constitutional Transformation. And it was kind of co led by Professor Margaret Mutu and Moana Jackson. And they have a lot of mana or prestige throughout Moridom. So that's one of the big projects and that's unfolding in very different ways as we speak.
- [53:06]
A
Yes, you've seen where I would like our discussion to go as a final part of it with what the both of you are working on next, separately and together, perhaps, because as Matthew, you mentioned, this book is in many ways kind of a provocation. It's putting a lot of important things together, but also kind of creating multiple potential roadmaps going forward. So, you know, it does very much seem to Anna's point earlier that the book is meant to be used and therefore things could come out of it. So anything else you want to tell us about what you might be working on next?
- [53:40]
B
That's a good question. We're busy. We're all very busy. The big project I've got going that lots of people are a part of is called Towards a Kaupapa Mori Political Economy. So, really, that book was the starting point and we've got a lot of work with a lot of different experts that needs to be done. So the things I just mentioned, like fiscal policy and taxation, monetary policy and central banks thinking about markets, how they're set up, interrogating particular concepts and whether they're appropriate, like value and social reproduction and alienation. And then a little bit of kind of speculative fiction, which we're very excited about. So having kind of workshop activities around what would New Zealand's political economy look like if Te Tiriti had been honoured or if Te Tiriti was honored. Right. So we're thinking, whenever we talk about these things, we immediately raise this kind of structural barriers and we kind of get caught up with historical baggage, for want of a better word. And that is an appropriate analysis that we need to do. But sometimes we want to kind of relax some of that, to imagine what could be, so we can figure out a kind of pathway to get there as well. So those are some of the things that I'm working on. How about you, Anna?
- [55:13]
C
And so I am sort of turning my lens here in Australia now to be thinking about the emerging ecological repair regime that's being built through the state and the different ways that different actors are attempting to essentially keep growing the capitalist economy here, particularly through agriculture, while attempting to repair Australia's biodiversity and climate regimes, which is creating a whole lot of really interesting ways of attempting to value nature, price nature and coordination issues at the level of the state. So, as has been clear through this whole conversation, my theoretical toolkit is really focused at this level of piecing together how value and nature and reproduction and the background of the productive economy operates, which is how I hinge onto the question of how indigenous lifeways both support and are depleted by the productive economy. And in terms of work that we will do together into the future, I mean, I think we continue talking about the questions that were raised in our book. I think one day, hopefully we'll have another book in us, but probably we're going to need a little bit of time to recover and sort of, yeah, engage with the world as it is and find the right provocation for the next steps for our work together.
- [56:47]
A
Well, it certainly sounds like the both of you are keeping very busy with all sorts of exciting things. And yeah, who knows, maybe another book together will be in the future. But of course, while everything is still ongoing at the moment, listeners can read the book you've already written together, titled the Economic Possibilities of Decolonisation, published by Bridget Williams Books in 2024. Matthew and Anna, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [57:10]
C
Thank you so much for having us.
- [57:12]
B
Thank. You.