How has indigenous poitics influenced what you do?
Nandor: I guess I've always had an intuitive support for the struggles of indigenous people. When I first came to this country at the age of seven, I fully expected that I would be speaking Maori and doing things in a Maori way because I go to Hungary to visit my grandparents and you know we speak Hungarian and do things in a Hungarian way. I was quite astounded to come here and find it so... colonised I guess, although I didn't realise, that's not how I would have identified it at the time. And I guess I grew up kind of aware that there was like a deeper history because Pakeha occupation here has been for such a short time that it's like a shallow band of history and I've always been aware that there's like a deeper... there's something underneath that. But it took me quite a long time to figure what it was because I grew up in an area where not many Maori people lived particularly.
So I guess it was when I was at university I really discovered the history of what had gone on under colonisation because this country has these myths that, you know, we treated 'our natives' good, is part of the myth of his country. We have good race relations and we're an equal society, everyone gets a fair deal. And when I discovered what actually happened in the process of colonisation, I was horrified. First of all, at what happened and secondly, how come I'd never heard that story before, how come we didn't learn that stuff in school?
Since then it's been a process of really developing my understanding about what the Treaty of Waitangi is, for example, what it really means? And we're still grappling as a nation with what it really means. How is it to be interpreted? Particularly in the context of modern New Zealand. And how can we... how would Maori society give expression to its sovereignty or self-determination? And those are deep constitutional questions. But I think that the constitutional debate is actually the most interesting and exciting thing going on in our country. How do we actually develop forms of decision making which can marry the best things about representative democracy, Western style, with the kind of participatory forms of decision making that characterise Maori society, in my understanding.
And so those are really interesting questions and we've gotta lot of work to do and a lot of talking to do. But it's an exciting journey because it's a process of nation building. We're in the process of decolonisation, we haven't decolonised, so we're working through what that means. And in the context of where you've got a majority Pakeha population, it makes it more confusing because questions of political legitimacy, from where does it derive? Does it arrive from a democratic mandate, and if that's where it derives from, then there's no argument against the racist domination by a Pakeha settler majority. So there's got to be other aspects to it than that. So yeah, these things are still to be teased out.
In terms of the politics that I do, I'm the spokesperson on Treaty of Waitangi issues. A lot of people are surprised that we have a Pakeha in that role because they say "that's a Maori thing", where really it's a Pakeha thing, because it's the Treaty of Waitangi that gave Pakeha the right to come to Aotearoa and establish the relationship. So really advocating for constitutional change is probably the main way that I give expression to that.
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