It's from Hōne to Heke

Tāmati Rīmene-Sproat's Waitangi Day special isn't the treaty treatise he'd planned. But it's still an illuminating look back at our national day.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

Talking to the Listener last June about the success of his jovial te ao Māori explainer series From Hongi to Hāngī, Tāmati Rīmene Sproat mentioned a planned episode on the Treaty of Waitangi.

“That one’s going to be really difficult,” he worried. “We’re going to need to spend a lot of time crafting how we tell that … It will need to be challenging to the audience and some of their thinking, while not trying to scare them away. We need to keep them engaged in the conversations that we need to have when it comes to the treaty.”

Since then, that conversation has (re) turned to a shouting match, due to the anti-treaty moves of the Act Party. And, since then, it seems, Rīmene-Sproat’s planned treaty show has changed tack.

It’s not actually about te tiriti, but Waitangi Day itself. Or that’s how it’s been packaged. “This isn’t about the articles or the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi,” Rīmene-Sproat (Rangitāne, Ngāti Kahungunu) says in the opening, in a move designed to stop middle Aotearoa reaching for the remote. “It’s about Waitangi Day – a day when all of us can express exactly who we are, and we all do it differently.”