What To Do With Toitū

Political theatre and the growing importance of relational communication in politics.

There is one thing that seems to unify the diverse array of politicians that whakapapa Maori - from David Seymour and Nicole McKee, to Willie Jackson and Winston Peters, to Debbie Packer and Rawiri Waititi. It's something many others have, but it's notable today. 

They have an appreciation for the more theatrical side of politics. 

The biggest Shakespeare nerds I know are Maori - he's big on 'palace intrigue’, which Maori can relate to as members of a culture with clear hierarchies within an iwi, but also with complex diplomatic interplay between iwi themselves. 

Historically, Maori have highly valued oratory skills and storytelling, and so it was inevitable that this would spread to any democratic politics involving Maori. 

The formality of Maori events such as powhiri, formality that some pakeha wince at, is just an expression of this belief in really engaging with your audience and speaking to their hearts first and foremost.  

As politics continues to be more about storytelling and less about the quantifying of success or failure, the power of spectacle (across all of the cultures that make us as a nation) increases - for reasons I will elucidate on later. 

So is the Toitū Te Tiriti Hīkoi a classically Tikanga response from tens of thousands of Maori, is it just a stunt by one party that has been jumped on by others, or is this something more in alignment with a global shift in how people engage with politicians and politics? 

It's all of these things, but only one of them is interesting. 

Much reporting on the hikoi has been at pains to reference the point made by Toitū Te Tiriti on their site that it is not ‘just’ a protest against ACT's Treaty Principles Bill, but about things like “Generation Tiriti standing up and protecting the rights of all of our mokopuna.” 

People arguing that the hikoi is JUST political theatre fail to grasp the reality that most politics is just theatre. Now more than ever. 

Seymour's bill itself is political theatre, in that its most probable outcome has always been failure in the House but with this leading to success in Party Vote polling. 

ACT have garnered significant public attention to a classic wedge issue and have positioned themselves strongly on one side of the wedge - opposite Te Pati Maori, united in their dual roles of pushing politics out of the centre and towards their parties. 

None of this negates the earnest reasons why non-politicians turned up in their tens of thousands to Parliament today.

These are people showing up out of a genuine concern for their country's direction… which can also be said of every Parliamentary protest, but this is a notably big one.

One person's wedge politics is another person's “revolution” - to use the language of Toitū Te Tiriti website (https://toitutetiriti.co.nz/pages/kaupapa). 

So, depending on your reading, tens of thousands of people are either uniting or dividing the country, and protesting a specific bill and/or a general vibe. 

This is not an easy thing to summarise, mostly because it’s very ‘eye of the beholder,’ but I hear your want for a semi-thoughtful 'take’ that illuminates what's happening on this hikoi and with politics more generally, ideally something you can pass off as your own to people who ask you for your take on this? 

In short, politics is more relational than it has ever been and that this is leading to a prioritisation of personal connection with politicians.

Politics is becoming both personalised and parasocial. 

In their paper ‘Assessing the Predictive Value of Parasocial Relationship Intensity in a Political Context’, Jonathan Cohen and R. Lance Holbert assert that “political support should be viewed as a communicative act and explained from a relational perspective.” 

Here is my very imperfect summary of the paper (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0093650218759446): 

Media consumers have been shown to develop imaginary parasocial relationships with sports figures and celebrities, in the same way people also develop similar connections with political candidates and elected officials. 

We may think of voters as rational actors, ones guided by an unbreakable and thoroughly reasoned ideology, but other factors play just as important a role in voter choice. 

The emergence of a competence dimension (i.e., expertise) and a character dimension (i.e., trust) in political science literature from the 1970s mirrors the findings of 1970s research on mass communication in finding the receiver’s perceptions of the source of a persuasive message is just as important as the message itself.

Over time these two truisms have become less true (my two cents: likely due to the demise of the monoculture and the rise of the internet, specifically social media, which Ben Thomas touches upon here https://www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/360478087/how-internet-has-helped-turn-trump-supporters-fandom) and a third dimension has risen in importance - goodwill. 

Goodwill is defined by Cohen and Holbert as “perceived caring,” people feeling the source of a message knows an audience’s ideas, can identify their feelings, and is responsive to their attempts to communicate.”  

In essence, we now need our politicians to 'get’ us more than we need them to be perfect vessels of rational action or even in close agreement with us politically. 

To people who feel seen and heard by Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, being at and engaging with the Hikoi will further bond them to her regardless of any other policy positions she may have or anything else about her.  

Likewise, people who see David Seymour as like them and expressing something they also feel will grow in affinity to him after this. 

If you read the social media comments and mentions directed towards either of them, you will find people who have developed emotionally unhealthy relationships (both supportive and hostile) with someone they've never met and don't truly know.

This says nothing about either individual, but it says a lot about the time we live in and the role of the internet in politics. 

The medium is still the message, but the medium was a limited portfolio of rather samey media outlets and is now X, Instagram and TokTok. 

The Age of The Influencer Politician - one that either started with Ardern, or much earlier with Winston Peters and NZ First in the 1990's - is now all-encompassing and we're seeing its effects right now. 

This is either a beautiful or terrible thing, it's here to stay regardless.