Today is our National Day.  It has been for a very long time and it will continue to be for a very long time ahead.

It has been endorsed by multiple governments and generations.  I’ve heard the old debate again, that it isn’t our national day and perhaps Anzac Day should be instead and that argument belongs to people with different barrows to push than this day and it’s significance.

Anzac Day is an enormously important day, laden with much emotion and meaning and as such it doesn’t need to saddled with the added responsibility of the national day. Anzac Day is a day to look back, but Waitangi is a day to look forward as our original peoples and our newest arrivals get together and celebrate and pledge unity and progress

And Waitangi Day is a good day and always has been. 

I was in Australia this year for Australia Day. There, three Melbourne Councils chose not to celebrate the day.  Some call it Invasion Day because it only commemorates the arrival of European settlers.  Our Day commemorates when Maori and the settlers chose to work together to forge a nation which is far more positive.  That said, I watched an Australia Day parade down Swanston Street in Melbourne which crackled with positivity and I lost count of all the different ethnic groups who marched in the culture’s clothes under a banner of one country.

My Waitangi Days have been uniformly excellent.  I’ve spent it with family, or at festivals and once at the Treaty Grounds. I’ve seen no nastiness only positivity.

So February 6 is the day that we chose to forge a nation in 1840.  Sure there are people on both sides that have problems with its implementation.  But fundamentally it is the soundest and best day to have as a national day

Jacinda Ardern is spending 5 days in the North.  Today Dr Aroha Harris has written this.  “One hundred and seventy-seven years after the signing of Te Tiriti, I wish that a Prime Minister – any Prime Minister – taking the time to pause among Māori and other New Zealanders, in Māori territories, on Waitangi Day or any other day, wasn’t a thing, wasn’t a cause for opinion or comment or media attention.”

It’s hard not to agree. The argy-bargy that is credited to Waitangi Day through the years came from one place.  Te Tii Marae. That marae had a special privilege granted to it purely down to its geographical location as the closest marae to the treaty grounds. That marae misused that privilege.  Not by protesting or bringing up concerns.  It was the mud-slinging, the sex toy chucking, the name calling and the jostling that did their chips.

When Bill English refused to go North all he did was discredit the day.  Either he should have sucked it up and stood up to the ratbags or he should have just crossed Te Tii off the agenda.  That’s what Jacinda Ardern has done and well done too.  I’m amazed it took so long to figure out a logical answer.