New Zealand is Keeping the Promise

In New Zealand: MATARIKI TO BE AN ANNUAL HOLIDAY 

She has kept her promise! New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, has kept her election promise. Matariki will be an annual national holiday as from 2022.

What exactly is Matariki?” Matariki is a uniquely Maori and therefore New Zealand based celebration.” It is the beginning of the Maori New Year and it will now be an annual national holiday says the Latin American Herald Tribune.

Matariki is celebrated “by eating food and spending time with the extended family, reflecting on the year that has been, acknowledging the dead and planning for the future.”

“In our view it’s been a long time coming,” Ardern said during her speech at the upper marae at Waitangai on Thursday.

An article in “The Guardian” written by Elle Hunt in Wellington explains that “Matariki is the Maori name given to the Pleiades cluster of stars which rises in mid-winter in the southern hemisphere – marking the start of the Maori new year.” The Pleiades are also known as “The Seven Sisters”. The cluster is northwest of the constellation Taurus.

Since the early 2000s there have been celebrations marking the reappearance of the cluster of stars. In 2009 MP Rahui Katene tried to have the event recognized as a public holiday. He, however, failed. 

Hunt writes that the call for a public holiday was again made last year. “A poll of 1,128 people conducted by UMR found that 63% of the people polled supported Matariki being made a public holiday.”

In the 2020 election a vow was made by the Labour party to make Matariki a public holiday. “The first celebration will be on June 24, 2022,” Prime Minister Ardern said. “We wanted to bring in those who had the expertise in order to establish those first dates.”

The new public holiday, will be New Zealand’s twelfth since Waitangi Day was introduced nearly fifty years ago.” It “would be an opportunity to learn more about Matariki” and to support other initiatives such as learning Maori history in schools.

Prime Minister Ardern said her government “was committed to making progress for Maori and navigating the relationship under the Treaty of Waitangi.” Maori account for about 15% of the population of New Zealand a Reuters report states.

Ms. Ardern wisely admits that “there will always be challenges – some will be those entrenched ones that we have been working on as a nation for decades, and others will be new for us. But what is important is that we fundamentally change the way we resolve them – that’s the shift we have been looking for as a government.”

Things, like learning history in schools, Ms. Ardern said, “will stand us in good stead for changing the way that our next generation thinks about New Zealand.”

The Waitangi Day Dawn ceremony takes place on Saturday. Every year on February 6, New Zealand marks the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. It is the nation’s founding document and is named after the Waitangi region in the North Island of New Zealand where the founding treaty was signed.

The three “P’s” (Principles) of the Treaty as they are often called are the principles of partnership, participation, and protection. These underpin the relationship between the Government and Maori under the Treaty of Waitangi. It was an agreement between the British Crown and many Maori chiefs, and it promised to protect Maori culture and enable Maori to continue to live in New Zealand as Maori.

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