New Zealand is too small for separate natural history or ethnographic museums.  Instead, the four largest museums (in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin) are encyclopaedic general museums where science (natural history, e.g. botany, zoology, geology) and culture (human history, e.g. ethnology, history, applied arts) must co-habit.  Among their duties these museums must prominently promote their science half.  Science museums (and therefore the science part of encyclopaedic museums) have “an ethical responsibility to safeguard scientific integrity” and need “loyalty to facts and evidence.” 

Politicisation of museums

New Zealand museums have increasingly embraced identity politics.  This is evident in many museum planning documents.  Future Museum, Auckland Museum’s 2012 “strategic vision”, for example, includes two major policy documents, He Korahi Māori: a Māori Dimension, and Teu Le Va: Pacific Dimension.  The latter offers “pathways of acknowledgement and inclusiveness” within the museum, based on the idea that “Pacific people have a special place in Aotearoa.”  No other ethno-cultural groups get their own guiding documents. 

He Korahi Māori ensures a Māori dimension in “all of the museum’s plans and activities”.  What might this mean?  It is hard to imagine a Māori dimension to an exhibition of English pewter or Chinese porcelain, when pre-contact Māori society had no metals or pottery.  Importantly, He Korahi Māori overlooks that specific cultural dimensions have little relevance to science in museums.  This is because the scientific method serves to overcome the limitations of local cultural perspectives by inviting criticism from everywhere.  There is only one version of science, which is universal and understood internationally.  Investigations or findings are either science, open to any informed criticism, or not science.  Science has no shielded local or cultural varieties.  Despite Hitler and Stalin, there is no “Aryan science” or “communist science” with special bodies of protected knowledge.

Many museum planning documents push a particular view of the Treaty of Waitangi, and any perceived principles of the Treaty are political.  The original 1840 “Articles Treaty” can be distinguished from the recently-developed “Principles Treaty“.  The contemporary reinterpretation of the Treaty as a “partnership”, favoured by the political Left, is contestable.  Former Labour prime minister David Lange stated: “The treaty [of Waitangi] cannot be any kind of founding document, as it is sometimes said to be.  …  The Court of Appeal once, absurdly, described it as a partnership between races, but it obviously is not”. 

Auckland Museum’s administration now talks about challenging “colonial narratives” and making the museum “tikanga-led” (led by Māori culture, values and knowledge).  I checked word-counts in the two most recent annual plans of Auckland Museum and annual reports of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Wellington).  All four documents show the same pattern: culture is privileged and science marginalised.  The word “science” appears 0–5 times in each document and science words like zoology, botany and archaeology get 0–2 mentions.  Meanwhile, the documents are swamped with cultural key words: Māori (44–81 mentions per document), iwi (= Māori tribes, 16–43), culture (9–37), mātauranga (= Māori knowledge, 7–26).  Te Papa’s recently-developed natural history exhibition gives further signs of ideological positioning.

Te Papa’s natural history gallery

In tandem with their large natural science research collections, museums provide secular space for major long-term natural history exhibitions presenting evidence-based explanations of the natural world.  These exhibitions contribute to a world-wide intellectual movement to advance science, a mission bigger than, and different from, parochial political or cultural concerns.  Museums may mount temporary exhibitions with different disciplines combined for special effect, but core, long-term galleries generally cover single broad subjects. 

Te Papa disrupted this traditional arrangement, when in 2019 it unveiled a new principal natural history gallery (Te Taiao / Nature).  Instead of devoting Te Taiao / Nature exclusively to science, as in the natural history galleries it replaced, Te Papa incorporated Māori cultural material throughout, to contrive a novel science-culture gallery.  Spiritual beliefs now sit alongside scientific knowledge.  To be clear, it is thoroughly appropriate that museum displays cover mātauranga Māori.  My objection is to the shifting of the Māori view of nature from ethnographic galleries (Te Papa has two permanent Māori galleries) to science galleries.  I question the asymmetry whereby human history galleries continue to present just culture, but science galleries now get one local cultural system mixed in with universal science.

Te Taiao / Nature is a new “nature and environment zone” that explains the natural world “through mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) alongside science”.  Exhibition developers refer throughout to the demigod Maui, who “can shapeshift into a bird, a lizard”.  “He helps us understand the nuances of Te Taiao [nature] from a Māori perspective.”  The Māori view of nature makes no distinction between nature and culture and includes mythology and spirituality (Roberts, M. Auckland Museum Annual Report 1999–2000: 45–47).  So, labels in Te Taiao / Nature state, for example, that the jostling of tectonic plates is “the shifting of Ruaumoko, god of earthquakes”.  A “mauri stone placed by a hinaki [eel trap] kept eels thriving”.  The creation story of Maui fishing up the North Island gets a mention.  

Museums need to maintain academic standards but Te Taiao / Nature makes a category error.  Mātauranga Māori is the counterpart, not of science, but of the folklore about nature that all societies around the world developed from their beginnings.  Modern science emerged before and during the European and North American Enlightenment, transcending local folkloric explanations of the natural world and becoming an international system.  Mixing parochial mātauranga Māori and international science may confuse visitors and undermine young people’s developing understanding of science.  Local academics have recently noted, for example, that science and mātauranga are “intrinsically contradictory approaches to knowledge that resist both combination and interrogation of one by the other” (Anderson, A. 2021, [Letter to the editor], Listener 277(4211): 6–7) and that placing science and indigenous knowledge alongside each other “does disservice to the coherence and understanding of both” (Ahdar et al. 2024, World science and indigenous knowledge [letter], Science 385(6705): 151–152).  Putting a system that depends on unrestricted openness to criticism, as if on a par with a system that depends on protection from criticism in the interests of faithful transmission, is problematic.

By putting the Māori view of nature in the single science gallery, Te Papa seems to promote the postmodernist ideas that there are no universal truths and that all knowledge is culturally derived.  This confused and simplistic ideology seeks to undermine science and other narratives construed as Eurocentric and colonial.  Te Taiao / Nature implies by its mixed content that science is unremarkable—just one of many equivalent world views—and that indigenous “ways of knowing” are somehow equivalent to science.  By shrinking its science contribution in this way, Te Papa wavers from its truth-seeking mission.

Risk to reputation

Until recently, science remained unaffected by postmodernism, an ideology that many consider has damaged the humanities.  The imposition of postmodern views in the science sphere is a serious concern that scientists must oppose (Krauss 2024, Alan Sokal’s joke is on us as postmodernism comes to science, Wall Street Journal). 

To protect their public credibility and reputations, here are three suggestions for New Zealand museums:  1.  Regain political neutrality in your organisational viewpoints.  2.  Restore science and science thinking to its equal place as a core museum component alongside culture.  3.  Maintain or restore science galleries, which by definition can present only knowledge, not a mixture of knowledge and belief.

Museums could choose to continue traditional pride in the universals of science and world cultural heritages alongside increasing support for the renaissance in Māori culture and knowledge.  This does justice to all and minimises reputational risk.  They should avoid the fashionable politics of aggrandising one while playing down another.  Making science exhibitions share space with cultural content, and challenging “colonial” narratives, is risky.  If politicians, donors, and the visiting public tire of a bias of culture over science, then visitation and funding may be threatened.

Brian Gill has a PhD in zoology from the University of Canterbury.  He was Curator of Land Vertebrates at Auckland Museum for 30 years.  Brian publishes in ecology and palaeontogy and has undertaken field-work in New Zealand, Australia and Pacific Islands.]

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“our Polynesian ancestors could not have crossed the largest expanse of open water

on the planet without developing a deep knowledge of astronomy, astrology, science,

maths and engineering.

They called it Mātauranga, an indigenous view of the world that includes all of those

subjects we have lumped under the acronym Stem (Science, technology, engineering

and maths) in our schools.

But we need to be telling these stories in our schools to inspire our young people that

this thing we call Stem is in their DNA.”

It is unclear whether Sir Ian meant this literally as a genetic predisposition towards science, metaphorically as a cultural predisposition, or something else entirely, but suggesting that science “is in the DNA” of Māori is problematic for several reasons.

First, complex skills such as ocean navigation were not something that all Māori inherently possessed, but rather skills that were practised and taught by specialists. People skilled in traditional methods of oceanic navigation today such as Jack Thatcher must be fairly bemused at the idea that Māori are born with skills that it took them decades to master, and that they take such care and effort to pass on to others.

Second, why is it necessary that in order to participate in science, students must believe it’s “in their DNA”? Doesn’t this view encourage Māori kids to believe that they’ll succeed in science because they’re Māori, rather than through their own efforts to learn and master it? Conversely, does Sir Ian think that there are races for whom science isn’t in their DNA? Does that mean that some races are inherently better at science than others? If not, what does it mean? 

Third, if Māori students are told that they’ll succeed in science because they’re Māori, but then they don’t experience success in science, could this bring their identity as Māori into question because they’re not succeeding in something that they’re apparently supposed to be good at? In situations where children do not experience success in something they think they’re expected to, they tend to blame themselves. The ‘science is in our DNA’ narrative, then, may well harm motivation and self-efficacy,  which can in turn affect educational outcomes, and lead to further disengagement. Thus, while Sir Ian’s intentions were well meaning, the weight of expectation may have unintended negative consequences.

Fourth, there are some interesting corollaries to Sir Ian’s view. If Māori are genetically predisposed to science because some of their ancestors developed ocean navigation and fortifications, does that mean that they’re not predisposed to skills in which their ancestors did not engage traditionally, such as literacy? In other words, should Māori not be expected to be good at literacy because their ancestors didn’t have a history of it? Such a view is clearly complete nonsense (Māori had very high literacy rates by mid-nineteenth century), but it’s consistent with what Sir Ian is saying here.

Science as a field of discovery is fundamentally accessible to all humans, if they have the interest and aptitude and are prepared to accept its basic principles. This is the message we should be conveying to our young people. All peoples adapted to their environment by developing the technology needed to survive, whether they lived in the Kalahari Desert, the Arctic, the Amazonian rainforest or on islands in the Pacific. We all use technology each day, but few of us understand the science behind how it works. We need to know that technology works, but not necessarily how or why it works. Artisans have been making wine and cheese for thousands of years without understanding the microbiological and biochemical processes involved, only that they reliably happened. Science is about explaining natural phenomena such as these. If indigenous technological solutions are seen as science then science just becomes what people collectively learned to do to survive in their particular environments. In this sense, equating oceanic navigation with science misrepresents modern international science, which is based on a set of universal principles, practices and norms, and especially the notion that all empirical claims must be provisional and open to test. Sir Ian seems to understand the last of these, but if so, why don’t we teach the best available solutions to problems, whether they are traditional or not?

It’s hard to see Sir Ian’s reference to DNA as anything other than a form of no doubt inadvertent racism. This view is consistent with the ideology of identitarianism, where the best way to characterise someone is based on their identity group, not their individual character, abilities and attributes. In his book “Woke racism”, the African-American linguist John McWhorter refers to this viewpoint as neo-racism.

To be fair to Sir Ian, he is putting his money where his mouth is in education by materially supporting Māori students to participate in science. It’s all very well saying that Māori kids engage with his material, but is there any evidence that they come away with a better understanding of STEM than when taught without emphasising race? We agree with teaching an understanding of mātauranga Māori in our schools, but teaching it as science, and especially suggesting that some races are somehow better at science than others, is problematic. The one thing we can all agree on and work toward is that Māori children should have the same opportunity to engage with and excel in science as anyone else.

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The push to decolonise casts science as Western, and racist, and therefore antagonistic to Māori. Dubbing science as Western insults the many non-Westerners who contribute to science, and denies the role Middle Eastern, Chinese, Indian, and Arabic civilizations played in early science. Racism was indeed widespread in Europe in the colonial era, and science sometimes reflected that, but science depends on continual self-challenge and self-correction. Science itself has made the strongest case against the very idea of distinct “races” of humans, showing that we all recently evolved in Africa and that diversity is greater within than between populations. 

Some decolonisers claim, against the historical evidence, that reading, mathematics, and accuracy are “not a Māori thing” (for a critique, see here). The demonization of science and the deprecation of learning as Western and alien reduce the chances of young Māori students. The distinguished African-American linguist John McWhorter has recently argued that casting precision and learning as uncool or “white” has similarly limited the achievement of generations of Black students.

Ideas of decolonisation spread in New Zealand late in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, leading thinkers of colour are questioning that goal. The Nigerian scholar Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Professor of African Political Thought and Chair of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, has presented in his Africa Must Be Modern: A Manifesto (2014) what he calls “a no-holds-barred, full-throated defence of ‘modernity’ and why it offers Africa the most promising path for getting out of the ‘misery corner’ of the globe.” In 2021 his Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously earned praise from many leading scholars and champions of African and Asian advancement. The Ghanaian Ato Sekyi-Otu comments that “Táíwò shows that ‘decolonisation’ has become an idea promoting indiscriminate hostility to forms of thought and practice wrongly tarred with malign colonial auspices. The ironic result is a rhetoric that gives short shrift to African agency. It’s time to drop the erroneous conflations and recognise our right to inventive appropriation of the human commons.” The distinguished Indian scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes about Táíwò’s book that: “To sloganise for cultural and ideological decolonisation is to deny history and agency to Africa.”

This resembles the points made by scholars of Māori descent when they stress Māori eagerness to read and write in the nineteenth century, or Māori incorporation of European knowledge into mātauranga Māori, or Māori leadership in the Suppression of Tohunga Act of 1909, or the crucial role of high Māori educational achievement in the present  (see the work of Melissa Derby (Ngāti Ranginui), Charles Royal (Ngāti Whanaunga, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Tamaterā and Ngā Puhi), Mere Roberts (Ngati Apakura, Ngati Hikairo), Michael Stevens, Atholl Anderson, and Te Maire Tau (all Ngāi Tahu)).

            If New Zealand students and New Zealand scientists are made to pledge allegiance to the contradictory falsehoods that mātauranga Māori is equivalent to science, on the one hand, but that science is Western and racist, on the other hand, and if bullies continue to secure disproportionate research funding for ideologues who make these claims, our students and scientists, including Māori, will suffer. Our science and education will become a laughingstock, and less able to attract the international cooperation and funding and the international student participation that offer the nation its best hopes of a future enriched by research and innovation. Parents who can afford private schooling or housing in zones where schools choose other qualifications than NCEA will opt out of mainstream schooling and widen the divide between Māori and non- Māori achievement.

            Mātauranga Māori reflects the skills of observation and experiment and the creative imagination of explanatory storytelling found in any traditional knowledge. It deserves to be preserved and researched and to be drawn on where local ecological knowledge can enrich science. But teaching it as science will harm science and both Māori and non-Māori students and divert from the real problems of educational underachievement pervasive in New Zealand.

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Co-authors are Emeritus Professor Robert Nola, Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger, and Professor Garth Cooper

Many New Zealanders were startled to hear of the government’s He Puapua plan for iwi co-governance of the nation by 2040. The July 2021 publication of the document, ‘Te Pūtahitangi, A Tiriti-led Science-Policy approach for Aotearoa New Zealand’ reveals one of the strategies for He Puapua’s implementation.  Stating that “the call for a Tiriti-led science-policy approach is timely”, Te Pūtahitangi, supported by the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, will insert mātauranga Maori into all areas of science, including the school and university currricula, research funding and science policy. With the same speed as the other He Puapua ‘reforms’ the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment is already proceeding with the Future Pathways Te Ara Paerangi Green Paper to establish the “tiriti-led system” advocated by Te Pūtahitangi .

According to Te Pūtahitanga “Mātauranga Māori is the Māori knowledge ecosystem underpinned by kaupapa and tikanga Māori”. Tikanga is defined as “the customary system of values and practices that have developed over time and continue to evolve and are deeply embedded in the social context”. The document distinguishes mātauranga Māori from science in its reference to “Aotearoa’s rich knowledge systems – Western science and Mātauranga Māori”.

Te Pūtahitangi contains two foundational errors. The first is the premise of an ‘equivalence’, or ‘ōrite’ between the traditional beliefs and practices and modern science. While traditional beliefs and practices are valued for many reasons, such understandings – as many leading Māori intellectuals insist – are not science.

Science provides naturalistic explanations for physical and social phenomena. In contrast traditional thought employs supernatural explanations for such phenomena with the proto-science (or pre-scientific) knowledge acquired from observation and experience providing ways to live in the environment. This includes the knowledge which enables ocean navigation by the stars and currents, efficacious medicines from plants, and social structures based on kinship relations and birth status.

Methods differ too. Science requires doubt, challenge and critique, forever truth-seeking but with truth never fully settled. In contrast traditional understandings require respect, even reverence from adherents. Change to tikanga comes from changes to the social context within which, as Te Pūtahitangi notes, tikanga is “deeply embedded”. Indeed it is that context which ties the beliefs and practices to a specific people and their ancestral traditions. Science is not constrained in these ways. It develops from the systematic criticism and refutation of its ideas. 

A second error in the Te Pūtahitanga document follows from the knowledge ‘equivalence’ error. This is the false characterisation of science as ‘Western’. But science rejects the authority of culture, and accepts only argument and evidence. It is universal, a fact shown by its rich history. ‘Zero’[MU1] , for example, was used first in Mesopotamia and India and discovered independently by the Mayans. Science belongs neither to the ‘West’ nor to any ethnic group.

As educators we are committed to the success of our Māori students. As scientists we know that equating mātauranga Māori with science will not produce this success. The academic education which does prepare young people for university is the study of mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, languages, literature, history, geography, and the arts. In acquiring understanding of the knowledge which belongs to all humanity young people also acquire the critical thinking required for democratic citizenship.

The aim of Pūtahitanga is to connect mātauranga Māori and science for use in policy. Science can inform policy as we see with Covid-19 and global warming. But policy informing science is a recipe for misinformation and the loss of scientific integrity, something seen in Stalinist biology, Nazi physics and Christian creationism.

Just as He Puapua proposes radical changes to New Zealand’s constitutional governance, so do Te Pūtahitangi’s proposals signal radical change to the relationship of science and policy along with all areas of education. This is a matter requiring robust discussion without fear or favour.

The header image for this article was taken from Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/Bt9y47d1e6k).

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What is being proposed?

The Green Paper makes some observations about high-performing science-funding systems and flaws in New Zealand’s current system. There is inefficient competition and fragmentation; Crown Research Institutes operate under a perverse legal framework; project-based funding leaves organizations unable to retain key talent when the project comes to an end. There are hints that the system is over-heavy on ‘governance’ requirements and red-tape.

This all rings true. Unfortunately, the Green Paper does not provide much detail and does not systematically assess the current system in comparison with the ones it considers high-performing. Instead, the main concern seems to be to ‘give effect to Te Tiriti’ across the whole funding system.

What does giving effect to the Treaty of Waitangi in this area involve? What benefits will it bring? How will it enable us to make best use of scarce public resources? What trade-offs might be involved? The Green Paper gives us an answer to the first question, but does not touch the others.

The chapter on Te Tiriti, Mātauranga Māori and Māori aspirations interweaves two fundamentally different concerns. The first is uncontroversial: if our research and science funding fails to engage with Māori researchers, fails to develop diverse talents, or fails to direct its resources in a way that proportionately benefits Māori, then obviously we have a system that is both inefficient (we should not squander the talents of our population) and unjust (if some segments of the population are systematically missing out from the benefits of publicly-funded research).

The Green Paper does not give us much relevant information here. How much publicly-funded research is directed to projects from whichMāori might be expected to benefit? We don’t know. What are effective ways of increasing Māori educational achievement and the number of Māori researchers? It is not enough to note that Māori, like some other demographic groups, are under-represented in some areas. We need to know how and where these differences arise.

The Green Paper is more focused on a different issue. It takes aim at our understanding of what science is and how knowledge advances. Injecting a ‘Te Tiriti-led’ approach across the whole system appears to mean embedding specifically Māori ways of knowing, Māori knowledge (mātauranga Māori), and partnerships with Māori as core pillars of the public research system.

Irreconcilable differences

Perhaps this sounds fair and inclusive. But if we as a country wish to reorient our entire research system in this way, we need to have more than a conversation among insiders. This is not about adding an extra strand to our research ecosystem, but changing its foundations.

Consider the claim that ‘Enabling mātauranga Māori in our research system gives effect to the obligations and opportunities embodied in Article 3 of Te Tiriti.’ Leaving aside the contentious nature of this interpretation of Article 3 (and whether it does or should create obligations in the present day), this would mean that the protection and advancement of mātauranga Māori is integral to a Te Tiriti-led research system.

There is more to this than directing resources to mātauranga Māori as a research area. Rather, the Green Paper seeks to embed mātauranga Māori and the Treaty of Waitangi at the system level, in the design and operation of the entire research, science and innovation system.

This is radical change. Mātauranga Māori differs in important ways from science. As a system of cultural knowledge that encompasses cultural, spiritual and ethical realms, in addition to practical and scientific knowledge, mātauranga Māori is ‘more than’ science. This point is made by proponents of enabling and protecting mātauranga Māori cited in the Green Paper and elsewhere: they make it clear that its processes and standards for generating and evaluating knowledge differ from those of science and the broader, universalist knowledge that underpins our current system.

Secular, universalist knowledge has as its foundational norm the principle that all knowledge is contestable on the basis of reason and evidence. Secular knowledge cannot have sacred status. Systems for advancing such knowledge cannot seek to protect particular knowledge or truth-claims from critical scrutiny.

Secular, scientific knowledge is universalist in the sense that it is open to all – regardless of ethnic or cultural background – to acquire the expertise necessary for engagement. Questions of moral value or the researcher’s personal characteristics are separate from questions about the truth or probability. This kind of scientific knowledge is advanced by what Jonathan Rauch has described as a ‘constitution of knowledge’: institutions, principles and commitments that allow for the pursuit of secular knowledge.

Te Pūtahitanga: A Tiriti–led Science-Policy Approach for Aotearoa New Zealand, which informs the Green Paper, notes that universalist claims of scientific knowledge contain cultural and normative content. This is true. The constitution of knowledge can be thought of as a culture of science. To regard secular or scientific knowledge as valuable does indeed reflect the belief that this knowledge is useful. Like any tool, it may also serve malign purposes, but the value judgement is that knowledge about the material world is preferable to ignorance. It is useful to have aircraft that don’t crash, medicines that work, and public policies that actually serve their declared goals.

And how do we distinguish knowledge from falsehood about such issues? (Strictly speaking, ‘more likely to be true’ from ‘less likely to be true’?) Again, the standards of universalist knowledge reflect a value judgment. In this case, it is the judgment that evidential tests and open debate are preferable to alternative methods of settling disputes about what is more likely to be true.

And let’s be clear about what the alternatives are: deference to a person’s social status or credentials, emotional manipulation, deduction from religious texts, intimidation and coercion. These alternatives gave us the Inquisition, theological rule and ‘Xi Jinping thought’ elevated to constitutional status. Of course, religious knowledge and faith can take much more benign forms. But to elevate them to positions of institutional authority is to create a system that puts faith and personal status above reason and evidence. Is this what New Zealanders want?

Some proponents say we can have both. I disagree. Certainly, different systems of knowledge may come to the same conclusions on some questions. But conflicts are obvious, especially when it comes to the underlying explanation as to why we should believe (or not) something to be true. On the one hand, we have the principle that all knowledge is contestable, a commitment to evidential tests, and universalist standards of knowledge. On the other side, there is  commitment to honouring knowledge on the basis of ethnicity, faith or cultural tradition. Either a claim is contestable, or it is not. An individual scientist can choose to hold both God and science in high regard; a system for advancing science cannot.

What are the trade-offs?

The practical implications of putting God – in the form of mātauranga Māori and Te Tiriti – into our science funding system are unexplored in the Green Paper. But we can anticipate some. If all research is to pass a Te Tiriti-consistency test, some subjects and some research findings will be off limits.

How could a researcher hope to gain funding to investigate the potential downsides of honouring obligations arising from the Treaty,

Could international research on carbon deposits in Antarctic ice, indicative of large-scale burning of vegetation by Māori in pre-colonial times, have been conducted by researchers operating under a Te Tiriti framework? Criticism of the research by some New Zealanders is telling. Local critics took aim at the ethnic makeup of the research team, alleged failures of cultural understanding, and the failure to cultivate relationships with Māori. Could any scientist hoping for funding and a career in New Zealand have led this research project to the same findings?

Good research often will upset stakeholders and may well be offensive. The history of philosophical and scientific discovery is full of heretics pushing against the cultural or religious orthodoxy of their times. Copernicus, Spinoza and Darwin all challenged sacred knowledge and those guarding it.

More prosaically, elements in our fishing industry would no doubt have preferred research not to have uncovered systematic labour exploitation on vessels fishing in New Zealand waters. I don’t suppose the tobacco industry was ever that keen on rigorous research on the health effects of smoking. We know a lot about the efforts of oil and gas to suppress climate change research.

The need for public research funding, academic freedom and research independence arises precisely because the narrow interests of stakeholders do not always coincide with public interests. Sometimes they do, but we cannot make it a bedrock assumption of our research system. Yet this is what embedding the Treaty does, by making all research subject to a partnership veto.

One of the authors of Te Pūtahitanga: A Tiriti–led Science-Policy Approach for Aotearoa New Zealand recognizes the extent of change involved, writing that a Te Tiriti-led public sector implies fundamental change to our system of law and governance. For example, the claim that, ‘The Waitangi Tribunal has described much of New Zealand’s law as still in breach of te Tiriti principles’ implies a need to rewrite much of our current law. According to the same source, honouring the Treaty also means we need to limit our central constitutional principle: that parliament is sovereign.

Whether or not the Treaty (or its principles) should be given constitutional status is obviously a critical question. The current MBIE ‘conversation’ appears to assume only one answer. Yet for the time being, parliament is still sovereign. In a parliamentary democracy, a resilient research funding system must have broad-based societal legitimacy if it is to pursue objectives that outlive the election cycle. Foundational change requires democratic scrutiny and consent.

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