The Ever since the advent of British imperialism, Māori have been marginalized from power and with disempowerment came the alienation of land, resources, loss of language and loss of many cultural customs as a consequence of colonisation. And in recent years there has been a cultural revival and the debate has now quickened as a consequence of the treaty settlements. If you go to an exhibition of Lundhā and Golding paintings of Rangatirah, you will see the nobility of the Lundhāsirah who were the sovereigns of this soil. And if you were to go to another exhibition, a photographic exhibition of the gangs, you will see the end product of colonialism writ large in the faces of those gangs. Many of those people are descended from the lineages of important ancestors. Now that is the damage that has to be repaired, the disempowerment, the impoverishment in pre-European Māori society, no one-hungered. There is no such thing as poor people. In fact, Māori did not have a word for poverty because their economy in the production of goods and services was a redistributive economy which the coloniser characterised as communist. But in capitalism we have an accumulative economy of wealth which is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Now that creates impoverished poor people. Now Māori were the impoverished people of the capitalist system introduced by the British. And they started to think of themselves as poor followers. And when they translated poor-fuller into Māori, it became poor hara. So that was a new word created to describe impoverished people as a consequence of colonialism. Today under the capitalist system, thousands and thousands of children go to school hungry. Now that is a problem that the capitalist system has not solved. Capitalism creates poverty where Māori are struggling to maintain the integrity of their own sovereignty, language and culture. And the coloniser is imposing and unilaterally ruling the country. The British, when they came here, they recognised Māori with the sovereigns of the soil. But they thought that their empire, their civilisation, was so superior and so good that they could persuade the chiefs to seed their sovereignty to the British for the benefits of civilisation. Now the problem is they didn't explain the other aspects of Kawhanatanga. They only put in front of them the good outcomes such as the building of hospitals, roads, churches, townships and an increase in trade and an increase in the value of their land. So these were the only the positive aspects of government put forward to the Lungatira which induce them to sign the treaty and allow the governor to set foot on this land. But the negative aspects were never explained that Māori language and culture would be kept out of the schools that the drive of the governor was for assimilation and that Māori would be turned into brown, white men. That was never explained. And the Crown claimed that it had got sovereignty under the English version of the treaty which the chiefs never signed. They signed the Māori version which ceded governance, not sovereignty. Now that's a fine point but it's also a moral point and that's where the debate is in the future. I think in the main Māori have come to terms with governance and some of the good transformations that occurred in recent years is an increase of Māori in parliament. I understand there's 26 people of Māori ethnicity in parliament at the moment whereas under the colonial regime only four seats were allowed for Māori. But nowadays Māori are standing in general seats and increasing Māori representation and the input of Māori philosophy Māori values into the way that parliament operates. Now that's got to be a good thing because Māori are the tangata fenu, they are the base culture of the country and superimposed on that is the park air culture. So that's what it means to be bicultural that the two cultures have to coexist and learn to share power in an equitable way.