The politics of reconciliation in Australia and New Zealand

This chapter draws on New Zealand examples to contextualize its assessment of reconciliation as public memory in Australian policy discourse. The Treaty of Waitangi has provided the rationale and framework for successive New Zealand governments to say sorry for acts of aggression against Maori tribes. In New Zealand, sorrow is expressed through Acts of Parliament that serve not only as instruments of restitution but as symbols of public memory. Faith and memory are similarly important to wider Christian treaty discourses, as it was Anglican missionaries who drafted the agreement and translated it from English to Maori. The Pastoral letter is drawn into Catholic public memory to justify the development of a public theology of reconciliation. Self-determination belongs first and foremost to individuals, but in Catholic teaching the human person is fundamentally social and exercises the rights and responsibilities of their human being in association with others.