Free and Frank Advice: Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the limit of the mapped domain

04/07/2026

I explain how the study found Te Tiriti o Waitangi at the edge of the bounded plurality, how I interpret that limit, and why I mark it as the constitutional limit of the mapped domain instead of adding a seventh posture.

This is the nineteenth of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa. In it I take up the finding that sits at the edge of the field more than within it: that Te Tiriti o Waitangi was present throughout the study, left the factor solution undifferentiated, and became visible as a limit only when the findings went back to practitioners.

The parts of my thesis that read the bounded plurality from the inside, through its postures, fault lines, shared boundary and political character, all describe a field organised largely in the inherited language of Westminster. One finding sits at the edge of that field, and it concerns Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which I carried through the whole design and which nevertheless stayed outside the structure the Q analysis produced. In this post I do three things: first, I set out the empirical sequence through which that limit became visible; second, I explain how two concepts from political theory help me interpret it, and why the reading has a decolonial reach; and third, I explain why I mark Te Tiriti as the constitutional limit of the mapped domain and decline to fold it into a seventh posture.

How the limit became visible

The sequence matters, because Te Tiriti o Waitangi was present at every stage of the study and still left no mark on the sorted field. Ata carried the obligation methodologically throughout, the Stage One interviews probed the implications of Te Tiriti for public policy and for free and frank advice, and the post-sort interviews in Stage Two carried questions about it as a constitutional obligation. The 58 practitioners who sorted the 34 statements nonetheless organised free and frank advice through Westminster terms, among them ministerial authority, official duty, impartiality, responsiveness, mandate, challenge, timing and protection, and those terms formed the thematic domains and differentiated the six postures. In my reading the finding concerns a patterned absence more than a simple omission, because Te Tiriti pressed on the field throughout while staying outside the terms through which the field was organised.

That absence carries weight because the study was conducted in Aotearoa, in a public service that operates under the Public Service Act 2020 and within a constitutional setting shaped by Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The six postures show how practitioners made sense of free and frank advice largely within a Westminster and Whitehall inheritance of ministerial authority, official independence, responsible government, public service duty, implementation responsibility, timing, relationship and warning. Te Tiriti did not appear as a seventh posture because it left the empirical pattern in the first two stages unshaped, and it is more than an optional addition to the model, because it names a constitutional obligation that exceeds the Westminster frame. I read the silence of the sorted field as telling me something about the frame, and very little about the practitioners who sorted within it.

Stage Three is where the absence became legible, and it emerged there with some force. When the findings went back to 88 practitioners through wānanga, workshops and expert interviews, practitioners described carrying obligations that arise from Te Tiriti, and forms of knowledge that do not fit the standard briefing format, as a body of responsibility kept separate from their Westminster obligations, which the advisory system had never asked them to bring together. Te Tiriti was present throughout as a constitutional obligation, yet the advisory field this study mapped had already shaped free and frank advice into forms that left little room for constitutional plurality in the ordinary practice of advice giving. I read the validation stage as the point at which the limit of the Westminster terms became visible to the people who work within them.

The remainder, the constitutive outside and a settler order

Two concepts from political theory help me interpret that limit, although they interpret the finding and do not supply a full account of Te Tiriti, which carries its own authority and its own body of thought that this study did not set out to represent. A remainder is produced when an ordering decides what belongs and, through that settlement, identifies claims it can accommodate only in part, and the excluded claim persists where the order has no place for it and can return as pressure on the closure that made it external (Honig, 1993). The constitutive outside describes the related process through which an identity forms itself by distinguishing itself from an outside on which its coherence depends (Mouffe, 1993). Applied carefully, these concepts direct my attention to the way the Westminster advisory field constituted its ordinary inside through a grammar of authority, duty, impartiality and mandate, with Te Tiriti present in the constitutional setting and outside the terms that differentiated the postures.

The reading has a decolonial reach, because the mapped domain was formed inside a settler constitutional order (Pihama, 2001; L. T. Smith, 1999). The second chapter of the thesis traced the Crown’s shift from a negotiated coexistence of kāwanatanga and tino rangatiratanga toward a unilateral sovereignty that laid imported institutions across existing tikanga and authority (M. S. R. Palmer & Knight, 2022), and the ground was already constitutional ground, carrying land, law, authority and relationship, before Westminster institutions were imposed on it. The constitutive outside helps explain how one order can present its own grammar as the complete field while treating another source of authority as external to ordinary practice, and the validation finding gives that mechanism a contemporary administrative form. In my view it is no surprise that a settler ordering continues to keep Indigenous knowledge and authority to one side of ordinary public administration, although I stop short of reducing Te Tiriti to an example of a theory developed elsewhere, or of claiming that the study mapped the constitutional relation between kāwanatanga and rangatiratanga.

Why there is no seventh posture

The risk of absorbing the finding into the existing structure is what gives my restraint its reason. Treating Te Tiriti o Waitangi as a seventh posture would place a distinct constitutional order inside a factor structure formed largely through Westminster categories, and it would make the existing map appear capable of containing a difference that validation showed it could express only with strain. Incorporation is only one way to engage a remainder, since the excluded claim can be kept in view as a continuing pressure on the settlement more than dissolved into it (Honig, 1993), and agonism adds the importance of allowing difference to retain its own standing without requiring it to become another variation within the dominant order (Mouffe, 1993). In my view a seventh posture would repeat the very closure the finding exposes.

The methodology already practised that discipline of letting difference keep its own shape, and the analysis follows it. Ata sat beside decentred interpretivism as a juxtaposition more than a synthesis, each keeping its own shape while entering the same inquiry (De Sousa Santos, 2004; Mutu & Jackson, 2016), and the thesis treats Te Tiriti in the same way, marking it as the limit of the field and leaving open what free and frank advice becomes when kāwanatanga and rangatiratanga are carried together as ordinary sources of authority. I see that choice as consistent with the research relationships the study was built on, because it declines to speak for an authority the study did not set out to map.

The thesis therefore identifies two boundaries, and the distinction between them keeps the finding within its limits. Practical statecraft forms the internal boundary of the bounded plurality, keeping the six postures within one convention through what they share, while Te Tiriti o Waitangi marks an outer limit of the largely Westminster field those postures describe. The first boundary organises legitimate difference inside the empirical structure, and the second identifies a constitutional relation the structure left outside it, a pressure at the edge of the advisory relationship that the inherited system has only partly integrated. The claim I carry forward is a narrow one, that Te Tiriti presses on the bounded plurality at the point where its Westminster grammar reaches the end of what this study can explain, and in my view the next account of free and frank advice in Aotearoa will need to begin from constitutional structures, such as those set out by Matike Mai Aotearoa (Mutu & Jackson, 2016), that treat Māori authority and tikanga as starting points for the advisory relationship.

Next, and last in the series, I set out what follows from the findings, where the study reaches its limits, and how the puzzle that opened the thesis looks once free and frank advice is read as a bounded plurality.

References

De Sousa Santos, B. (2004). A critique of lazy reason: Against the waste of experience. In I. Wallerstein (Ed.), The modern world-system in the longue durée (pp. 157–197). Paradigm Publishers.

Honig, B. (1993). Political theory and the displacement of politics. Cornell University Press.

Mouffe, C. (1993). The return of the political. Verso.

Mutu, M., & Jackson, M. (2016). He whakaaro here whakaumu mo Aotearoa: The report of Matike Mai Aotearoa — The Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation. Matike Mai Aotearoa.

Palmer, M. S. R., & Knight, D. R. (2022). The constitution of New Zealand: A contextual analysis (3rd ed.). Hart Publishing.

Pihama, L. (2001). Tihei mauri ora: Honouring our voices. Mana wahine as a kaupapa Maori theoretical framework [Doctoral thesis, University of Auckland]. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books.