Treaty Principles Bill will greatly damage National’s relationship with Māori – former minister

This article first appeared at rnz.co.nz and is republished with permission.
There is no doubt the Treaty Principles Bill will greatly damage National’s relationship with Māori, former Treaty Negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson says.
The legislation passed its first reading on Wednesday afternoon, but not before extraordinary scenes of opposition that led to the Speaker suspending Parliament.
Senior Labour MP Willie Jackson was booted out of the House after calling the bill’s author ACT leader David Seymour “a liar” and refusing to apologise for it.
Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, Te Pāti Māori MP for Hauraki-Waikato, then led a ‘Ka Mate’ haka in the debating chamber as the party votes were being counted.
MPs from Labour and the Greens – alongside Ngāti Toa in the public gallery – joined the haka, though it was Maipi-Clarke who was later suspended from Parliament for 24 hours.
Seymour said it was disappointing behaviour that made him concerned about the state of the debate.
“There are now people who don’t believe that they have to respectfully listen to others and actually come up with a better argument.
“Without that, I think New Zealand has a much bigger problem.”
Finlayson said the response seen in Parliament was to be expected.
“I think David’s got to understand that while he may want a nice, rarefied, intellectual seminar on the principles of the Treaty, it’s a lot more than that.
“It goes to the heart of what tangata whenua aspire to and so on and it can’t be seen as a mere debate. It’s a lot more than that.”
The Treaty Principles Bill sets out to redefine the Treaty principles long-established by the courts to three new ones: that the government has the power to govern, that everyone is equal before the law and that hapū and iwi are afforded different rights only if agreed through Treaty settlements.
Thousands have joined a protest hīkoi against government policies, including the legislation’s first reading, that is still making its way down the North Island to Parliament grounds.
Finlayson said things would only get more fractious over the next six months as members of the public made submissions on the bill.
“We were on such a good path in a bipartisan way, over many years we’ve been working toward trying to undo the burdens of the past so that we could move to the future together as one, and a lot of that’s being undone now. It’s most unfortunate.”
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was on his way to APEC during the debate but gave a scathing appraisal of the Treaty Principles Bill before he left Wellington.
“You do not go negate, with a single stroke of a pen, 184 years of debate and discussion, with a bill that I think is very simplistic.”
He also bit back on Seymour’s criticism that National was not bold enough to engage with difficult issues, saying the bill was not helping the government’s focus on the real “hard stuff” like the cost of living and crime.
Finlayson said it was inevitable the legislation would cause “great damage” to National’s relationship with Māori, saying many MPs clearly did not know the party’s history.
“There’s a school of thought that says a lot of people in the National Party today aren’t perhaps aware of the liberal conservative traditions of the party and the work that was done over many generations by people like Ralph Hanan, Duncan MacIntyre, Jim Bolger, Doug Graham, me.
“Maybe they need to go back and look at their history and look at the commitment that the National Party has made … not expecting any votes out of it but because it was the right thing to do.
“A lot of, maybe, people in the National Party today are more concerned about their careers than about the history and traditions of the National Party.”
Members of the public will be able to make their own submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill in the coming months, before it is read a second time next year.