OPINION
Paul Goldsmith has the job of cleaning up David Seymour’s race-relations mess.
The two have history, with Goldsmith humiliatingly surrendering to Seymour four times in Epsom without firing a shot.
Yet events are revealing Goldsmith as the more serious political figure in my view.
Having recognised his deal over the Treaty Principles Bill is the worst of both worlds, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has now completely ruled it out from becoming law.
Last fortnight he shifted responsibility for the doomed exercise from Goldsmith to Seymour, making the Act leader an Associate Justice Minister responsible for this one project.
Seymour is now incentivised to slow everything down so his bill remains live this time next year, again putting himself centre stage on Waitangi Day.
Luxon must use his authority as Prime Minister to insist the Bill be written, sent to select committee and then thrown out.
If his isn’t to become the third successive government to fail to deliver the change voters want, Luxon must focus on bold economic and education reform and reducing crime.
Like new prime ministers before him, he is already finding Crown-Māori relations and foreign policy take more time than expected. Throw in their media and parliamentary activity, and prime ministers have only a few hours left each week for anything else.
Luxon can’t let Seymour’s bill dominate the agenda into 2025. Ideally, it should be culled by spring.
Ironically, just as the Crown is obliged to honour the Treaty even if it disagrees with its terms, Luxon feels bound by a section of his coalition agreement he already regrets.
Act shows no intention of acting in good faith, launching another highly misleading “information” campaign in favour of its bill just hours after Luxon ruled it out unequivocally.
Even more ironic than Luxon’s dilemma, Seymour’s position is similar to the most radical Māori activists who believe the Treaty is some kind of bill of rights or constitution for contemporary New Zealand.
He’s right it is contemporary New Zealand’s founding document, in the sense it legitimises the rest of our constitutional documents and conventions.
The 1840 Treaty is why England’s Magna Carta 1297, Bill of Rights 1688 and much of its court-developed common law are equal parts of New Zealand constitutional and other law alongside acts passed by our Parliament.
But the Treaty itself doesn’t say anything about our freedom from unlawful detention or that King Charles or Dame Cindy Kiro can’t tax us or raise an army without Parliament’s consent.
Nor does it give me, a Pākehā, any special rights to property or citizenship. For me, those come from the common law and Acts of Parliament and I am perfectly entitled to tell you to get off my land and have you removed if you won’t.
As even former National and Act leader Don Brash understood in his Orewa speech, the Treaty must be upheld and its breaches rectified but, as he put it, “lurking behind its words is not a blueprint for building a modern, prosperous, New Zealand”.
In contrast, Seymour, no less than the most radical activist, has apparently perceived such a blueprint in the Treaty, in his case through the lens of European philosophers rather than Māori mythology.
Behold, Seymour exclaims, the Treaty promises equality. As another former Act leader Richard Prebble argued in the Herald on Wednesday, it just doesn’t.
Prebble was minister of state-owned enterprises when the courts first followed Parliament’s instruction to say what the Treaty principles meant for the land SOEs were to own.
He points out the courts didn’t tell him and Māori Council boss Sir Graham Latimer they were in a legal partnership, just that they should work as partners to sort out the mess – which both did admirably.
He and others on the political right warn that Seymour’s Treaty principles, if they became law, would be more destabilising than the status quo, since they’d give the courts a new mandate to begin interpreting the meaning of tino rangatiratanga.
Prebble’s most important suggestion is one already doing the rounds in National and Act circles, that the Treaty and its existing principles should be left well alone, but the Bill of Rights Act 1990 strengthened.
There’s no escaping that the Treaty – like the Companies Act 1993, the Property Law Act 2007 or the Wills Act 2007 – gives us different rights and duties depending on who we are and which entities we are associated with.
There’s a whiff of communism in the Act leader’s talk of absolute equality.
Our equal rights as citizens – and other fundamental rights such as freedom of thought, conscience, religion and speech – are affirmed, imperfectly, in the Bill of Rights Act.
That means that while we all have differing exclusive rights, whether under the Treaty or property law, they should be enforced within the context of equal rights as citizens.
No one disagrees.
Seymour’s bill and “information” campaign will cause ill-informed division and unnecessary angst, before being voted down 112-11 by Parliament.
It will then be for Goldsmith, in both his major portfolios, to bring common sense and integrity to heal those wounds.
As Justice Minister, he could pick up Prebble’s idea and strengthen everyone’s equal rights of citizenship without undermining anyone’s differing exclusive rights, including to property and other treasures.
As Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations, it turns to Goldsmith to succeed where even his great National Party predecessors Sir Douglas Graham and Chris Finlayson failed, in settling the historic claims of the northern tribes of Ngāpuhi.
Historic settlements don’t extinguish the Crown’s contemporary Treaty obligations but they help iwi put their fury behind them and focus on the economic and social development of their people, in partnership with or independently of the state.
Nothing would do more to restore a harmonious relationship between the Crown and northern iwi, while boosting Northland’s struggling economy.
Goldsmith needs imagination. No Ngāpuhi hapu will agree it surrendered sovereignty because, as historian Paul Moon argues, the 1840 balance of power between them and the settlers makes it unthinkable they would have.
Goldsmith will need to swallow that.
Moreover, not every Ngāpuhi hapu wants to settle. Nurturing grievance is everyone’s prerogative. But others may wish to move forward in smaller groups, perhaps led by Ngāti Hine and its neighbours and allies. Beehive strategists say Goldsmith is open to that approach.
Obviously, it will take two sides. But, if Goldsmith could initial an apology and settlement with Ngāti Hine by next Waitangi Day, having strengthened everyone’s citizenship rights in parallel, his name will sit comfortably with Graham and Finlayson as the great National Party reconcilers of the contemporary era.
Matthew Hooton has more than 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties and the mayor of Auckland.
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