National and NZ First have said they will not support it beyond the select committee stage.
The bill will be considered by the Justice Select Committee, including public submissions, over the next six months.
Matthew Hooton has over 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.
OPINION
The Prime Minister is too arrogant to resign, at leastbefore the election, but those who argued the former corporate bureaucrat lacks the attributes required for successful national leadership have been proven right.
Like Ricky Gervais’ David Brent, Christopher Luxon has an unfounded sense of his own personal charm, while also running down his colleagues behind their backs.
His lack of understanding of the National Party means he fails to appreciate that everything he says about another MP soon gets back to them.
Christopher Luxon could have rejected Act's Treaty Principles Bill at the coalition talks, Matthew Hooton says. Photo / Mark Mitchell
However, Luxon’s lack of understanding of New Zealand, partly but not solely because he lived abroad from 1995 to 2011, is more serious.
When he left, the economy was booming under Prime Minister Jim Bolger, there was a structural surplus and corporate welfare had been tamed.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall but before 9/11, our international relations were less complicated, despite the anti-nuclear policy. A free-trade agreement (FTA) with China was unimaginable, and something like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) nearly so.
Back home, just one iwi had completed a Treaty settlement and the first MMP election hadn’t happened, nor the lessons of coalition management.
When Luxon returned, National was back in Government, under Prime Minister John Key, supported by Act, United Future and the Māori Party.
Despite Key resuming borrowing, debt was still low after the Bolger-Shipley and Clark Governments had paid it all back. After 20 years of turmoil, health was out of the headlines. On the downside, corporate welfare had been re-established by Helen Clark’s Government and worsened by Key’s.
China had become our most important market after the FTA, and the TPP was under negotiation, including with the United States.
In parallel, Winston Peters had begun restoring the defence relationship with the US, having forged an excellent relationship with George W Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
While away, Luxon also missed the racial division sowed by Clark’s mishandling of the foreshore and seabed issue and Don Brash’s Orewa speech, but also the healing that followed.
When Luxon returned, over 40 treaty settlements had been completed and nearly 20 were in the pipeline, helping make Māori major players in the economy.
The principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, which had been clearly defined by the Court of Appeal and Privy Council a quarter-century earlier, were deeply embodied in the law and practice.
There was a rough bipartisan consensus over climate change policy.
Across all these policy areas, Luxon seems to have no appreciation of how difficult progress had been, nor how fragile, especially for a small, isolated, agrarian economy.
That may not have mattered, except Luxon appeared to demonstrate little if any curiosity about the country he wanted to lead. The casual observer might conclude that he considered that if he didn’t already know something, it wasn’t worth bothering with.
His record at Air New Zealand was mixed. He failed to forge a strong network even in the Auckland business community, let alone more broadly.
Bereft of a deep understanding of the New Zealand economy and its recent development, Luxon had nothing to offer but some modest yet unaffordable tax cuts and a belief his mere election might motivate an economic boom.
After a year in office, it would be okay to still be blaming the previous Government for most of New Zealand’s economic ills, were Luxon able to articulate a programme to address them.
But, as Professor Robert MacCulloch, the University of Auckland’s right-wing chair of macroeconomics explained in the Herald yesterday, there is none.
Tinkering around the edges will do nothing to address New Zealand’s productivity and growth crises.
Luxon’s language is often derided as business-speak, but no genuine businessperson uses so much corporate twaddle.
His language more resembles a cheap self-help book.
Extraordinarily, he communicates even less substantively in the media and in person than the lamentable Dame Jacinda Ardern.
Worse, if Luxon genuinely believes New Zealand’s long-term fiscal and health crises can be resolved through much-needed cost-cutting in Wellington alone, then he is as innumerate as he seems illiterate.
Arguably, Clark and Key had the knowledge, intelligence and personal attributes to chart a middle path between China and the US, but Luxon shows no sign of it.
Neither Xi Jinping nor Donald Trump is likely to be remotely influenced by a clutch of the shoulder, a Luxon grin and trite sloganeering, except negatively.
Yet the Treaty of Waitangi and race relations are the areas where Luxon’s lack of history, understanding and foresight threaten the greatest harm.
Luxon can’t say he wasn’t warned, including by every living National Party Prime Minister and more broadly, that his handling of Act’s Treaty Principles Bill was wrong-headed, and could benefit only Act and Te Pāti Māori, while severely damaging both New Zealand’s social cohesion and National’s electoral interests.
As party leader, he had two options when negotiating with Act: to accept their policy or reject it. If he wanted to be an effective Prime Minister, he had only the latter.
Act insists it did not declare the bill a bottom line in coalition negotiations, but only an important priority.
If so, it isn’t true Luxon had to accept the compromise.
Nevertheless, despite claiming without evidence to have extensive experience in mergers and acquisitions, Luxon opted for the worst possible option, enraging Māori while bitterly dividing his own party.
Belatedly, he has settled on the obvious point that it is not the role of a single Parliament to redefine the meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi after 184 years of debate, but that is no more than he was advised at the outset, had he listened to his own advisors and senior MPs.
Despite this delayed realisation, Luxon has proven too personally and politically weak to exercise his authority as Prime Minister to decide that killing the bill before introduction was in the best interests of country and party.
As in the country at large, he is now rightly regarded as impotent by both National’s liberals and conservatives, and as an easy-beat in negotiations by his coalition partners.
Luxon’s leadership of country and party will stumble on while achieving little and meaning less. He will remain Prime Minister only because he lacks the self-awareness to know it would be better for New Zealand and his own reputation to accept he is completely out of his depth.
In the meantime, he could at least appreciate his Cabinet ministers are not some kind of Ilford Second XI captained by Sir Donald Bradman, but that at least half of them would be doing his job much better than he is.
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