There is no political incentive for either Christopher Luxon or Winston Peters to take a position on the Treaty Principles Bill, despite the strong feelings it inspired, Matthew Hooton argues. Photo / Getty Images
There is no political incentive for either Christopher Luxon or Winston Peters to take a position on the Treaty Principles Bill, despite the strong feelings it inspired, Matthew Hooton argues. Photo / Getty Images
Opinion by Matthew Hooton
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.
Record submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill suggest division, but polling shows most are indifferent.
Polls indicate most voters prioritise the cost of living, economy, and health over Treaty issues.
Of the 8% who name the Treaty their top concern, more than 70% say they vote for Te Pāti Māori (TPM), Labour or the Greens.
Record numbers of submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill and inevitable tension at Rātana and Waitangi risk convincing us we’re a bitterly divided people over Treaty and related issues – but the polling data suggests otherwise.
The enormous respect expressed from across the political spectrum for Dame Tariana Turiashould remind us that leadership such as hers and Sir John Key’s has previously enabled us to move on from other cynical and unjust attempts to divide us on Treaty and race issues – and even to emerge stronger.
As the historian Michael King wrote in 2003 in his History of New Zealand, shortly before his untimely death, “most New Zealanders, whatever their cultural backgrounds, are good-hearted, practical, commonsensical and tolerant”.
Current polls are consistent with the overwhelming majority signing up to the proposition that – as Key put it in his first speech as National Party leader in 2004, written for him by now-Finance Minister Nicola Willis – we are all equal before the law in terms of our basic civil rights but “Māori are the tangata whenua of this country and we have nothing to fear from acknowledging that”.
More crudely, the pre-Christmas polls suggest the vast majority of New Zealanders just don’t much care, one way or the other, about the kinds of issues that exercise extremists in Treaty and wider race-relations debates.
Whether by good luck or good management, Christopher Luxon and Winston Peters’ approach to the Treaty Principles Bill may have turned out to be exactly in tune with the views of the overwhelmingly majority of voters, including those they care about most – their own, and those they might attract from Labour.
If anything, the polls suggest it is Act that risks finding itself offside with its own voters if it invests too heavily in David Seymour’s doomed project.
Act voters want their leader investing his political capital in bold economic reform and stopping National’s reckless borrowing, not on pointless sideshows.
Do Act voters really want party leader David Seymour to be preoccupied with the Treaty Principles project? Photo / Alyse Wright
The December Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll found the percentage of voters who named Treaty or related issues as their number one concern had jumped up three points to 8%.
This was mainly because a small group had slightly re-ordered the issues that most concern them. The percentage naming the Treaty and related issues in their top three concerns was stable on 17%.
On the face of it, these numbers looked good for Act. For comparison, only 5% name the environment as their top issue, and only 12% put it in their top three.
Yet everything – including the Treaty, environment and even law and order – is overwhelmed by concerns about the cost of living, the economy in general and the health system. Most voters name one of them as their top issue. They are each a top three issue for over a third of voters. Nothing else comes close.
And while it’s obvious what people mean when they say they’re worried about the cost of living, the economy or health, it’s less clear what they mean when they say they’re worried about the Treaty.
Are they Māori radicals wanting Pākehā to leave? Or obsessed Pākehā concerned about the alleged “Māorification of everything”? Or are they just ordinary people in the middle who perceive growing division between those extremes?
More detailed polling data kindly provided to me by Curia’s David Farrar suggests it’s mainly the first of these.
Of the 8% who name the Treaty their top concern, over 70% say they vote for Te Pāti Māori (TPM), Labour or the Greens.
For National and NZ First voters, the Treaty just isn’t much of a big deal, one way or the other. Fewer than one in 20 of their voters name the Treaty or related issues as their top concern and not many more than one in 10 include them in their top three.
There is no political incentive for either Luxon or Peters to take any position on the Treaty Principles Bill. Both are best to avoid it whenever they can, and talk instead about the cost of living, the economy and health, which voters do care about.
Worryingly for Act strategists, that is also largely true for them. Despite all the coalition negotiating power Seymour has expended in getting National and NZ First to temporarily indulge his Treaty Principles Bill, the Curia poll suggests more than 90% of Act voters name other issues as their biggest concern.
Even more astounding, the data suggests nearly 70% of Act voters don’t name the Treaty even as one of their top three issues.
The late Michael King, whose seminal work on New Zealand history may have lessons - and political realities - resonating more than 20 years later, Matthew Hooton argues. Photo / Mark Smith, The Listener
Seymour may love the positive feedback he gets about his bill from a minority of Act voters, but the vast majority of them would prefer he focus on issues they regard as more important.
The polling data also suggests the Treaty Principles Bill is unlikely to do anything for his ambitions to secure more votes from National and NZ First.
To some extent, TPM’s co-leaders, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi also risk over-investing in the Treaty Principles Bill debate. Their voters are most concerned about the Treaty, but more than 40% of them name something else as their top issue, and more than 30% don’t even name the Treaty as one of their top three issues.
Be clear, all this indicates is indifference to the Treaty Principles Bill, which its vehement supporters and opponents, including me, will find surprising.
There will inevitably be a fuss over the next month about the bill and related issues, at Rātana, Waitangi and in the media.
Those of us with strong views one way or the other should remember we are in a tiny minority.
Most voters from National, Labour, Act, the Greens and NZ First want their leaders focused on the cost of living, the economy and health, with the environment and law and order also making the cut as secondary issues.
The Curia data suggests we are indeed a good-hearted, practical, commonsensical and tolerant people. But we face an unfolding economic and fiscal crisis that Act in particular would be wise to take more seriously.
