OPINION
Act thinks National’s attitude to its Treaty Principles Bill risks breaching paragraph 21 of their coalition agreement. That says both must use good faith and their best endeavours to achieve consensus on policy.
Act has a point. On Tuesday, Christopher Luxon again described not just a referendum on the Treaty principles but the bill itself as “divisive and unhelpful”.
He confirmed National’s long-standing opposition to a referendum and that it has no intention to support the bill becoming law.
Even though paragraph 21 means Luxon wouldn’t give absolute assurances National would vote against the bill, Act would be right that his comments wouldn’t pass a good-faith test in employment negotiations.
But National would be perfectly entitled to say Act isn’t demonstrating good faith either. It knew National’s position before coalition negotiations, making it cheeky to raise it, especially as a bottom line.
Act got away with it only because of Luxon’s lack of knowledge of New Zealand history generally and the Treaty settlement process specifically, including its importance to economic and regulatory stability.
As the Herald’s senior political correspondent Audrey Young puts it, it’s possible he has thought so little about such issues he has no capacity to talk about them.
But, if he accidentally unravelled the lands, fisheries or electromagnetic-spectrum settlements based on the courts’ Treaty principles, he’d create instability across the agriculture, forestry, commercial property, seafood and telecommunications industries.
Luxon also lacked the foresight of more experienced and wiser National Party doyens to understand where even introducing Act’s bill will lead.
Perhaps he looked at it as an outcomes-focused corporate chief executive: sure, the proposal wastes shareholders’ funds, but doesn’t affect the bottom line beyond that, so who cares?
The answer is Māori do, both because the gains since 1990 were so hard-fought and the sheer mana involved.
As Kīngitanga spokesperson Rahui Papa said at the Rātana marae, there might be “some consternation” about closing the Māori Health Authority and Māori would keep using Waka Kotahi instead of NZTA whatever politicians say, but the Treaty is in an altogether different category.
Any meddling with the Treaty and every measure would be taken to resist, he said.
Luxon concedes his understanding of the Māori world is underdeveloped, but enjoyed his recent engagement with King Tūheitia in Ngāruawāhia, Ngāi Tahu in Christchurch and everyone at Rātana Pā, and looks forward to Waitangi Day.
He wants to “deepen my relationships with Māori leaders up and down the country”.
If so, he’ll soon learn that, after just two months as Prime Minister, he has earned the title Te Pirīmia Whakakotahi i Ngā Iwi, the great unifier of the people.
In nearly 1000 years, no one – not even Helen Clark over the foreshore and seabed – has so unified Māori.
Ten thousand attending a hui called by Tainui is probably unprecedented.
Everyone from Ngāi Tahu’s conservative Murihiku hapū in Bluff to the most radical northern tribes attended.
Centuries of inter-iwi warfare and rivalry were put aside.
Tainui and Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei’s ancient border disputes, now moved from the battlefield to the courts, didn’t stop the Aucklanders attending.
Who imagined Tainui sitting so comfortably with Ngāti Porou after they backed the Crown during the 1863 Waikato invasion?
Or Te Rauparaha’s Ngāti Toa with the South Island tribes? Or Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Mutunga with the Chatham Islands’ Ngāti Mutunga o Wharekauri? Or the arguably most historically bitter rivals, iwi and Urban Māori Authorities?
After their combined work leading to the 1992 fisheries settlement followed by their bitter commercial disputes over quota, how symbolic that Ngāi Tahu’s great rangatira Tipene O’Regan sat alongside Tainui’s King at Tūrangawaewae Marae?
Luxon might be forgiven, for he knew not what he was doing, but David Seymour understood perfectly.
To Pākehā most sceptical of te ao Māori, the initial stages of the skirmish have already positioned Act as the party most strongly at odds with a uniquely unified Māori movement and everyone else in Parliament.
Act gains further over National and NZ First if that movement becomes too associated with the Greens’ Marama Davidson, Te Pati Māori (TPM) co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi, and firebrands like Hone Harawira.
Ideally for Act, the Mongrel Mob would occupy Parliament. Act wouldn’t get a majority of the right-wing vote but would go above 10 per cent.
Act says it wants a respectful national debate but won’t engage in one.
The leaked draft principles read as purposefully disrespectful to the text of the Treaty. Hopefully, whoever wrote them was disingenuous, not sincere, and being deliberately, not accidentally, provocative, because the alternatives would suggest a reading comprehension crisis worse than believed.
The Treaty was between the British Queen, then still holding executive powers, and chiefs whose authority also relied on bloodlines and military power. It wasn’t written as a blueprint for liberal democracy.
The most conservative Pākehā historians find it unthinkable those warrior-chiefs would have knowingly ceded their sovereignty and all governing authority to a foreign chief, especially with more than 80,000 Māori and only 2000 Europeans in New Zealand at the time.
Yet the leaked principles insist on interpreting the 1840 Treaty as if written by John Stuart Mill, the founder of English liberalism, which would be surprising since he only started thinking about On Liberty in the mid-1850s.
Each of the leaked principles refers to the Treaty being about “all New Zealanders”, as if it were some left-wing UN declaration of human rights, but that concept doesn’t appear in any of the articles and those who signed would have laughed at the very thought.
The Treaty was about maintaining a balance of power and managing social and economic relations between settlers and tribes. Māori traded having the same duties as British subjects for gaining the same rights, but the Treaty didn’t say anything about French and American settlers or escaped convicts from Australia. It’s not about “all New Zealanders” at all.
Act’s strategy seems to be to offer fake Treaty principles to the public, generate a few hundred thousand supportive online select-committee submissions, hold six months of heated hearings, hope for civil unrest, produce polls showing a majority wishes the Treaty had been written by Mill, and then accuse National of siding with Māori radicals against “mainstream New Zealanders”.
If so, National is perfectly entitled to accuse Act of breaching paragraph 21.
Luxon should get ahead of the game, using his authority as leader of the country to stop Act’s bill right now.
If Act rebels, he could then do what he should have done during coalition negotiations and tell them to try their luck with Labour, the Greens and TPM.
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.
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