A chief justice once ruled the Treaty was a nullity. Another chief justice gave a completely different ruling. Same document, different interpretations.
The certainty Seymour seeks cannot be given by any law passed by Parliament, even one reinforced by a referendum.
Seymour is correct that the Treaty is being misused to challenge the sovereignty of Parliament, to promote co-government and to create two classes of citizenship.
No-one has accepted Seymour’s challenge to cite a successful society where there are two classes of citizenship based on ancestry.
Governor Hobson cited “discovery”, not the Treaty, to claim sovereignty over the South Island. Māori never thought they were lost. Whether Māori consented or not, sovereignty has transferred to the Crown.
Internationally, the sovereignty of the New Zealand Government is universally recognised. New Zealand was a founding member of the League of Nations and the United Nations.
Sovereignty is a complex concept. In a liberal democracy in every election, every elector, Māori and non-Māori, holds ultimate sovereignty. In that sense Māori still have sovereignty.
It was the Labour Government, not the Treaty, that promoted co-government.
No court has ever said the Treaty created a legal partnership. I was the Minister of State Owned Enterprises when the Māori Council challenged the transfer of state trading departments into businesses. The court made no ruling, told us to sort it out, and observed that the Treaty relationship is like a partnership.
Partnership, like sovereignty, is a complex word. Webster’s dictionary gives three different meanings ranging from a legal partnership to, say, “scientists working in partnership with each other”.
This latter meaning is how the council and I interpreted the judge’s observation. The chairman of the Māori Council, Sir Graham Latimer, was my father’s friend. I was a teenage volunteer in Matiu Rata’s campaign office. In my lounge, no lawyers, we worked in partnership to find a solution. There was never any doubt about who was the minister.
Good governments work in partnership with the electorate. When we reformed the wharves, I invited all the parties to meet with me. In partnership, we worked through the issues. It was not co-government. As a minister of the Crown, the decisions were mine to be ratified by Parliament.
The third complex word in the Māori text of the Treaty is tino rangatiratanga. Tino rangatiratanga can mean self-determination, sovereignty, independence, and autonomy. In 1840 it meant “highest chieftainship”. What does it mean today?
Seymour says it means we all have the right to tino rangatiratanga. Every citizen has the right and duty to provide for themselves as far as they are able. It follows that if we all have chieftainship then no one else has tino rangatiratanga over us unless they are democratically accountable to us.
Putting such complex words into a statute is highly risky.
One solution is not to try to define the Treaty principles but to strengthen the Bill of Rights, making it clear there is only one class of citizen.
Our Bill of Rights is weak and should be strengthened. Weak as it is, the Bill of Rights has already delivered a significant defeat to co-government.
My local council embraced co-governance and enacted Māori wards before realising it was likely to reduce the number of Māori councillors. It has. The Rotorua Council’s solution was to promote a local bill to make a vote in a Māori ward worth more. The attorney-general ruled the bill was contrary to the Bill of Rights that says we have “equal suffrage”.
At one level, Act’s bill is a diversion enabling the coalition to dismantle Labour’s six years of mismanagement. Extreme language is making the Opposition unelectable. But Seymour’s bill is more than a diversion. It is a debate we must have.
I have a rainbow of grandchildren. I want for them a colour-blind government with one law for all. It is the way to honour the Treaty.
