Seymour discusses Treaty principles

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Many people are worried about what the next Government’s approach will be to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and the possibility of a divisive referendum on the principles of the Treaty.
On the campaign trail, Christopher Luxon said National did not support co-governance in public services and also did not support Act’s policy of a referendum on the Treaty — but he did not rule it out. So it was interesting to hear Act leader David Seymour’s thoughts on this in an interview with The Platform’s Sean Plunket this week.
He repeatedly described it as a problem built up over four decades, and said Act had a comprehensive strategy in its paper released a month before the election: A Pathway Back from Co-Governance to Democracy.
People needed to accept that Treaty principles were real, and second, there was a way of interpreting the Treaty. In theory, references to the principles of the Treaty could be removed from every statute, but “that would take a very long time”. “Alternatively, what we can do is actually look at what the Treaty says . . . the government has the right to govern, that we have the right to organise and self-determine for our own lives, to our property, and that we’re all equal before the law. 
“Now, funnily enough, those are the principles that the New Zealand Government, but not Parliament, set out in 1989 — which was gradually engulfed in the madness. I think the opportunity is for the Parliament, having said that there are principles in the early ’80s and having had the courts interpret those for 40 years, to say, ‘no, these are the principles’, and then put it to a referendum.”
The next part of Act’s “clear agenda” was to repeal race-based laws — Seymour listed the Māori Health Authority, Three Waters legislation and the Natural and Built Environments Act with its 16 co-governed planning committees, adding that National was “on the same page” — and third, instruct the public service to “treat everyone based on the basis of need rather than race or ethnicity or culture”.
Plunket suggested he should work with Winston Peters on this, as they had a lot of common ground.
“Well, maybe,” Seymour said, before pointing out that Peters had said there shouldn’t be any Treaty principles.
“That’s quite a big problem because unfortunately even if they were removed from certain statutes, you’ve still got 40 years of the courts and a whole lot of people outside of government saying that they are based on the principles.”
This was not an easy conversation, it had got them “a lot of negative press”, but this had to be confronted. Seymour described Act’s referendum policy as “the most realistic way forward to make the Treaty a source of unity rather than division”.