I have an acquaintance who loves to stir. (No, Dad I’m not talking about you).
Whenever they want to say something outrageous they don’t just come out and say it, they make the statement in the form of a question. So at marae hui, iwi consultations or Māori land meetings, if they want to wind people up they will ask a question that provokes a reaction.
Sometimes it is to play devil’s advocate, but sometimes I think they do it because they enjoy the reaction they get. If the reaction they provoke gets very negative they just hold their hands up in all innocence and say, “I didn’t say that that is what I think, I’m just asking the question”.
Act leader David Seymour is seeking Treaty of Waitangi reform. Photo / Mark Mitchell
This approach is not as harmless as they pretend. If I was at a shareholders’ meeting for a large company and was unhappy with the economic performance I could say, “Where is all the money going? Is it going straight into your pockets?”. When getting the inevitable indignant response I could reply, “That’s not what I think, I’m just asking the question”, as if that was what I heard others were thinking.
But if I did that, am I really just asking a simple innocent question?
We see variations on this theme in some of the comments from the Act Party in relation to the Treaty Principles Bill, implying “what could be wrong with asking questions”? It doesn’t matter what trouble they cause along the way because they are “just asking questions”.
Te Pāti Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke in Parliament during debate on the Treaty Principles Bill. Photo / RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
The bill would set up a referendum to vote on what people would like the Treaty to say (rather than what it does say). According to the other members of the coalition Government (National and New Zealand First) the bill is dead in the water. Yet they still pushed it through, taking up valuable time and resources.
My wife was one of those who made a submission, noting that to misinterpret the Treaty of Waitangi was either “ignorant, naive or deliberately malevolent”. We can ask that as a question – are Act naive, ignorant or deliberately malevolent? Ignorance is certainly possible. According to the 2021 General Social Survey fewer than 8% of the New Zealand population can speak te reo Māori well enough to have a conversation and even fewer can translate effectively. I would expect an even smaller percentage among Act members could translate the Māori language version and so would rely on others to give accurate translations. Unfortunately they don’t appear to want to listen to experts.
There could be any number of reasons for those deliberately misrepresenting what the Treaty says. Is it about trying to maintain a profile in the media? It can be difficult for smaller political parties to get the ear of the media, but the Act Party has been masters of the six-second sound bite for years. They are much better at it than the National Party is.
Is it to polarise the electorate and so entrench voters into one part of the political spectrum? New Zealanders are notoriously fluid in who we vote for. If you named eight political parties I have probably voted for six of them, both left and right. Is this a way of getting people to identify with one side of politics and stay there? If it is, it might have the opposite effect with polarising happening at both ends. The Māori Party has moved from the centrism of the past, but seems to be prospering on the left, although they will never be able to compete financially with many of the other parties.
Is it to cause discord and dissension by making people believe that they are being “hard done by” if Māori are succeeding? Does the politics of envy occur at a number of places on the political spectrum?
Are Act’s actions a fundraising drive? How much money has this campaign, outside of the election cycle, drawn into its coffers? Negative politics is a well-proven fundraising ploy.
Or, if the Prime Minister is correct and this bill won’t go the distance, is it a decoy for something else that is going on? Is it a “Hey everyone look over at the Treaty Principles Bill” so that the Regulatory Standards Bill can slip through unnoticed? (A bill that seeks to provide very narrow definitions relating to taxation, laws, policies etc., in effect placing limitations on government by a predetermined set of criteria determined by the far right, and not based on the democratic will of the people.)
Associate Professor Anaru Eketone. Photo / Supplied
Or is it a smokescreen to get through policies that will enable the private sector to take control of government funding and contracts?
I am not saying this is what “I think is happening”, I am just asking questions.
