The Justice Committee hears submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill.
The Justice Committee will hear submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill from Today.
Parliament returns for its first sitting of the year on Tuesday.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has reiterated he will not support the bill when it is brought back to the House for its second reading.
Parliament returns from the summer recess in earnest this week, with MPs commuting back to Wellington for the first sitting block of the year, which will begin on Tuesday.
Act Party leader David Seymour, the architect of the bill, believes his controversial Treaty Principles Bill, or a bill similar to it, will eventually pass at some point in the future.
In his opening remarks to the Justice Select Committee, Seymour said his beliefs on the issue were long-held and sincere.
“What we have witnessed in recent decades is how the courts and the Waitangi Tribunal have sought to define the principles of the treaty is incompatible with freedom under the law, a free society, where each of us have equal rights.”
He said last summer, a concert had different prices for tangata whenua and tangata tiriti, while some central and local government factions were also taking what he called this “divisive approach”.
He said dividing people into racial groups is the definition of racism.
“This bill, some will say, may not pass. We shall see. But I can tell you that you are part of something important and inevitable.”
Seymour referenced previous bills that did not pass when they were first introduced but were later enacted, like homosexual law reform and end-of-life choice.
“That idea eventually will succeed and the work that you will do over the next 80 hours of hearings over the next five months of deliberating, I believe, will make a very important contribution to that movement, so I hope that you will enter into it in good spirit.”
‘Subjugate, humiliate, assimilate’
Lady Tureiti Moxon followed Seymour’s submission. She told the committee Te Tiriti was a contract, between iwi Māori and the Crown to govern over our own.
“Replacing the treaty principles with notions of civil government, equality and historic rights is an attempt by this coalition Government to rewrite Te Tiriti in favour of itself in order to retain power and control.
“It is designed subjugate, humiliate, assimilate and oppress iwi Māori.”
Lady Tureiti Moxon.
More than 300,000 online written submissions regarding the bill were received – a record. Some of those submitters will be given the opportunity to make oral submissions to the Justice Committee, either in person or via Zoom.
This week’s list of submitters includes several prominent former MPs and ministers, one of whom has said the MPs who support the bill should be locked up with historic reading material and not allowed out until they have read it and been tested on what it says.
“I’m still waiting for somebody to explain why our founding document is incompatible with equal rights for every human being in this country. I’d love to hear it [an explanation], but so far all I’ve seen is name-calling and abuse,” Seymour said.
The submissions will begin at 8.15am and be live-streamed at the top of this story.
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer told the Herald that 17,000 submitters wanted to give oral submissions and there was no way for the committee to get through them all in the time allotted – whittling them down was difficult.
“It is really important that [we] politicians front up,” she told the Herald while on her way down to Wellington for the committee hearings.
She said millions of people around the country and the world were aware of the bill, and reckoned the committee’s live-stream might break records for engagement – usually, committee live-streams have fewer than 100 people watching them.
“I really encourage as many to get online [to watch it],” she said.
“This is a really important part of Aotearoa’s history going on at the moment,” she said.
Seymour, who introduced the bill, will speak to the committee first. He will then be followed by Te Pāti Māori president John Tamihere, who will be speaking with a group submitting on behalf of Te Kōhao Health and the National Urban Māori Authority.
Later on Monday, prominent lawyers Carwyn Jones, Graeme Edgeler and Natalie Coates will submit.
Former MPs Marilyn Waring, Andrew Little and Kiri Allan will submit this week, with Waring and Little submitting on Monday and Allan submitting on Thursday.
Iwi groups including Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira and Ngāti Manuhiri Settlement Trust will also submit this week.
Many submitters did not want to speak to the Herald ahead of the committee hearings or did not respond to requests for comment. However, their written submissions have been published by the committee.
Little, submitting as a former Minister of Treaty Negotiations, wrote the bill constituted a “unilateral determination by one party of both parties’ rights”.
“The nature of the agreement represented by the Treaty means it is inappropriate for one party to the agreement, the Crown, to use its legislative powers to determine the content and meaning of the Treaty,” he wrote.
He added it was “inappropriate” to allow the principles to be determined by a referendum, which would be the case were the bill to pass.
He urged Parliament not to pass the bill, which it will not, given it is currently only likely to have the support of the Act Party when it returns to the House for its second reading. National and NZ First have said they will not allow it to progress further.
Waring, who was an MP for Raglan and later Waipā between 1975 and 1984, will also submit against the bill.
Her written submission said it was a “deep shame” the bill had proceeded as far as it had.
“[Those] who supported it to this situation should be locked up with documents to read, and tested on their contents, before they qualify as ‘representatives’ in the Parliament of Aotearoa,” she wrote.
Speaking to the Herald ahead of her submission, Waring said she was frustrated with the definition of Article 3 of the Treaty, which states “[everyone] is equal before the law”.
Former MP Marilyn Waring.
Waring said this definition harked back to an outdated definition of the concept of equality akin to “undergraduate philosophy”.
“No one pretends anymore that all men and everybody else are born equal, that we all have the same equal opportunities, that we have the same equal enjoyment, and there is plenty of law and case law around the world to show that it is a joke to think that is the basis of what he is going for in Article 3,” Waring told the Herald.
“We are not all born with the same rights, it’s just not true. Ask anybody who is in a wheelchair how they feel about that or ask any woman who has been in the workforce her entire life and finds her superannuation contributions are worth far less than any man because there wasn’t any pay equity – this is the real world. There is not equal opportunity, there is not equal enjoyment, there are not equal rights,” she said.
One former MP who does back the bill is former National and Act leader Don Brash. Hobson’s Pledge, an organisation which strongly backs the bill, is set to submit this week, although it is not clear whether Brash will submit in person.
Brash’s written submission on behalf of Hobson’s Pledge, co-signed with Elliot Ikilei, former leader of the New Conservative Party, supports the bill. However, the group would prefer the bill’s definition of Article 2 of the Treaty, which currently says the bill “recognises the rights that hapū and iwi had when they signed the Treaty/te Tiriti. The Crown will respect and protect those rights. Those rights differ from the rights everyone has a reasonable expectation to enjoy only when they are specified in Treaty settlements”.
Hobson’s Pledge is concerned that it “is not clear, nor can it ever be” what Māori rights were in 1840 and that redefining them in this way could lead to ongoing problems and litigation.
Seymour told the Herald he was happy with the way the bill had worded the definition of Article 2, saying it was an “elegant” solution to a complicatied problem.
“It acknowledges the rights that [hapū] and iwi Māori had in 1840, yet points out that those must be interpreted in a universal democratic framework in modern times,” Seymour said.
Jones’ written submission argues the bill “presents a false interpretation of Te Tiriti” and proposes to change the “meaning and effect of Te Tiriti without any discussion with Māori”.
The submission says the proposal would “remove Māori rights” and urges not only that Parliament discharge the bill but that the Government “take immediate steps to correct the false interpretation of Te Tiriti presented by the bill”.
Ngarewa-Packer said the Government should go further than that and, as soon as the bill was discharged, adopt the recommendations of the Matike Mai Aotearoa report on constitutional transformation which was published almost a decade ago.
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
