Hīkoi’s influence will be felt for years, but Treaty Principles Bill still popular – Thomas Coughlan

THREE KEY FACTS

• Act’s Treaty Principles Bill has passed its first reading in Parliament with support from National, Act and NZ First.
• National and NZ First have said they will not support it beyond the select committee stage.
• The bill and public submissions will be considered by the justice select committee over the next six months.

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.

OPINION

If stopping the Foreshore and Seabed Bill is the measure of success by which the 2004 hīkoi to Parliament should be judged then it was an abject failure.

The bill passed into law and at the 2005 election, held a little over a year later, parties that supported the bill, Labour, NZ First, and United Future, plus National, the party that wanted the bill to be even more restrictive, won 90% of the party vote.

In an election where the Treaty and Crown-Māori relations were very much on the ballot, Labour and National tacked right, away from the position represented by the hīkoi, and were rewarded with a relatively high combined share of the vote (not to be bettered until 2017).

But to measure the influence of that hīkoi – and the one that marched to Parliament this week – by success in Parliament and at the ballot box would be to miss the point.

Not long after the election, Ngāi Tahu chairman Mark Solomon invited a group of iwi leaders to his marae in Kaikōura. Recalling the meeting some years later, Solomon said: “I asked myself, if the Crown was to extinguish the Treaty like they had Māori rights to the foreshore and seabed with the stroke of pen in Parliament, what have iwi got left? And my answer was quite simple: ourselves.”

He sent 30 invitations to iwi leaders, 35 iwi chairs showed up and the Iwi Chairs Forum was born. The forum rapidly grew in prominence, becoming so influential during the Key-English years that in 2017 some members openly said adjusting to a new Labour Government would be difficult.

Dame Tariana Turia (second left) split from Labour and created the Māori Party. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Before the election, Labour MP Tariana Turia crossed the floor, won a byelection and created the Māori Party. Turia went into Government with National, bringing with her one of the hīkoi’s prominent organisers, Hone Harawira, who eventually split and created the Mana Party.

In between, the Māori Party secured a commitment from National to review the Foreshore and Seabed Act, which the Government did, eventually negotiating a repeal-and-replace solution.

It’s a stretch to say the 2004 hīkoi did all this, but it was the most visible symptom of a movement that did much more than simply (eventually) get rid of the Foreshore and Seabed Act. The movement reshaped Māori politics, broke Labour’s stranglehold on the Māori electorates and created a new, powerful nationwide iwi body and two new political parties, one of which appears from the vantage of 2024 to have embedded itself as a permanent feature of the political landscape.

The 2024 hīkoi against the Treaty Principles Bill feels like it might follow a similar trajectory. It won’t stop the bill itself (ironically, it’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters who will do that). Nor is it likely to succeed in truncating the bill’s select committee timeframe to have it brought back to the House and killed.

Illustration / Guy Body

But it would be a mistake to think that the marchers’ aims were purely the bill and its passage through Parliament. Forty-two thousand people don’t march through the streets of Wellington simply to call for a quicker pathway to a second reading.

A reflective Shane Jones, perhaps recalling his own history of protest, caught on his way into Parliament on Wednesday, wondered whether this was the latest wave in a series of generational shifts in Māoridom.

“Every generation, it appears that Māoridom gather the tribes together and reflect where they stand on particular pivotal issues,” he said, drawing comparisons with the Māori land march of the 1970s and the 2004 hīkoi.

Already, leaders of the latest hīkoi and key voices in opposition to the bill, including Ngāti Toa leader Helmut Modlik, who battled Act leader David Seymour in a live stream debate on the bill, are discussing ways to harness this week’s momentum. One proposal is to establish a “distinctly Māori body”, Te Whare o te Rangatiratanga.

If brought to fruition, this body might respond to some of the criticisms of organisations such as the Iwi Chairs Forum, which is that they prioritise iwi groups at the expense of urban and other Māori organisations (a serious omission given some of the most powerful Māori voices in Parliament, John Tamihere and Willie Jackson, both came up through those types of organisations). Te Whare o te Rangatiratanga would be the culmination of a series of hui, beginning with the Hui a Motu called by the late Kīngi Tūheitia at Tūrangawaewae in January and carrying through to this week’s hīkoi (the idea has been brewing for much longer).

The effects of the hīkoi are likely to go far beyond Te Whare o te Rangatiratanga (if it comes into being). It doesn’t take too much imagination to believe that a new generation of MPs and political leaders were in the crowd.

One of the organisers, Eru Kapa-Kingi, is a former Te Pāti Māori candidate and will likely find his way into Parliament in the near future. Te Pati Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi used the considerable social media profile generated by the march to encourage Māori to switch to the Māori roll – and he’s already had some success, the roll has grown by 1800 in three weeks). Should more follow, there may be changes to the electoral map.

Already, the Māori seats are crowded, with the average population in a Māori seat 74,000 in 2023 compared with 70,000 for a general seat, a trend that projections released last month suggest will continue in 2026. Could we see more Māori seats in the future and the left bloc making strategic use of vote-splitting-generated overhangs to give it an advantage?

The influence of the hīkoi and the bill that sparked it will not be limited to Māori politics or politics on the left.

Act party leader David Seymour will likely do well out of the episode. Photo / NZME

It should not be forgotten in the understandably heady aftermath of this week that the proposition included in Seymour’s bill is quite popular – and significantly more popular than the alternative of voting the referendum proposition down. A Taxpayers’ Union Curia Poll from October found 45% of voters would vote “yes” compared with 25% who would say “no” and 29% who were unsure.

It’s striking to see parties representing about 85% of the vote support a position backed by just 25% of voters – and it isn’t difficult to see why Labour and National might find themselves getting squeezed.

No leader of the “no” camp has been able to confidently and convincingly articulate to non-Māori their opposition to the bill.

One media outlet ran a powerful quote from one of the protesters, “Let the people be heard”, which did the rounds in Parliament. Labour’s social media team ran an ad featuring a variation on a popular Simpsons meme in which principal Seymour Skinner decides it is the thousands of people outside of Parliament who are “wrong” and not him.

The trouble for every “no” party, from Te Pāti Māori to NZ First, is that this is precisely the opposite of what they are arguing. Seymour’s bill is, after all, not about legislating the Treaty principles, but about having a referendum on legislating the Treaty principles. If the people really were to be heard, the bill would likely pass into law – if the public really are the arbiters of who is right and wrong, polling suggests they’re more on the side of the Seymours (David and Skinner) than anyone else’s.

In their rage at Act’s anachronistic rewriting of the principles, the Opposition seems to have forgotten that it’s the referendum, as much as the principles themselves, that is likely to attract people to the bill. It takes a skilful politician to argue why the public shouldn’t have a say on something, which is perhaps why none of the current crop has waded too deeply into the matter of the referendum.

So far, the issue has not fundamentally realigned polling – which, according to one poll, is tighter than at any point since the election. A corporate poll from Talbot Mills, which also conducts Labour’s internal polling, has National on 34% and Labour one point behind on 33%, with the Greens and Act on 10% each, followed by NZ First on 7% and Te Pāti Māori on 3.3%. Luxon’s preferred Prime Minister ranking was 25%, two points ahead of Labour’s Chris Hipkins.

The poll was taken over an unusually long period of November 1-10 (with a margin of error of 3.1%) and National’s relatively low polling diverged sharply from a Taxpayers’ Union-Curia Poll (Curia also conducts National’s internal polls) taken at the same time.

If anything, this suggests that Act is eating National’s lunch, while Labour seems to be holding steady.

In 2004, Labour was able to stave off National’s lurch to the anti-Māori right by tacking right itself, sacrificing internal party unity for hugging National. This time around, Labour has prioritised party unity and tacked left, hugging Te Pāti Māori to the point of issuing joint statements and social media on the bill.

The change will be obvious at the party’s conference in Christchurch next weekend. Labour conferences always include speaking slots for its finance spokesperson, deputy leader and leader, but this year, Māori caucus co-chairman Willie Jackson will speak too, a sign of how much of a realignment there’s been since 2004.

It will not be lost on anyone, however, that Labour won the last election in which it fought a hīkoi from the political right. The real test for how much has changed, particularly for Labour, is whether it can pull off the same trick from the left.