Christopher Luxon should vote down the Treaty Principles Bill in person - Thomas Coughlan

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon attends a Waitangi Day ceremony at Ōnuku Marae in Akaroa. Photo / George Heard

• The report on the Treaty Principles Bill from the Justice Committee was published on Friday with most parties on the committee opposing the bill.
• The bill emerged from coalition negotiations with the Act Party and seeks to redefine the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.
• Polling shows that while voters tend not to support the bill, they would be more likely than not to vote for it in the referendum it would enable.

OPINION

Second reading debates are among the most boring hours one can spend in Parliament.

MPs from the relevant select committee take the call, congratulating themselves on their hard work and fortitude shown spending hours listening to the uninformed tittle-tattle of normie submitters.

Occasionally, you’ll get something interesting. The 52nd Parliament’s Abortion Legislation Bill and End of Life Choice Bill had barnstormers — both were conscience votes and while they were fairly popular among MPs, there was always the chance that the political ground would shift and one or two MPs would unexpectedly peel away.

The Justice Committee published its report on the Treaty Principles Bill on Friday.

All that remains now is for the bill to be brought back to the House for its second reading where it will be voted down by an enormous majority (a potential compromise, leaving the bill on the order paper for the rest of the Parliament, has been ditched).

The second reading on the Treaty Principles Bill may be the most watched second reading since these debates began half a decade ago.

The Government would rather people’s attention was elsewhere. Despite receiving an unprecedented 300,000 submissions on the bill (the previous record was just over 100,000), the Government having resolved at its formation to kill the bill, resolving more recently to kill it quickly and quietly.

The Justice Committee raced through its 80 hours of submissions, helped by a subcommittee. Even the Act Party, whom we have to thank for all this, appears keen to shift focus elsewhere.

Despite the massive victory scored by David Seymour in getting the bill through coalition talks, it merited only the briefest mention in his State of the Nation address at the beginning of the year, which instead shifted focus to asset sales, which some MPs quietly interpreted as a deliberate attempt to shift focus.

The bill might be brought up for its second reading as early as next week, allowing it to be dispatched to legislative Hades before Parliament’s long, three-week pre-Budget recess.

Speaking slots haven’t been allocated. Members of the committee are likely to speak, as is convention, so we’ll hear from National’s James Meager, the chair. The bill is in the name of Seymour, so he’s likely to take a call too.

One question is what Prime Minister Christopher Luxon plans to do.

It’s not really a question, to be fair.

Christopher Luxon will vote the Treaty Principles Bill down. Cartoon / Daron Parton

According to precedent, he has no obligation to speak on the bill.

Prime Ministers rarely speak during legislative debates, saving themselves for their own bills — or bills they hope to define their Government. This is especially true of Luxon, who has not spoken in any first, second, or third reading debates since he became Prime Minister.

It would be nothing short of incredible if the first such speech Luxon delivered would be to vote against a bill introduced and championed by the man who will become his Deputy Prime Minister in a few short months.

To say nothing of the politics. The smart political brains say Luxon should stay away from this vexed bill — they’re probably very right.

But Luxon does have a broader obligation to speak. In his telling (though not in Seymour’s), it was a bottom line in negotiations to form a government. Though he does not personally support the bill, he was willing to back it at first reading if that was the price for the keys to the Beehive.

For most New Zealanders, the Treaty Principles Bill represents anything from an unfulfilled promise of constitutional reform to a great, perhaps unforgivable, injury. The list of people who win from the bill is short: they include Act and Te Pāti Māori, but Luxon is perhaps at the top — after all, in his telling, the bill played a key role in making him Prime Minister.

The fame, prestige, the grotty Tinakori Road flat and broken-down planes, the “entitlements” if you will — Luxon owes them all to his 2023 compromise with Seymour on the bill.

It’s hard to see what the country gets out of it — supporters and detractors alike will be disappointed.

It’s been a long time since we heard a Prime Minister deliver a speech of substance on Crown-Māori, summing up where the country has been and where it is going.

Occasionally, you get moments of brilliance at Waitangi — Jacinda Ardern’s promise to keep returning and her willingness to be held to account was strong, but like most Waitangi speeches, it was framed as a speech from the Crown to Māori.

It’s been a long time since we’ve heard anything of substance from a Prime Minister that speaks to everyone taxonomised into that catchall category of lazy journalistic-ese: “Kiwis”.

Now is the time for such a speech — if not in the debate itself, then perhaps soon after the bill is dispatched.

New Zealanders aren’t looking for Gettysburg — our cultural aversion to anything a bit cringe has made us allergic to the grand political oratory overseas.

But that shouldn’t stop a Prime Minister from a few brief remarks on what the Treaty means today. If the Treaty is not reflected in Seymour’s principles, as Luxon believes, then where is it reflected? What does it mean?

The country could do with hearing a bit of leadership on Treaty issues. Polling suggests voters’ feelings are complicated.

We learned on Friday that 90% of the more than 300,000 submissions on the bill were in opposition.

As Seymour said, however, controversial bills tend to turn out the haters.

He cited his own End of Life Choice Bill, which 90% of submitters opposed, but passed a referendum 65% to 34%.

He could also have cited the Abortion Legislation Bill, which was opposed by 90% of submitters, but which two polls suggested was supported by 66-69% of voters (the polls did not poll the specific bill, but whether abortion should be legalised on the terms it specified).

Hikoi participants march in Hamilton on day four of a journey to Wellington to protest various issues impacting Maori including the Act Party’s Treaty Principles Bill. Photo / Mike Scott

The Treaty Principles Bill is similar — but more complicated. The referendum the bill would enable has a good chance of passing, according to several public polls that have asked the question since 2023.

However, that support is slipping.

In 2023, support was 60%-22% in favour of the bill.

A poll from last December on each of the three principles found that while 62% of people supported Act’s redefinition of principle 3, support for the definition of the other two principles was 45% and 42% (still well ahead of the opposition to these definitions, which was 24% and 25%).

Ask voters about the Treaty Principles Bill another way, however, and the mood shifts.

A 1 News Verian Poll from December found when people were simply asked whether they did or did not support the bill (without being asked the specific referendum question the bill contained), just 23% backed it compared to 36% who opposed it — 39% said they didn’t know enough.

A Post-Freshwater poll from the same time, which asked much the same question, got much the same answer: 40% opposed the bill and 30% supported it.

What to make of this?

Much polling analysis is guesswork, so here’s a guess: voters are dissatisfied with Crown-Māori relations as they currently stand, and quite like the strong affirmation of equal citizenship in the Treaty Principles Bill, particularly Article Three.

However, voters also seem to be listening to the leaders of the parties they elected to Parliament at the last election, who universally (with the exception of Act) oppose the bill.

There is a clear dissatisfaction with Crown-Māori relations, but voters don’t seem convinced the bill is the way to fix it — even if they do broadly agree with what it contains. That dissatisfaction is longstanding.

In 2023, a 1 News-Verian poll found just 14% of people thought race relations were getting better, compared to 47% who said things were getting worse — and worse they got.

A 1 News-Verian Poll from last year found just 10% of voters thought government policies were reducing racial tensions, compared to 46% who believed it was making them worse. Luxon himself conceded to Q+A that Crown-Māori relations were “probably worse” than a year ago.

The Government has two remaining items on its Treaty agenda. The first is a NZ First proposal to rework Treaty clauses in existing legislation. This could go one of two ways.

If done properly, it could be a boring law reform exercise, providing clarity where there’s currently little. If the Government messes it up, it would simply regurgitate the fear and anxiety of the Treaty Principles Bill debate.

The other is to amend the five-decade-old legislation underpinning the Waitangi Tribunal to “refocus the scope, purpose, and nature of its inquiries back to the original intent of that legislation”.

This might have broader support. Chris Finlayson, whose name is often invoked in the service of arguing the modern National Party are wayward numpties on all matters Treaty, himself wrote that it was “difficult to disagree with Shane Jones that the Waitangi Tribunal has turned into a ‘mortgage broker looking for new business’.”

The comment, from his Treaty book He Kupu Taurangi (co-authored with ex-staffer and candidate James Christmas), had plenty of criticism for the Tribunal, describing a 2018 report as “unfair and wrong” and “flimsy”.

“As usual,” Finlayson wrote of one particular finding, “the Tribunal found the Crown had not acted honourably”, adding that this particular finding “seems to have become the starting point for Tribunal Reports”.

He hit upon the nub of criticism of the Tribunal from the right, which is that the Tribunal tends always to say the same thing (one might ask, of course, whether this is because history would suggest the Crown never really acted honourably regarding the Treaty).

Politicians will never say it, but many feel this is because the Tribunal has become more political than it should be — Richard Prebble’s hokey-tokey membership in which he was in, then out, and shaken all about, is an example of a former politician who feels this way.

The Government may find that soft and sensible reforms to the Tribunal are much less controversial than the Treaty Principles Bill — however much Te Pāti Māori tries to suggest otherwise.

All of this can only begin once the Treaty Principles Bill is consigned to history. Luxon has already said it’s “divisive” and unhelpful. But if he really wants to turn the page on the bill and reclaim control of his own government, he can’t have his vote against it cast by proxy while he’s on the ninth floor of the Beehive or outside of Wellington.

He needs to be in the airless bear pit of the debating chamber.

Like it or not, he’s the reason the bill is before the House. He should be on the floor of the House to dispatch it — and he should speak to voters before he does so.

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.