For a piece of proposed legislation that is dead in the water, the Treaty Principles Bill has caused quite the sound and fury. Not that its chief promoter cares, because it has generated the kind of attention he craves – controversy, constant publicity and the endless opportunity to peddle disingenuous sound bites.
But the problem is bigger than either the bill or Act’s David Seymour. The bill and the furore around it has exposed the weakness of the Prime Minister’s leadership.
Christopher Luxon has butchered the whole thing from start to finish and it might yet be his undoing. It won’t be the single issue that will sink him but it’s stark evidence of his failures of judgment and leadership that are repeatedly being exposed on other fronts. It turned out the bill wasn’t a bottom line in the coalition negotiations, which shows what an own goal it really is. Luxon belatedly vowed it won’t get past its second reading.
But for all the protests inside and outside Parliament, perhaps the most significant criticism has come from National’s own corner. Former prime minister Jenny Shipley laid into the bill (and its sponsor) with a particular disdain.
“Great nations don’t break their promises. I think that the promise of the treaty was profound and it doesn’t need some second-hand car salesman to try and divert us into some notion that frankly is not worthy of the promise of the treaty and I don’t say that reference is personal to the promoter.”
But former National MP Hekia Parata identified a more longstanding problem. She argued there had been a persistent conflation of the collective rights held by iwi, hapū and tāngata whenua, which are practised and related only to their specific rohe (region) and the individual citizenship rights Māori have as New Zealanders, which they are free to exercise anywhere they choose to make their home in this country.
“It is this persistent failure of public policy and public management that creates many of the misunderstandings that New Zealanders have.”
I’d add that there’s also a persistent failure of the media to explain this distinction.
I wrote early last year that: “The crown and Pākehā society seem to have a problem with Māori exercising their right to act collectively as Māori.
“There are all sorts of legal entities that are made up of a collective of individuals, and the rights and powers those individuals hold in that collective entity are distinct from those they hold as a single individual. This never seems to bother anyone too much – except when that entity and those individuals are Māori.”
Both Seymour and Winston Peters are happy to blur and distort the public’s understanding of rights Māori hold in collective entities they belong to, portraying them as some grave threat to civilisation. Public ignorance is an easy target to hit. They also have a penchant for using Māori as an attention-seeking device around elections, stirring up some manufactured controversy that they ride in the polls just enough to get them over the line on election night. There’s no loss for them in doing so because they have to cater to only a small audience anyway.
But Luxon has failed to articulate and expose Seymour’s and Peters’ performative outrage as the publicity stunts that they are.
Part of any leadership role, whether in politics or business, is about understanding and managing risk. If you don’t understand the risks of some undertaking at the front end then you’re not going to make any plans to manage or mitigate them at the start. But you’ll quite likely have to clean up a mess later when it’s all gone sideways.
Luxon failed to understand some of the main issues facing Māori. If he did, he could have communicated to the broader electorate in a way that nullified the rhetoric coming from the leaders he finds himself stuck with in a coalition. But he doesn’t have the knowledge or skill to do so. The result is that Peters and Seymour were running rings around him before the election votes were even in.
This, then, put Luxon in a weakened position during the coalition negotiations and Seymour got one over him with the Treaty Principles Bill. Luxon has been trying to clean up the mess ever since while Seymour enjoys outsized attention for his minority position.
Beyond Shipley and Parata, there are surely a number of past National ministers who are dismayed by the toxic coalition agreement their party has got itself into. Jim Bolger and Doug Graham and even more recent leaders such as John Key and Bill English must be shaking their heads.
And it’s often forgotten that there’s a long tradition going back to Sir Āpirana Ngata and other Māori leaders who were on the right of the political spectrum.
Don Brash destroyed any goodwill that had been built between Māori and National, and John Key and Bill English had to start from scratch. Now, Luxon has failed in his leadership role in both his party and as prime minister to build on their efforts. But he has also reminded Māori that the crown is still the crown and can’t ever be trusted to honour the document that gives it its authority to govern.
