Treaty Principles Bill: Ruth Richardson scorns mātauranga Māori, partnership with iwi

Wednesday, 26 February 2025

The woman who gave us the Mother of all Budgets has delivered the mother of all disses to opponents of ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill.

On Wednesday, former National finance minister Ruth Richardson told the select committee hearing submissions on the bill that culture was the new political battleground.

It came as she gave full-throated support for the bill - putting her in direct opposition to her former colleague, and former prime minister, Jenny Shipley.

Previously, Shipley likened ACT leader David Seymour to a second-hand car salesman, but Richardson delivered glowing praise for his bill.

“You’ve heard of the slogan, ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’” Richardson said. “That was the mantra that government and their challengers seek to observe if they want electoral success.

“Well, there’s now a new rival on the block: ‘It’s the culture, stupid.’”

She said there was a new imperative on the cultural front in New Zealand - the need to correct Treaty overreach that was evidently “wayward and wrong”.

It was only proper to spell out in law the principles designed to conduct of Treaty policy. “That in essence is why I support this bill, both as to its timing and its text.”

Richardson scorned the idea that partnership was a principle of the Treaty. “Nowhere in the Treaty was the word partnership used, let alone defined.”

This, she said, was an invention of the courts, which she said had become a platform for policy driven by separatism that trashed democratic norms.

“I refer to the ill-fated establishment of the Māori Health Authority as an exercise in separatism, now unlamented and gone.”

Richardson ridiculed the championship of “mataurangi” - correctly known as mātauranga - Māori, “which now passes as having the scientific equivalence” of the likes of gene editing technology.

Richardson delivered the controversial Mother of all Budgets in 1991, which slashed government spending - particularly social welfare spending.

This Government is dangerous

Richardson’s submission followed an emotional morning, with some opponents close to tears, others cutting loose on the bill and an ACT representative.

Journalist and former Stuff Pou Tiaki rangatira Carmen Parahi said she was concerned by the dangers created by the Government - extremism, polarisation, assimilation, ignorance and disinformation.

“We believe we are in dangerous times. Sometimes I feel very afraid, and we know my children do.”

The Government’s job was tending social cohesion, bringing everyone together, she said - Te Tiriti could help in this. “We’re all feeling vulnerable: climate crisis, a health system that’s about to collapse.”

The “devastating results” of extremism were seen in the March 15 attacks in Christchurch and the Royal Commission of Inquiry found polarisation caused this extremism, Parahi said.

“We need to be careful please, watch our language and our actions.”

Parahi said her own two teenage children told her, before her presentation, about how the Government made them feel.

It made them feel ashamed to be Māori, she said, and that their culture didn’t belong in Aotearoa, “they were beneath those that took their land”.

“Does the Government hate us?”

‘I reject your question’

Muslim community leader Anjum Rahman gave short shrift to a question by ACT MP Todd Stephenson who asked if she was comfortable with new migrants potentially being left with different rights to Māori.

“I reject your framing, and I reject your question. This is a way to try and sow division between communities, and we see you.

“When you go to ethnic minority communities and try and promote division between our community and theirs… We hear you when you say ‘oh, your community suffers racism too and they get special treatment’.”

Māori did not get special treatment, said Rahman, and they did not get privileges.

“They are getting the rights that were promised to them and the help that should have been upheld in a very minuscule way.”

Only lunatics or fools would do this

Dame Anne Salmond said ACT was trying to rewrite Te Tiriti, to make it say what the party wished it said.

It was like someone who didn’t speak French going to France and trying to rewrite an important constitutional document they could not read, she said.

“They would be regarded as a lunatic or fool.”

Here was a fringe party with little electoral support and less knowledge, she said, that took it upon itself “to rewrite the promises exchanged between the rangatira and the Queen in 1840”.

The fact the coalition Government had allowed the bill to proceed to the hearing was “a disgrace to our democracy”, she said.

There are numerous Treaty principles, developed through courts, the Government and Waitangi Tribunal over decades. Only decisions from the courts have created a binding precedent on Treaty principles. The principles are used to guide the Government on how to apply the spirit and intent of the Treaty.

ACT’s bill would replace them in law with the three found here. The law would need majority support in a public referendum to come into force.

Select committee hearings, where more than 16,000 applicants to speak were short-listed down to 80 hours of speakers, run till early March.