Kill the bill - Māori implore PM to stop Treaty Principles Bill in its tracks

Wednesday, 7 February 2024

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon at the Treaty Grounds in Waitangi.

Tova O’Brien is Stuff’s Chief Political Correspondent and host of the political podcast, Tova, which has just dropped a special Waitangi Day episode to start the new year.

ANALYSIS: David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill is going ahead no matter how loud the chorus against it or how fierce the fight. It doesn’t matter that it’s arguably an enormous waste of Parliament’s time given no one but ACT plans to support it beyond the select committee stage.

And that’s because the repercussions of doing so risk a kind of political horror story; even if you don’t believe in such nonsense, you never go chanting “Bloody Mary” three times in a mirror, just in case.

Māori at Waitangi made crystal clear their disdain for the bill. They don’t want it, and they definitely don’t want Seymour to be the one to re-write the principles.

Members of the Government in Waitangi in the lead up to the celebrations.

When asked by Stuff if he would like to hear the prime minister kill the bill in its tracks, Waitangi National Trust Chair Pita Tipene responded with a decisive “yes”.

Put that to ACT - and what would happen if the PM did drop the axe - and the spectre of the boogie man appears, the “it doesn’t bear thinking about” proposition.

“Well, it's to be determined, but certainly so far everyone in the coalition is honouring all their commitments. And if we find that commitments aren’t being honoured then that’s unchartered territory, I don't think anyone wants to go there,” Seymour said.

ACT Party leader David Seymour leaving the Waitangi Treaty Grounds.

Ominous.

And totally fair. It’s locked and loaded in the coalition agreements - the keystones to the stability of the Government and therefore the country yadda yadda.

If Christopher Luxon had wanted to avoid talking about the bill - as his Waitangi speech certainly suggested with its total failure to address it - then he probably shouldn’t have let ACT negotiate it into the coalition agreement in the first place.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Deputy Prime Ministers Winston Peters and David Seymour are welcomed onto the Waitangi Treaty Grounds with a powhiri.

Or perhaps not - perhaps this bill, which is going absolutely nowhere, was Luxon’s only golden ticket to power.

We asked Seymour if there was anything else Luxon could have offered him during the negotiations instead of the Treaty bill - or if it was bill or bust, and without it he would have refused to go into government.

NZ First’s Shane Jones speaking at Waitangi .

Seymour said: “New Zealand cannot continue and flourish so long as some citizens are in partnership with the Crown and others have a different status - that is totally incompatible with liberal democracy as practised all around the world.”

So the prime minister has well and truly made this bed and he’s determined - or at least has been forced - to lie in it.

When told what Tipene had said about the PM killing the bill, the prime minister said, “our position's well established on that, as you know, there was no support, no commitment, no intention to take it beyond that”.

Challenged to just kill it now, Luxon said, “it’s been a long-standing commitment of the National Party not to pursue a referendum at all. I appreciate it's a different position from the ACT Party and part of that is, as a coalition government, that's what we've agreed to do.”

A hikoi from Cape Reinga reaches Waitangi Treaty Grounds.

NZ First is negging on the bill even harder.

Asked if they would ever support it to a referendum, Shane Jones said: “Please read my lips, that's not in our coalition and that is not what we campaigned for.”

We asked Jones if there was anything - anything - anyone could say or do at Waitangi that would make the Government wind back these policies people are finding so divisive.

“I would just ask people to sort of take a bit of the steam out of the hangi and see where that goes but to the best of my knowledge, it's not going to have enough votes to go any further than where it's likely to end up,” Jones said of Seymour’s bill.

And he continued, with the augur of the boogie man, “any stance that departs from the coalition agreement - or any refinement of the coalition agreement - would involve all the parties who have signed up to the coalition agreement. I think you can see from Winston Peters how defensive he is about the coalition agreement with the recent issue over the 500 police.”

Labour thinks Luxon could end a lot of the divisiveness by showing leadership and killing the bill, even if it meant the coalition agreement crumbles.

“Ultimately, that's his job, his job as prime minister is to make sure that he is holding the Government together. He signed up to these policies, which he's now saying he doesn't support,” Chris Hipkins said.

But ultimately the bill will not die. Well, at least not until after a no doubt explosive select committee process where anyone who wants to have their say on the Treaty Principles can.

So when it’s inevitably introduced, Te Pāti Māori has another plan:

“We've only got one option when that bill is tabled,” party president John Tamihere told Stuff. “And that is we have to rise up against it. With everything we've got.”