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ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill was tabled in Parliament on November 7, and the first reading debate was held on November 14. The bill was referred to the Justice Select Committee, where a closing date for submissions of 7 January 2024 has been set – full details can be found HERE.
This is the third time parliament has dealt with a bill designed to address the Treaty principles conundrum.
The problem, of course, is that the Treaty of Waitangi doesn’t have any principles. As Sir Āpirana Ngata outlined so eloquently in his 1922 explanation of the original Māori version of the Treaty, it only has three articles – they established the Queen as our Sovereign, they protected private property rights, and they gave Māori the same rights and privileges under British law as every other New Zealander.
Yet over the years, dozens of Treaty principles have been invented by the judiciary, the Waitangi Tribunal, academia and the civil service, to embed a wide variety of race-based privileges into our legislative and regulatory framework.
Concerns about Treaty principles escalated during the last term of the Labour government when, without any warning or mandate from New Zealanders, the former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern began imposing her secret He Puapua agenda onto the country to give the unaccountable representatives of multi-million-dollar tribal business corporations power over our lives.
In response, the ACT Party launched a policy to deal with the growing Treaty principles problem using a strategy they had successfully employed to deliver euthanasia law reform: A bill would be tabled in parliament that would only become law if it was supported by a majority of New Zealanders in a nationwide binding referendum.
ACT’s solution involved re-defining the principles along the lines of the three articles of the Treaty and inserting them into legislation.
The downside of this course of action centres on concerns that at some stage in the future such a law would be vulnerable to reinterpretation by a new government pushing Māori supremacy.
The alternative approach for dealing with the problem involves taking the Treaty principles out of legislation, rather than adding them in.
This has been tried twice before by New Zealand First. In 2005, Winston Peters had a Private Members Bill to that effect drawn from the ballot and debated in Parliament. While National and ACT supported the bill, it was defeated by Helen Clark’s Labour government.
However, after the 2005 election, as a condition of providing confidence and supply to Helen Clark’s new Coalition, New Zealand First gained Labour’s commitment to “Support New Zealand First bill relating to Treaty principles going to select committee for consideration.” There was no agreement to support it after that.
In other words, in 2005, Labour agreed to send the bill of a coalition party to a Select Committee, after which they planned to oppose it. This is exactly what National has agreed to do with ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill – support it to a select committee but no further.
In 2006, the Herald reported on the progress of New Zealand First’s doomed Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Deletion Bill:
A bill that would strip references to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi from legislation passed its first reading in Parliament tonight, but it will be defeated the next time there is a vote on it. It will go to a select committee and the public will have a say on it before it is reported back for a second reading. The odd circumstances of the New Zealand First bill were that the Government had to vote for it on its first reading under its support agreement with NZ First, but it does not have to back it any further and does not intend to. Labour’s Maori MPs had to vote for it, although they totally oppose it as well. ‘Sometimes we have to do things we don’t like,’ said Labour’s Nanaia Mahuta. ‘We don’t agree with this bill but we have an agreement with New Zealand First’.
During the final debate on the bill in 2007, New Zealand First explained that the Māori Party “continually peddled the untruth that the bill aimed to eliminate the Treaty itself. This was deliberate. Both here and offshore they have spread their untruths by calling it the ‘Treaty Deletion Bill’, and claiming that it aims to eradicate the Treaty…”
Things haven’t changed.
The Māori Party’s response to ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill has been based on deception.
Even their rallying call to “to kill the bill” was absurd, since they know only too well that the bill will be defeated at the next vote in parliament. But theirs is a high-stakes game. They are using lies not only to escalate Māori opposition to the coalition, sign up new party members, and fundraise through a hīkoi company run by the wife of the Māori Party’s co-leader – but also to drive voters onto the Māori electoral roll.
Māori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi outlined their strategy during the first reading of the Treaty Principles Bill in Parliament:
When will we begin to assume governance ourselves? Our role as Te Pāti Māori is not to be a part of this system but to create our own. What is the pathway forward? Tino rangatiratanga and self-governance is the ultimate goal, but there are steps we must take to get there.
He explained their path to self-government involves elevating the Māori Party into a permanent kingmaker role through more Māori seats in parliament:
First, we need to do what we need to do to get rid of this government. This must be a one-term Government. How do we do that? We must all register on the Māori roll. Everybody must register on the Māori roll… That is the goal in order to make this a one-term government. We need more Māori voices in this House. We need more Māori independent seats in this House. That is how we do it. Everybody on the Māori roll; if you are Māori, get on the Māori roll. The rangatahi are migrating – they are registering on the Māori roll. That must be our goal.
The Māori Party’s stunts during the Treaty Principles Bill debate were planned to maximise publicity for their recruitment drive as they aim to increase the number of Māori seats in parliament from seven to 20. They don’t care that they treated parliament with contempt – their ultimate objective is to destroy the institution itself.
Their march to the capital in cars and buses, which was organised by a former candidate on the payroll of Parliamentary Services – the son of one of their MPs – was publicised as a “revolution” against the government’s “assault” on the Treaty.
Let’s be very clear: the Māori Party’s agenda is to incite hatred against the coalition and anyone who dares to stand in their way – as they build support to take control of parliament through a dramatic increase in the number of Māori seats.
So, what are we, the people, going to do in response to this assault on our democracy?
Will we collectively put our heads in the sand, or will we recognise this as a serious threat to New Zealand’s future and do something about it?
The situation we now face, is that through their obvious radicalisation, those MPs in the Māori seats have now become a danger to society and our democratic system of government.
The reality is that the reserved Māori seats, which were established as a temporary measure in the days before universal suffrage, should have been abolished 130 years ago when all New Zealanders gained the vote.
Forty years ago, the Royal Commission on the Electoral System warned that if we followed their recommendation and adopted the MMP system of voting, the Māori seats should be abolished, otherwise it would lead to an over-representation of Māori in parliament.
And that’s exactly what’s happened. While Māori make up only 14 per cent of the voting age population, MPs of Māori descent now occupy 27 per cent of the seats in this 54th parliament. If the Māori seats were removed, Māori would still make up more than 20 per cent of parliament, so claims that their abolition would result in an underrepresentation of Māori are unfounded.
In fact, many of the record number of Kiwis now leaving the country for better opportunities abroad say New Zealand has become so obsessed with Māori demands, that they feel discriminated against – they feel that their families no longer matter.
The reality is that parliament’s Māori seats have been weaponised.
The MPs being elected into those seats have been radicalised by decades of separatist education. The taxpayer funded Kōhanga Reo and Kura Kaupapa Māori immersion schools, which were established to appease Māori calls for government support to nurture their language and culture, have long been captured by zealots pushing self-determination. As a result, the graduates of this indoctrination are angry extremists, who, as the Māori Party now demonstrates, want nothing less than the overthrow of democracy itself.
The reality is that National should have followed the recommendations of the Royal Commission when they introduced MMP in 1996 and abolished the Māori seats. In fact, that was their intention: the original bill introducing the MMP voting system states, “No provision is made for separate Māori seats.” But unfortunately, they caved in to the demands of Māori leaders – and Māori seats were included in the legislation.
Since it was National’s act of appeasement to Māori that is responsible for New Zealand being in this dangerous position where a party within parliament is openly promoting insurgence, they should take the lead and allow New Zealanders to have their long-awaited say on the future of the Māori seats.
After all, over the last few years, all three of the coalition partners have campaigned for a referendum on the future of the Māori seats. With those seats now representing a growing threat to democracy and the future stability of the country, it’s now time for the referendum promise to be fulfilled.
Meanwhile, New Zealand First’s Coalition agreement with National is providing an alternative approach for dealing with the Treaty principles problem:
Conduct a comprehensive review of all legislation (except Treaty settlements) that includes ‘The Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi’ and replace all such references with specific words relating to the relevance and application of the Treaty, or repeal the references.
That work programme is well underway with 28 laws specifically identified with Treaty principles that need to be changed or scrapped.
Looking back, the former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is largely responsible for the escalation in racial tension that is now evident within society. By implementing her radical He Puapua agenda, she raised the expectations of Māori leaders that they would gain control of the country. In doing so, she deliberately lit the fuse of insurrection.
If we do nothing, the toxic extremism we have witnessed over the last few weeks will get worse. It’s time for New Zealand to settle this matter through the democratic process, by holding a binding referendum on the future of the Māori seats.
And finally, sometimes it takes someone from overseas to point out the obvious – as this week’s NZCPR guest commentator American podcaster Matt Walsh has done:
New Zealand has bent over backwards apologizing for the alleged evils of colonization. They’ve paid out reparations, they’ve flown the flags, they’ve done everything. They’ve centered their whole society around land acknowledgements and so on. And now there are pagan chants breaking out in the middle of parliament. That’s what they get for all of this, for all of this kowtowing and bowing and submitting, this is what they get. The Māori are explicitly campaigning against equal rights and they’re threatening politicians who don’t agree with them. This is a sort of enrichment that Western societies can expect when they start apologizing for their own existence.
This article was originally published by the New Zealand Centre for Political Research.
