Don Brash
Don Brash was Reserve Bank governor from 1988 to 2002 and National Party leader from 2003 to 2006.
The following is written in Don's capacity as Hobson’s Pledge trustee
This week, RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop and Parliamentary Under-Secretary Simon Court announced that the Environment Committee has reported back on the government’s new planning legislation. As you know, the current Resource Management Act (RMA) is being replaced with two new bills – the Planning Bill and the Natural Environment Bill.
Crucially, the cabinet has agreed to an 11th-hour amendment: existing and proposed Mana Whakahono ā Rohe (MWAR) agreements will completely terminate and will not transfer into the new planning system.
Mana Whakahono ā Rohe (MWAR) agreements are effectively a backdoor to co-governance of your councils and certainly offend against equal rights – the ability for every ratepayer, regardless of race, to have their say equally.
This is an enormous victory for equal citizenship and the credit belongs to a powerful group of voices who refused to stay silent.
Hobson’s Pledge has been campaigning aggressively against these backdoor co-governance arrangements for months, warning how activist iwi and weak-kneed local councils were rushing to lock them in before the RMA is officially repealed.
But we do not claim this win alone. This was a triumph of collective pressure. We must acknowledge the vital role played by ACT Leader David Seymour, who strongly advocated for scrapping these agreements, and Parliamentary Under-Secretary Simon Court, who did the hard yards behind the scenes. Ultimately, Minister Chris Bishop made the final call at the cabinet table, and he deserves credit for listening to the overwhelming public concern and fronting this necessary decision.
We must also salute our friends at Federated Farmers and the Taxpayers’ Union. Federated Farmers led the charge with a robust select committee submission and successfully halted Environment Canterbury’s reckless attempt to ram through a massive suite of MWAR agreements just last week. It is immensely heartening to see major organisations standing shoulder-to-shoulder on this constitutional issue.
Similarly, we owe a debt of gratitude to local heroes like Councillor Davina Smolders in the Far North. Hobson’s Pledge was proud to amplify her brave stand against these rushed deals. She, along with other principled councillors around the country, have been warning that opportunistic iwi and compliant local authorities were quietly establishing parallel governance structures without proper oversight or genuine community engagement.
Thanks to our collective pressure, those undemocratic instruments are now dead in the water.
However, this significant win must also be tempered with caution.
While the government has wisely taken MWARs off the table, they have simultaneously announced plans to replace them with a new mechanism: “narrowly scoped iwi participation agreements”. The minister promises there will be “clear guardrails” to prevent scope creep.
But we have heard these hollow assurances before.
Have we learned nothing from history? Look no further than the Marine and Coastal Area (MACA) Act. Parliament was explicitly clear back in 2011 that the threshold for customary marine title was to be extraordinarily high. Yet, the courts performed spectacular legal acrobatics to completely subvert the intention of the law, opening the floodgates to vast tribal claims.
You will recall our very successful full front-page advertisements in the newspapers at the time, pointing out the obvious – that pretty much all New Zealand’s coastline could now be claimed thanks to the court’s ruling. In response to our advocacy, the government amended the law to restore the original intention of parliament, but, even now, we have no doubt activists and lawyers are looking for new ways to subvert parliament’s intent.
Once you open the legislative door even an inch, activist courts and ideologically driven councils will invariably seek to kick it wide open. The solution is simple – do not replace MWARs with “iwi participation agreements” at all.
There is no need for such agreements and we must reject the idea that such race-based arrangements are needed in the first place.
Every single New Zealander – regardless of when their ancestors arrived in this country – already has the absolute right to participate in local government and statutory planning processes. We elect our councils democratically. We submit on district plans equally. We can engage our mayors and councillors equally.
Why, then, does one specific group require a bespoke, separate, and privileged statutory pathway to participate?
The concept of “iwi participation agreements” is inherently flawed. In our modern, multi-ethnic democracy, we are meant to have equal rights. One person, one vote. Equal weight before the law.
So while we congratulate the government on removing Mana Whakahono ā Rohe agreements, we think the government needs to take these separate agreements entirely off the table and replace them with precisely nothing.
Together, we have won a major skirmish by ending MWAR agreements, but the broader battle for equal citizenship goes on. We cannot afford to become complacent.
This article was published by Brash and Mitchell.
