The architect of the Treaty Principles Bill, David Seymour, says he has a “thick skin” and isn’t concerned about the “name-calling and abuse” he might receive during oral submissions at Parliament this week.
He remains open to having his mind changed on some aspects of the legislation.
“No doubt there will be new ideas I haven’t heard before, that’s why I think it’s a great day,” he told reporters ahead of his submission to the justice select committee.
“What I’m interested to hear is can anyone actually tell people why New Zealand is better off divided into tangata whenua – land people — and tangata treaty — treaty people — and what societies have succeeded by dividing people by race and are better off for it?”
In his opening remarks, Seymour told MPs he believed using race as a qualifier in society was the definition of racism and should be expunged from our society.
“When you see people as a member of a group first and an individual second, you miss interesting things about them, you also open the door to dehumanising oppression.”
Just this summer he told MPs a concert had ticket prices based on tangata whenua and tangata treaty, and some central and local government departments are also taking, what he calls, this divisive approach.
He remains optimistic that the bill will pass at some point in the future – all other political parties including Act’s coalition partners have already confirmed they will vote against the bill at its second reading.
“Sometimes it takes time for the idea of a free society to bed in, some resist that, but no doubt it’s worth having the debate.”
‘Absurd to think Māori ceded sovereignty’ — Lady Moxon
Lady Tureiti Moxon followed Seymour’s submission, speaking as managing director of Te Kohao and chair of the National Urban Māori Authority.
She strongly rejected the bill and said she did so alongside the 42,000 who marched to Parliament from across the country last year in opposition to the legislation.
“The Treaty is an agreement between iwi and the Crown to govern over our own — it is not one country, one-size-fits-all for everyone,” she told MPs.
“Replacing the principles with notions of civil government, equality, and historic rights, is an attempt by this coalition to rewrite te Tiriti in favour of itself in order to retain power and control.”
Up to 80 hours of submissions will be heard after the Bill received an unprecedented number of written responses. (Source: 1News)
Lady Moxon said the bill is designed to “subjugate, humiliate, assimilate, and oppress iwi Māori”.
“It’s absurd to believe or think that at the time of the signing of the Treaty that approximately 2000 Māori ceded our sovereignty to 2000 colonists from England.”
‘The antithesis of mutual trust’ — Helmut Modlik
Ngāti Toa Rangatira chief executive Helmut Modlik told MPs the bill makes a mockery of the Crown’s apology and settlement with his iwi.
He said it misrepresents and undermines legitimate constitutional foundations.
“The Treaty Principles Bill before us today is in spirit and substance the antithesis of the mutual trust, and co-operation, and respect for te Tiriti o Waitangi so solemnly promised by the Crown, and also passed unanimously by this House to Ngati Toa to restore its tarnished honour.”
Modlik said the bill has become an international embarrassment for New Zealand.
‘Flawed in process and substance’ — Carwyn Jones
Legal academic Carwyn Jones, of Ngāti Kahungunu, has told the Justice Select Committee the Treaty Principles Bill was “flawed in both process and substance.”
He said the bill proposes to change the legal meaning and effect of a treaty without discussion with the other parties to that treaty.
Jones said the Minister was “fully aware the bill is a distortion of the Treaty” and that it will not achieve its stated purpose.
“It’s shameful that Parliament and the legislative process has been used to try to give legitimacy to this made up version of what was agreed in Te Tiriti and to mislead the New Zealand public in this way.”
Given the Bill seems certain not to pass, he said, the whole exercise was a “collosal waste of time and resources” – not just Ministers, MPs and officials, but also the hundreds of thousands of people who submitted on the Bill.
Jones claimed the Bill would create “signigicant and costly uncertainty” about the application of the principles of the Treaty where there is currently “significant certainty.”
He said the proposed principles are completely “detached from reality”.
A private collector of Treaty of Waitangi documents, Spencer Scoular, submitted against the bill.
He presented a range of archival documents, posing there “may not have been an agreement” between the two signatories of the Treaty.
He referenced the Waitangi Tribunal’s acknowledgement that Māori did not cede sovereignty.
“There’s a clear difference between what each party expected out of it.”
‘Disinformation from people in power’ — Rizwaana Latiff
Rizwaana Latiff and Denis O’Reilly presented on behalf of Tangata Tiriti Aotearoa. Latiff said migrant communities were vulnerable to misinformation from people in power, “and that is exactly what is happening with this Bill”.
She said the Bill distracted from the very real issues of “social and economic equality caused by colonisation, white supremacy, Islamaphobia, etc.”
O’Reilly called on the committee to “kill this bill” but also to “dissipate the fog of disinformation that it has manifest”.
He said Te Tiriti had been cynically cast as a device to privilege one set of New Zealanders, Māori. “The metrics across all dimensions of wellbeing in Aotearoa demonstrate what an absurd lie that this is.”
‘An extraordinary ignorance’ — Sir Taihakurei Durie
The New Zealand Māori Council said it opposed the bill but welcomed the debate.
Sir Taihakurei Durie said the bill ignored 50 years of examination of cases that inform the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi by “well-qualified Māori and Pākehā of the Waitangi Tribunal”.
He said the proposed principles did not reflect the purposes and intent of the Treaty. “There is an extraordinary ignorance in presuming otherwise.”
Durie said if this Bill passed, he believed the New Zealand government would be the laughing stock of the Western world who understand how responsible states today seek to manage relationships with their indigenous peoples.
‘This is aimed at the courts’ — Graeme Edgeler
Electoral law expert, barrister Graeme Edgeler, said the bill created some legal ambiguities which would need to be addressed before it ever went to a referendum.
While the bill is not expected to pass its second reading, its original intention is to take the principles to a public referendum.
“We have no idea what the courts will actually do with this. This is very much a bill aimed at the courts, and telling them, when you’re looking at those bits of law which have Treaty Principles sections, how should you apply them.”
He said there currently is a sense of how the principles should be applied, but it’s not clear how that would change due to the bill.
Edgeler told the committee if the bill was about greater protection of property rights or equal protection, they could be put into other laws instead so the context in which it is used is better understood by the courts.
“Equality before the law, equal protection, the other principles that we describe here — I would have said, if they’re important, they are important all the time. Not just the 20 or 30 bits of law that have a treaty principles section.”
‘Not practical’ to hear all oral submissions — James Meager
The committee is set to listen to 80 hours of submissions in total after the Bill received an unprecedented number of written submissions.
The Justice Committee chair said the Treaty Principles Bill select committee process is “unusual, but still business as usual”.
National MP James Meager also acknowledged it was “just not practical” to be able to listen to everyone who wanted to make an oral submission, despite receiving thousands of requests.
David Seymour was the first to make an oral submission in addition to the time allocated to submitters. It was rare for a minister to submit on their own Bill, but Standing Orders allowed for ministers to take part in the select committee process.
Recent practice, according to the Department for the Prime Minister and Cabinet, had been for a minister to be available to a select committee to “explain the considerations underlying a government bill and to otherwise facilitate the select committee’s consideration of the bill”.
A spokesperson for the ACT party said the minister was invited by the committee to make an oral submission.
RNZ understands there were at least 15,000 requests by submitters to make an oral submission, with the total number still being processed.
Meager said he didn’t know the latest figures when it came to the number of people who wanted to submit orally, but “if they are ballpark accurate – if you did the maths on those hours”, he said it would be something like “54 days of straight, 24-hour worth of hearings”.
“Now that’s just not practical and not feasible.”
Meager said it was not uncommon for select committees to decide their own procedures for how to select submissions to be heard, “when a select committee receives more submissions than it can physically or literally hear” and “there’s just no capacity or resource or humans to be able to hear from every single submitter that wants to”.
He said it came down to a range of factors such as the numbers that come in, how many had been processed, whether or not there was appetite around the table to have a range of views, or whether it was proportional to what the views were.
Meager said the committee had worked to ensure there was a broad range of views heard in the first sessions.
Every political party representative on the committee was able to put forward submitters they knew had made submissions, or whose submissions had been processed.
“They are a range of individuals and organisations from different backgrounds, a focus on youth, a focus on academics, a focus on individual submitters who don’t come from those backgrounds and who have made their views heard.”
He acknowledged not everyone would be able to have their say, but all written submissions were “read by someone at some point — by an official or a staffer — and all those views are taken into account”.
In every Parliament and with every Bill considered, Meager explained, there was a “balance” between allowing every single person to have their say and letting Parliament “do its job”.
“Which is to consider information and evidence which is relevant to the proceedings, and to use that to work into what they do with the Bill at the end of it.
“Traditionally, the select committee is intended to assist legislators to scrutinise the legislation and to shape legislation.”
He acknowledged the process had “kind of evolved” into an opportunity for advocacy campaigns and submission campaigns.
He said the select committee process for this Bill was extraordinary in the sense it was difficult to anticipate the resource required to respond to the volume of submissions.
“It is in a sense unusual, but still business as usual, because we can still treat the bill in its normal process.”
By Lillian Hanly of rnz.co.nz
