Everything you missed from day four of the Treaty principles bill hearings, when the Justice Committee heard two hours of submissions.
Read our recaps of the previous hearings here.
Parliament’s Room 3 was the same old, same old on Thursday morning for the fourth Treaty principles bill hearing – brown walls, green seats, blue suits. There was a buzz this morning, though, as there always is when a former minister appears, even over Zoom, and today’s first submitter was former National Party minister Hekia Parata (Ngāti Porou, Ngāi Tahu), who last year told The Spinoff she supported a boycott of the bill’s select committee hearings. Though Labour MP Willie Jackson, on the Justice Committee, joked Parata was here for National, she countered with “I’m here for Ngāi Tahu.”
Parata said the bill would perpetuate inequality in Aotearoa, and that his bill assumed that equality must look the same for all New Zealanders regardless of specific need. “One of the oft-repeated statements or inferences that have characterised the discourse around this debate is that ‘where in the world has ancestry been the driver of rights?’,” Parata said.
“I find that incredibly ironic, because the authority of this committee and the proposal of this bill rests on a kinship-based ancestry, property-owning royal family known in New Zealand as the Crown.”
Julian Batchelor, the Christian evangelist behind the Stop Co-Governance movement, spoke in favour of the bill with a powerpoint to back his submission. “Anyone who claims Māori did not cede sovereignty is living in denial, which is not just a river in Egypt,” he said. Jackson coughed throughout his submissions, muttered “rubbish”, swung around on his swivel chair, massaged his temples when Batchelor dubbed Sir Apirana Ngata “the greatest Māori we’ve ever had” and whispered “thank God” when it was all over.
Barrister and activist Maui Solomon (Moriori, Ngāi Tahu) opened his submission with a counter to Batchelor’s claim that Māori had knowingly signed away their sovereignty – this wouldn’t be the case, Solomon said, as Māori signed the te reo Māori version of te Tiriti. “That is, to use Mr Batchelor’s words, ‘absolutely delusional’.”
Solomon labelled the bill a “colossal waste of taxpayers’ money in order to serve the ego and the self-political interest of one man”. “If Mr Seymour seriously expects Māori to have confidence that this house will serve their interests when 184 years of legislative experience suggests otherwise, you’ve gotta be kidding,” he said.
Horiana Irwin-Easthope (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu, Rakaipāka), managing director of Māori law firm Whāia Legal, used the second half of her submission to speak directly to her young son, who also wrote a submission, entirely in te reo Māori. “Please, retain hope. Retain hope that actually the conversation [around the bill] – the blip that I believe this is in our history – will pass, and that one silver lining that may come out of this situation is that we reflect as New Zealanders and as a nation, on who we want to be moving forward,” she said.
Local Government New Zealand’s co-chairs Iaean Cranwell (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Irakehu, Kāti Kuri, Kāti Makō) and Toni Boynton (Tamakaimoana, Tūhoe, Te Rarawa, Ngāti Kahu, Ngāti Awa) spoke against the bill, with Boynon saying discussions around it were “testing relationships” between councils and iwi, and that the proposed principles would “unsettle established jurisprudence”.
Former New Plymouth Mayor Andrew Judd, self-described as a “recovering racist”, also criticised the bill, which he said reflected harmful attitudes that he was “fundamentally raised to hold” while growing up in New Zealand. “Cook may as well have arrived yesterday,” he said. Judd spoke on the pushback and fear associated with the Treaty from the bill’s supporters: “We might think Māori might do to us what we do to Māori, and that is to, of course, dominate and control and have it our way.”
Bradford Haami (Ngāti Awa), an author and lecturer in Māori culture and history, Zoomed into the hearing to speak against the bill with his young daughter by his side. He said his hapū, Ngāti Hokopū, believed this bill would limit the Treaty obligations of the Crown to protect it and other hapū, and that their voice would be “marginalised” within their region. “We believe that collective hapū rights should not be up for debate or discussion in a public referendum,” he said.
Karen Feint and former prime minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer submitted against the bill on behalf of a group of 50 king’s counsel. Feint referenced comments made by Gary Judd KC in the first Treaty principles bill hearing two weeks ago, that the courts had acted improperly by recognising and endorsing the Treaty. “We submit to the contrary, that it would be parliament that would be acting improperly and irresponsibly should it enact this bill, which so clearly intends to distort and rewrite what amounts to an international Treaty,” Feint said.
Palmer said the bill had “wasted a tremendous amount of time” and “damaged the collective fabric of the nation”. “We really need to learn from this,” he said, visibly exasperated. Justice Committee deputy chair Duncan Webb of Labour asked for the pair to be given five more minutes for their submission, to which fellow committee member and Act MP Todd Stephenson objected, and a small kerfuffle kicked off until James Meager called for them to cool down.
Dean Knight, academic and co-director of the University of Victoria’s New Zealand Centre for Public Law, spoke against the “constitutionally misconceived” bill. He said the proposed principles had been designed “in terms of what promoters think it should mean as a constitutional document, regardless of … what it actually does mean as a matter of historical and constitutional fact”.
“Put it bluntly, the meaning of Magna Carta isn’t worked out by taking a straw poll at the pub on a Friday night,” Knight said.
Former Green MP Kevin Hague was the final submitter of the morning, speaking against the bill. He called on the committee to consider in its report any mechanisms parliament might enact to remedy racist rhetoric that had emerged since the bill was introduced.
“I started by talking about the waste of time, resources, and opportunity, and the platform the bill has provided for racism, but there has been one positive effect of the bill,” Hague said. “The fact that most New Zealanders have actually been galvanised into taking a stand, taking some action, standing up for the kind of nation that we want to build, and that we want our kids and our grandparents to be able to live in.”
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