Matthew Hooton has over 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties, and the Mayor of Auckland.
Seymour’s triumph is all the greater since insiders deny Act has ever threatened to collapse the coalition. At most, Act has been clear the Treaty Principles Bill is its top priority, ahead even of reducing the state’s size, power and tax-take.
Act leader David Seymour deserves universal admiration for his negotiating skills, according to Matthew Hooton. Photo / Mark Mitchell. File photo / Mark Mitchell
Christopher Luxon’s apparent impotence is particularly embarrassing since, the morning after the election, in his All Blacks’ jersey, he sold himself as a master negotiator.
“I’ve done a lot mergers and acquisitions and I’ve done a lot of negotiations,” he boasted, “and getting the chemistry, getting the relationship right is the platform and foundation for then being able to work your way through the transactional issues.”
It’s never been revealed what mergers, if any, Luxon worked on at Unilever. He was presumably not referring to his role in Air New Zealand’s disastrous alliance with Virgin that cost shareholders tens of millions of dollars.
In contrast, Seymour, whose pre-Parliament career was as an engineer and think-tank analyst, doesn’t talk up his negotiating skills. Like NZ First’s Winston Peters, he lets the results speak for themselves.
In coalition negotiations, the two big problems were NZ First opposing National’s promise to allow foreigners to buy residential property worth as little as $2 million and tax them for the privilege, and Act’s Treaty Principles Bill.
National conceded entirely on foreign buyers, even though NZ First might have compromised with a higher threshold. The cost was adding more to Labour’s debt.
On the Treaty bill, Luxon put up a bigger fight. He said on Monday that was a big part of why the coalition negotiations took so long.
During the election campaign, Luxon had described the bill as divisive and unhelpful. Like every party except Act, National opposed redefining the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi from those spelt out by the Court of Appeal 37 years ago, and confirmed by the Privy Council in 1994 and ever since by the Supreme Court.
On Monday, an under-fire Luxon positioned the National-Act compromise as lose-lose, claiming both National and Act were unhappy. If negotiations are about identifying win-wins, that would suggest poor negotiating skills on both sides.
In fact, the compromise Seymour negotiated was a win-lose in favour of Act, which won just 8.6% of the vote, at the expense of National, which won 38.1%.
Both parties had clearly articulated contradictory positions, yet the bigger party conceded almost everything to the smaller one.
Having no other support for its bill prior to or after the election, Act knew there was never any possibility of the referendum it promised. It lost nothing from the so-called compromise.
The Beehive, Parliament Buildings, Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Instead, it won exactly what best serves its interests for 2026: a protracted public debate, certain to be dominated by the most extreme and cynical players, where it can position itself to a minority of voters as standing alone against the liberal elite, Māori radicals, the lobbyist swamp and the Wellington bureaucratic blob.
It does Act no harm that its position is based on wilful or lazy ignorance of European, Māori and New Zealand history, law, jurisprudence and political philosophy. To the contrary, like Donald Trump, that helps Act connect with an important minority of voters.
The bill’s opportunity cost has been conservatively estimated at over $4m of bureaucratic time. That could have been used to advance legislation reducing the state’s powers. Alternatively, the bureaucrats working on the doomed bill should have been made redundant as part of Nicola Willis’ savings programme.
Instead, it could be argued Act has cleverly helped itself to that amount of taxpayers’ resources to fund its policy development programme for the 2026 election.
Bizarrely, the Electoral Commission has even been told to start preparing for the phantom referendum.
For the officials themselves, and for all the bill’s supporters and opponents who will feel the need to protest for or against and make submissions to the select committee, there is something Sisyphean about being told to take seriously a proposal everyone knows in advance won’t happen.
On Monday, Seymour even managed to secure Luxon’s agreement to make the select committee process as long as the rules allow and thus as expensive as possible.
This is exactly the Wellington wastage Act was set up to oppose.
Yet the bureaucrats may have had the last laugh by getting Seymour to include a principle that “the Crown recognises the rights that hapū and iwi had when they signed the Treaty/te Tiriti [and] will respect and protect those rights”.
Were the bill to become law, which National won’t let happen, this would probably be the first time Māori customary law was recognised in an Act of Parliament with an obligation for the Crown to protect it. The principle is qualified, but nevertheless invites Treaty lawyers and the Supreme Court to spend the next few decades defining, arguing and protecting customary law as it was back in 1840.
Act risks laying the groundwork for a legal revolution in favour of Māori customary law that the most radical Māori activists never dreamed possible in their lifetimes.
Yet that won’t prevent strong Māori opposition since the bill doesn’t recognise the black-letter assurance in the Treaty that hapū and iwi would continue to have tino rangatiratanga over their land and other things they value.
Tino rangatiratanga is the term missionaries used to describe God’s authority in their translations of Christian texts, and is usually translated back into English as “unqualified chieftainship” or “absolute sovereignty”.
In contrast, the kāwanatanga granted to Queen Victoria was used by the missionaries to describe Pontius Pilate’s role as governor of Judaea.
There’s no doubt both Māori and Pākehā in 1840 understood tino rangatiratanga to be a bigger deal than kāwanatanga.
The purpose of the principles of the Treaty in the 1980s was to paper over problems like that, to the benefit of the Crown.
Now, until at least the middle of next year and then to the election, there will be another protracted fight over such matters that the Prime Minister has already guaranteed won’t change a single element of law.
The only winners will be radical groups outside Parliament and Te Pāti Māori and Act within. The biggest losers will be Luxon and National. For his part, assuming he has so outplayed the master negotiator Luxon advertised, Seymour can be confident of a post-Parliament career leading the global merger and acquisition team at McKinsey’s.
