The Government plans to pass the Marine and Coastal Area Bill despite Supreme Court ruling and growing concerns over New Zealand's cyber security. Video / Herald NOW
Opinion by Matthew Hooton
Matthew Hooton has more than 30 years’ experience in political and corporate strategy, including the National and Act parties.
Unemployment hit 5.2% in the June quarter, the highest rate since 2020
Inflation increased by 2.7% in the 12 months to June, the highest point in the last year
On Friday, the US announced it would put a 15% tariff on NZ exports to America
Labour force participation is falling and unemployment is rising.
Inflation risks re-emerging here and globally. Government debt continues to grow, the fiscal deficit is locked in, and our Treasury already has to pay among the highest interest rates in the developed world.
Productivity growth remains anaemic, public-sectorpay is still rising faster than private-sector wages, the construction industry is contracting, bureaucrat numbers are increasing, and the education system is failing.
At the same time, our second biggest export market has just imposed 15% tariffs on our products – higher than on our direct competitors – and its rival for global hegemony is extending its influence and projecting its military power into our region and even our realm.
Yet despite all this – or perhaps because of it – some within the coalition Government and fringe groups aligned to them think it’s a good idea to have another argument about race.
Maybe that’s not surprising. With the working and middle classes crying out for an explanation for why things are so bad and the country’s prospects so bleak, some within the old political and business establishments dare not admit it is because of poor policy and commercial decisions they themselves contributed to over recent decades.
As in other nations facing seemingly irretrievable decline, it’s much better to point to a minority and blame them.
“It’s not your fault, or mine, that you’re doing it tough,” this old elite tells those who are struggling.
“We’re all just victims of the ‘grievance economy’ where Māori keep taking what is rightfully yours.”
The worst thing is that it works, at least with perhaps 20% of voters. That rump, which polls suggest consists mainly of white baby-boomer men, is particularly important electorally to NZ First and Act, who fight over them.
You may think that the biggest issues in this year’s local government elections are out-of-control rates and councils’ cumbersome and incompetent application of the Resource Management Act.
But, according to Hobson’s Pledge, “the most important fight of 2025” is around Māori wards.
“Across the country,” it says in an apocalyptic fund-raising email, “local councils have become the frontline in a slow, stealthy assault on democracy. Behind closed doors, race-based policies are being pushed through. Co-governance is being installed without consent. And representation is being carved up based not on merit or votes, but on ancestry.”
Hobson’s Pledge says it will “go big with this campaign”, including “billboards, signage, social media, and engaging with new voices”.
The campaign’s integrity is already under question, after it was revealed that Hobson’s Pledge used, without her permission, a photograph of an elderly Māori woman in a billboard implying she opposes Māori wards.
Rotorua kuia Ellen Tamati is devastated after discovering her image is being used by a political lobby group that’s pushing to abolish Māori wards. Photo / Aukaha News
In fact, she supports them. She never agreed for anyone to use her image commercially, and the agency which sold it anyway was clear it could not be used in advertising.
Hobson’s Pledge has since asked the billboard company to remove the advertisement and said it would contact the woman to ensure she was okay and let her know her image was publicly available as a stock image.
Hobson’s Pledge has form with this sort of thing, setting up a “We Belong Aotearoa” campaign before the last election, falsely suggesting a grassroots movement by immigrants concerned about co-governance.
Next time, Hobson’s Pledge ought to use one of its own supporters – of which it claims to have many – in its advertisements.
It might also give greater attention to telling the truth, after its advertising about the foreshore and seabed in the New Zealand Herald was found by the Advertising Standards Board to be materially misleading.
Hobson’s Pledge will continue to do its thing, and its antics are probably best seen as another small price to pay for the benefits of free speech.
This is certain to arouse all the passions of the Clark Government’s 2003 and 2004 fiasco that the Key Government resolved so successfully in its first term by passing then-Attorney General Christopher Finlayson’s Marine and Coastal Area Act 2011.
The Luxon Government – or at least a powerful faction within it – seems to want a repeat of Act’s failed Treaty Principles Bill, with all the associated division and distraction from the real economic crises.
There might have been a case for the bill Goldsmith is fronting had the Supreme Court upheld a recent novel interpretation of Finlayson’s legislation by the Court of Appeal. But the Supreme Court overruled the Court of Appeal, making the proposed bill seem redundant.
We must now choose whether Finlayson or Goldsmith is likely to be the better jurist. Finlayson says the Supreme Court left things as Parliament intended back in 2011 and that Goldsmith’s bill would compromise existing Māori rights.
Goldsmith says the Supreme Court made it too easy for Māori to have their rights recognised by the courts and that the bill is needed to return things to the status quo the Key Government established.
Since the whole foreshore and seabed controversy emerged in 2003, it has been based on what Finlayson calls a “lie”: concerns about public access to beaches.
Hobson’s Pledge now goes so far as to claim there’s a risk of “kissing our entire coastline goodbye”.
Yet beach access was never an issue, even when the Court of Appeal made its original 2003 ruling that kicked off the controversy.
It certainly isn’t an issue under the 2011 law or the Supreme Court’s decisions.
The rights that an iwi can have recognised over bits of the foreshore and seabed are highly limited, and nothing like ordinary property rights.
Underlying all this is another lie: that there is something activist, radical or woke about the courts acknowledging Māori customary law.
Yet in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, North America and New Zealand, the British Empire and its common law always acknowledged that customary law continued after colonisation, unless it was specifically repealed.
The truly radical or activist judges have been those who historically tried to deny this.
It can be annoying when other people’s legal rights are upheld, like farmers being able to stop hikers from walking across their property.
But that is no reason to deny such rights. To the contrary, it is an essential democratic principle that the specific legal rights of individuals and other minorities are upheld, whatever the majority may think.
It’s wrong to keep changing the law on the foreshore and seabed or anything else when it looks like the courts may uphold some specific legal rights that someone else might find annoying.
If they can do it to an iwi, they can do it to you. And, with all New Zealand’s economic and social crises, ask yourself whose interests are served by trying to turn your attention to race.
