Washington Post: New Zealand reckons with ‘divisive culture war’

Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, a 22-year-old MP, shot to international fame last year when she ripped up a controversial bill and performed a haka, in front of its author.

Her protest quickly went viral and – coming barely a week after Donald Trump’s presidential victory – offered some Americans a glimpse of raw but effective resistance to culture war politics.

Now Maipi-Clarke, a representative for the Te Pāti Māori, is hoping her actions – and the historic levels of opposition from across the country – will stop the polarising Treaty Principles Bill from advancing any further in coming months.

“It’s just a piece of paper that should be given no ‘mana,’” Maipi-Clarke, New Zealand’s youngest member of Parliament in 170 years, said.

New Zealand, a country of five million people often viewed from afar as a kind of sleepy utopia, is deeply divided over the bill, which seeks to recast the principles of it’s founding document.

The Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi, an 1840 agreement between the British Crown and more than 500 Māori chiefs, resulted in the indigenous population being violently dispossessed of their lands, leading to disadvantage and disempowerment that continues today. Māori experience worse health, greater poverty and higher incarceration rates than the non-Māori population.

But the Treaty has become New Zealand’s de facto constitution. In recent decades, Parliament and the courts have come to see it as promising Māori, who make up almost 20% of the population, significant decision-making powers and special protections.

Act leader David Seymour. Photo / Mark Mitchell

David Seymour, the leader of the libertarian Act Party and a junior partner in the conservative coalition Government, wants to change that, saying New Zealand has become an “apartheid” state that favours Māori.

Seymour, whose office said he was not available for an interview, has insisted his Treaty Principles Bill merely “gives every New Zealander the same rights and dignity” and would ensure “the Treaty can no longer be used to justify separate public services, race-based health waitlists, and creeping co-governance”.

This stance, critics say, does not reflect the status of Māori as the Indigenous people of New Zealand or the toll of colonisation.

Introducing the bill was Seymour’s price for forming a coalition in 2023 with Christopher Luxon and his centre-right National Party and a smaller populist party. Luxon, on becoming Prime Minister, made it clear that he did not support the bill and as recently as January said “it won’t become law”.

But his decision to permit its introduction appears to have backfired, sending his approval rating plunging and igniting a culture war that has drawn comparisons to the Brexit referendum that divided Britain.

Luxon, who declined to be interviewed, will soon have to vote to stop the bill in its tracks or risk worsening the polarisation that is fracturing his own Government as well as the country. It is expected to come up for a second vote in Parliament in May, after a committee digests 300,000 written submissions and 80 hours of oral ones, which were overwhelmingly opposed to the bill.

Maipi-Clarke helped galvanise that opposition.

Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke in Parliament.

She comes from a long line of activists and grew up hearing stories of relatives who were kicked out of movie theatres because they were Māori or who had to take out loans just to learn their own language. As a huge protest march, which eventually swelled to a record 35,000 people, was making its way down the country toward Wellington to protest the introduction of the bill in November, she made plans to rip up a copy as a sign of her disdain for it.

“It would mean my grandchildren having the same experiences that my grandparents had,” Maipi-Clarke said. “That’s why my generation is just, like, no, no, no. We’ve been being brought up on their stories about the trauma they went through. We’re not going through that again.”

Although the bill is not expected to advance – it’s “as dead as a dodo,” in the words of Christopher Finlayson, who served as both Attorney-General and Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations in a previous National government – a lot of unnecessary damage has already been done, Maipi-Clarke and other opponents say.

Chris Finlayson.

A former centre-left prime minister said the legislation had “damaged the collective fabric of the nation”, while a former centre-right one said it invites “civil war”. The Waitangi Tribunal, the authority mandated by Parliament to adjudicate Māori claims under the Treaty, said the bill, if passed, would be “the worst, most comprehensive breach of the Treaty/Te Tiriti in modern times”.

Māori rights were already under assault before the Treaty Principles Bill, Maipi-Clarke said, with the Luxon-led Government axing a Māori health agency, reducing the use of Māori language in the public service and making a slew of other changes that disproportionately affect Indigenous people.

While the bill would not rewrite the Treaty, it would effectively render it meaningless and halt any advancements Māori have made, critics say.

“For 40 years, New Zealand was viewed as a bit of a poster boy for trying to reconcile colonial-era harms and contemporary realities,” said Helmut Modlik, the head of Ngati Toa Rangatira, a Māori tribe based to the north of Wellington. “To be honest, I expected a bit of an Anglo-Saxon kickback … but what I didn’t expect is what we got.”

The bill’s wording also has been widely criticised, including by the Government’s own lawyers, who suggested it was effectively unenforceable.

Finlayson said the bill is “very badly drafted” and dangerous. “What Seymour has done is identify a problem which isn’t there and then try to solve it in this rather grotesquely divisive way,” he said. “The trouble is, as Brexit showed, you play a particular line like that and it ends up as ashes for the country.”

The main beneficiary is Seymour, who has dominated news coverage – to his coalition partners’ chagrin, Finlayson said. Seymour is set to become Deputy Prime Minister at the end of May as part of the coalition agreement, elevating his profile even further ahead of an election toward the end of 2026.

Seymour’s Act, which has 11 out of 120 seats in Parliament, is the only one of the six political parties that supports the bill.

“The chihuahuas cannot be allowed to have an outsize impact on the Government,” Finlayson said.

The increase in racial tensions sparked by the bill’s introduction has been most painful for older Māori, many of whom experienced discrimination and abuse in their youth that they hoped the country had left behind.

“In the matter of just over a year, the clock has been turned back decades,” said Sandra Lee-Vercoe, one of the first Māori women elected to Parliament. She became an MP in 1999, three years before Maipi-Clarke was born, and endured threats and break-ins of her home and office.

A quarter-century later, Maipi-Clarke received a flood of messages after performing her haka in Parliament. Though almost all were positive, she says, enough were not to warrant hiring private security, particularly during the protest march – the “hīkoi” – that arrived in Wellington a few days later.

But Maipi-Clarke said she doesn’t pay much attention to the small minority who fear her generation, which includes many who grew up fluent in the Māori language.

“Honestly, I don’t take the time to worry about what is the source of their fear,” she said. “That’s their problem.”

Modlik, who was in the chamber on the day of her haka, said Maipi-Clark’s actions were a fitting protest. “This is a moment that our leaders stood up and said ‘whiti te ra,’” he said, citing a line from the haka. “‘The sun is rising’ on this nonsense today, and we won’t stand for it.”

The fight against the bill has led to conversations among Māori groups about coordinating future actions for greater impact, Modlik said.

Natalie Coates, a Māori barrister who spoke to the committee against the bill, said the haka undoubtedly inspired many of the submissions to Parliament. “You could feel the beauty and power of her cultural expression in what is often an un-cultural place,” she said of Maipi-Clarke’s protest.

For now, Parliament’s youngest MP is focused on making sure the bill goes no further and protecting the rights of New Zealand’s Indigenous people.

“Māori people are not fighting people,” she said. “We’re survivors.”