Does he realise that’s not strictly a one-person, one-vote model?
“Yes.”
It was refreshing. And then it was alarming. Because it was a Cabinet minister admitting that he was introducing a reform that he knew was undemocratic. In a democracy.
And then it was even more alarming because he couldn’t explain why. At least, not in a way that stood up to scrutiny.
He said Māori special rights in water have been tested in courts and found to be New Zealand law, except they haven’t. He talked about the ownership of water when Three Waters is about the ownership of pipes.
He suggested it was okay to tinker with democracy because lots of stuff we do in NZ “wouldn’t stand up to a purely academic democratic framework”. Except one person, one vote is not really an annoying academic technicality in democracy. It’s the whole point of democracy.
Then he rolled out the example of the Māori seats to prove that we don’t always do one person, one vote. Except, great care is taken in calculating the Māori seats so that no one person’s vote is worth more than another’s.
This isn’t how things were supposed to play out. McAnulty was supposed to make the Three Waters problem go away for Labour. Not open new lines of attack.
Luckily for him though, he seems to be getting away. There’s been hardly anything more than a few squeaks of outrage.
A generous explanation is that critics have been caught off guard. They weren’t expecting this level of honesty. So they didn’t know what to say next. They hadn’t prepared their argument. They couldn’t tell voters why they should care.
A less generous explanation is that they’re afraid of the eternal threat of being labelled racists.
Obviously, voters should care because McAnulty is giving more political rights to one group (mana whenua) than another (everyone else) but can’t explain why.
He seems to have conflated property rights and political rights.
Property rights might be a legitimate reason for co-governance. For example, if mana whenua can prove their ownership of a river, then fair enough to give them a say over the river. Co-governance is a simple way of settling the ownership claim.
But political rights are not a legitimate reason for co-governance. Mana whenua can’t prove their ownership of water pipes because they don’t own them. So, giving them co-governance can’t be because of property rights. It must be because of special political rights. This means they get more of a say than everyone else because they’re more special.
Voters should also care because it’s not just water pipes. It doesn’t stop there. The same argument’s been used to justify the co-governance of the health system. And giving two unelected seats to mana whenua on ECan. And the government proposal to do the same on every council across the country. This is a principle, not a one-off.
There’s always a chance McAnulty’s luck runs out and this comes back to bite Labour when Parliament resumes sitting again. Opposition parties have another week of recess to gather their thoughts and iron out their arguments. They should already be pulling out McAnulty’s inaccuracies and inconsistencies to question him on in the House.
It’s not as if they’re short on material. McAnulty was surprisingly frank. And surprisingly wrong.
Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive, Newstalk ZB, 4pm-7pm, weekdays.
