Mike Hosking: Ngāi Tahu Representation Bill - the Government has re-engineered democracy

Members of Ngāi Tahu perform a waiata at the third reading of the Canterbury Regional Council (Ngāi Tahu Representation Bill). Photo / NZ Parliament

OPINION:

In my opinion, a very large and deeply disturbing wrong was committed by the Government against its own people last week.

The Ngāi Tahu Representation Bill was passed and as a result the Canterbury Regional Council will appoint two Ngāi Tahu representatives, unelected and unanswerable to voters.

This is not the first council to have Māori representation, of course, but it's the first to be passed through Parliament.

Other councils that have previously decided they would appoint Māori representatives ran into trouble because a law at the time allowed the locals to get a petition together and if they got 5 per cent of the voting base they would force a referendum, and when that referendum was held, almost inevitably the move would be defeated.

In other words, the council was trying to do something that the locals didn't want.

The Government got rid of that law - you can no longer force those referendums.

What makes this case different in part is because of the Ngāi Tahu settlement of 1997, which acknowledged their association with the land and natural environment.

An outworking of that agreement was the appointment of representatives to the Department of Conservation and on conservation boards, that part is important and I will come back to it.

The Government seems to have accepted that Te Tiriti o Waitangi and its obligations allow them to up-end democracy as we know it.

Which brings me back to their various appointments to the conservation boards.

The reference to the boards is contained in the legal advice David Parker as Attorney General sought, in trying to work out whether any of this was acceptable and whether it might end up in court.

The advice to my eye is astonishing if not dangerous.

The appointments to those boards in part supports the idea that it has set some sort of precedent and therefore having appointments on councils is the next reasonable step.

What it doesn't seem to take into account is the fact the conservation boards are not elected, they are appointed. So you are merely adding some more appointments - at no point is a vote and the public involved. That surely is a very long bow to draw.

The legal advice concludes that no other person or group can be considered to be in comparable circumstances to Ngāi Tahu, and no groups or people will be materially disadvantaged by passing the Regional Council Bill.

That last line makes me weep.

A voter is not disadvantaged? A council whose sole mechanism is decided by democracy - one person one vote - is not disadvantaged now that some of that council isn't actually elected?

That any decision made and voted on by that council is materially affected by two votes that don't represent the wider electorate? Are you serious?

We have of course seen this kind of outworking elsewhere - the new health set-up has a strong Treaty-based element.

But, in my opinion, Canterbury and its regional council is the most egregious of all the Treaty-based policies this Government has looked to implement.