Act’s Treaty Principles Bill passed its first reading in Parliament on Thursday with support from National, Act and NZ First.
National and NZ First have said they will not support it beyond the select committee stages
It will be considered by the Justice Select Committee, including public submissions, over the next six months
Claire Trevett is the NZ Herald’s political editor, based at Parliament in Wellington. She started at the NZ Herald in 2003 and joined the Press Gallery team in 2007. She is a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
OPINION
Former Treaty Minister Chris Finlayson posed aninteresting theory when he criticised Prime Minister Christopher Luxon for allowing the Treaty Principles Bill into the coalition agreement with Act.
Finlayson, who is appalled by the bill, suggested on RNZ that former PM Sir John Key would not have got himself into such a pickle because he would have called Act leader David Seymour’s bluff on any threats to sit on the cross benches over the issue, rather than join a coalition.
He added, hilariously, that Key would have told Seymour he would personally stand against him in Epsom if he pushed his luck on it.
Finlayson’s suggestion forgets Key was brutally pragmatic about political arrangements and also had more options than Luxon had in 2023.
Had Key faced the same situation Luxon did after the last election, he could well have done what Luxon did, which was to give Seymour an inch and then suffer the consequences of Seymour transmogrifying that inch into a mile.
The effect of Finlayson’s comments was to put the blame squarely on Luxon for what may have seemed to be a workable compromise at the time the coalition agreement was forged, but has predictably proved otherwise.
And it is a pickle — not just for Luxon, but for pretty much every National MP.
Illustration / Guy Body
If you want to watch joy die in a National MP’s eyes these days, it only takes three words: Treaty Principles Bill.
They are copping it on social media, emails and in the streets of their electorates from those who want the bill to disappear and those who want National to support it. They are being criticised both for supporting it at its first reading and for saying they will not support it any further. The most concerning to them is clearly the latter.
There have been inevitable (and probably not groundless) rumours of discontent within the caucus and suggestions some might have wanted the freedom to cross the floor on it.
Thus far, no MP has confirmed those rumours, and Luxon and party whip Scott Simpson have both said no such proposal was raised.
The closest things have come to a suggestion any MP might have made comments on the issue was Tama Potaka saying Labour was not necessarily correct in assuming he had not expressed a view on it in caucus or Cabinet.
MPs have clearly had it hammered home that if they did not go ahead with what the agreement promised, there was a risk Seymour would pull the pin on the coalition.
Luxon can only hope caucus discipline holds firm for the next six months, through the public submissions and leading into the second reading when it is voted down.
A new Taxpayers’ Union Curia poll out on Thursday might help achieve that, because it showed National bumping up four points to 39%, and Act dropping a bit to 8.5%.
The Treaty was sixth on the issues most important to voters.
The fireworks at Parliament might give Seymour a bit of a bump, but National will be betting it won’t be a permanent vote swinger.
For now, MPs are gritting their teeth and hoping it will all end in six months time.
Because if there is a chink, Seymour will hold a street parade to advertise it. It is National’s voters he is playing for.
On the day of the debate, on social media National MPs were pretending it was not happening.
Seymour’s celebratory post after the first reading passed was of himself with a beer in the Koru lounge. A fire hydrant sticker was on the wall behind his head. A fire hydrant may well be what’s needed.
Cartoon / Rod Emmerson
Luxon’s social media post that day set out what his “focus” of being in Government was: the economy, cost of living, law and order, health and education.
He did not mention the Treaty Bill at all, but it was clearly aimed at highlighting what he thought was important instead.
They are also the things that win elections.
On X, however, a long string of replies to Luxon’s tweet were about the Treaty Bill.
National is now scrambling to appease its base. It is so doing by trying to explain why it will oppose Seymour’s bill while also emphasising the things it is doing that will impact on Māori, such as in the co-governance area.
At an impromptu media standup on Thursday, Luxon did a pretty good job of setting out National’s position, while also trying to downplay whether it was souring coalition relations.
“A Treaty Principles Bill that is simplistic, that hopes to rewrite a debate and discussion over 184 years through the stroke of a pen, is not the way forward.”
The party then sent out an email from Paul Goldsmith to its supporters, setting out the reasons it would not support the bill beyond first reading. It also reassured them it remained committed to stripping back co-governance in public services.
Goldsmith also set out National’s position on it in Parliament, saying it was appropriate for politicians and the public to debate what the Treaty meant today and in the future.
However, he said Seymour’s bill was a “crude way to handle a very delicate subject” and risked increasing divisions rather than reducing them. He said addressing that tension should be done on an issue-by-issue basis — as it has been all along.
He pointed to the steps the Government had taken to wind back elements of co-governance that had come in under the last Labour Government: Māori wards, the Māori Health Authority and NZ First’s review of the Treaty principles in existing legislation.
All of those things are also on the list of the reasons a hīkoi is making its way to Parliament next week — but National’s aim at the moment is appeasing that base.
It is clearly hoping highlighting its other moves will be enough to do that and ease the pressure around the Treaty Bill.
The National Party’s position on the bill is one its members should be comfortable with.
It is not out of step with the approach to Treaty issues former National Governments have taken.
However, Seymour has played a blinder in fomenting discontent, both against the National Party and the media, which he has taken to accusing of being biased in its coverage of the bill.
He knows it is one thing for the two large parties — National and Labour — to say the Treaty is worthy of a debate and quite another to hold that debate.
No major party that wants to win the next election wants to get bogged down in a lengthy debate about race and the constitution, whether the process for it meets their approval or not.
While National MPs were trying to avoid it, Seymour took out full-page ads about the Bill in the NZ Herald.
That has partly been why this “debate” has been so flawed. The debate itself has often been unedifying and Seymour has cherry-picked from those to highlight the most unedifying moments.
He has repeatedly said if others had a solid argument they would put it forward rather than resort to name-calling and haka. Actually, there were considered arguments put up, including in Parliament by Goldsmith, NZ First’s Casey Costello and Labour’s Duncan Webb.
But making sure that all eyes are on the bad bits of it has not exactly been hard for him to do.
On Friday, Te Pāti Māori Rawiri Waititi made it very easy for him, as the exchange reached whole new levels.
In response to NZ First MP Shane Jones’ purely mischievous suggestion that Te Pāti Māori MPs should end up in prison for the haka, Waititi pointed to Jones’ 2007 woes of porn on his ministerial credit card.
He then suggested in indelicate terms that Jones and Winston Peters could go and do a number twos.
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