Activist Tāme Iti spoke in te reo Māori during his oral submission on the Treaty Principles Bill. Photo / Alan Gibson
Activist Tāme Iti spoke in te reo Māori during his oral submission on the Treaty Principles Bill. Photo / Alan Gibson
The Government is “playing chess” with Māori with its controversial Treaty Principles Bill, activist and artist Tāme Iti said on the final day of oral submissions after 80 hours of hearings.
The architect of the bill, Act leader David Seymour, described the hearings as a “triumphfor democracy”, saying he was yet to hear a compelling argument against the proposal.
Speaking in te reo Māori, Iti pondered what the path forward would be after the bill had caused confusion and challenged unity.
He highlighted protests against the proposed policy since it was first unveiled, saying the Government was mistaken if it thought it could do this to Māori.
“It’s just hōhā, it’s a game of chess. They are playing chess on us – and checkmate.”
Tāme Iti says the bill has caused confusion and challenged unity. Photo / Alan Gibson
Seymour said he watched some of the submissions and followed media reporting on the hearings.
“I don’t believe, certainly from the submissions I’ve seen, that anybody has come up with a compelling argument that a) the Treaty should divide us by ancestry with the different role to play in society and b) that that will be beneficial to New Zealand in the long term.
“I think it has been a triumph of democracy. We have surfaced an issue that a lot of people are unprepared to speak about. They’re now speaking about it. Now that this bill has raised the issue, sooner or later, New Zealanders are going to have to [face] – whether we are a liberal democracy or some other constitutional oddity.
National and NZ First have stressed they would not support the bill past the first reading.
Supporters of Te Tiriti and anti-Government protesters turned their backs on David Seymour when he spoke at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds this year. Photo / Dean Purcell
Iti submitted alongside former Māori Party MP Marama Fox, who called the bill “an expensive waste of time”.
She implored the Government to “have faith” in Māori, saying “we have the answers” and citing academic successes in kura kaupapa Māori and Whānau Ora.
“This is just mischief-making by the Government to first allow this bill to come before us in this expensive waste of time.
“The Government talks about equal opportunity – we’d love that. They talk about privilege – we’d love that.”
Kaupapa Māori models of practice “raise us out of the statistics that we have been bound to”. Fox said.
“We need to have a Government that has faith in us to be ourselves.”
The bill received an unprecedented 300,000 written submissions. Parliament’s Justice Select Committee heard 20 hours of oral submissions as a full committee before breaking into two sub-committees to hear 30 hours each.
James Meager, the committee chairman and a newly minted National Party minister, reflected on the hearings, saying it was “actually quite good” but “certainly quite intense”.
National's James Meager says the hearings were good but quite intense. Photo / Mark Mitchell
“I feel like we did a really good job of hearing as many people as we could in the time available and I feel like we gave the process the respect it needed in terms of still [being] part of the Parliamentary process.
“I think, on the whole, the tone of submissions was really good ... As chair, I didn’t actually have to interject much, if at all, for submitters.”
The final number of submissions for and against the bill is not known. This is expected to be revealed closer to the release of the committee’s report in May.
Meager said the oral submitters were a mix of those selected by political parties and randomly. He acknowledged the clerk teams for their work behind the scenes.
He said they dealt with emails and phone calls from people “who didn’t quite understand what the process was or how it was going to work”.
“And then the people who did come and give submissions too – it was really good they, on the whole, treated the process with respect and they gave us some pretty substantive and thoughtful submissions. Everyone was fairly polite and fairly considerate to the members.”
