The Treaty Principles Bill is dead, though David Seymour has donned his white lab coat and is firing up the Tesla coils in Parliament’s basement to try to resurrect it.
What an interesting process it’s been.
During the call for submissions, a journalist colleague suggested a topic for this column based on their personal experience. “My [social media] feed has been full of ‘SUBMIT NOW’ urgencies / ‘I’ve submitted, have you?’ posts from very concerned people urging friends to get in and tell the government it’s wrong, etc.”
Fair enough. I saw more and more posts claiming to have heard that submissions supporting the bill were way ahead of the “no” count as the cut-off date neared.
Surely, my colleague speculated, nobody could know if one side or the other were ahead in the count. Surely, the Office of the Clerk of Parliament wasn’t sorting them into two piles as they came in?
Obviously, claims of this kind weren’t based on the reality – about nine in 10 of the 300,000 written submissions and 85% of the 16,000 oral submissions opposed the bill.
This reminds me of the old “while stocks last” tag to many a shopping network advert. If you don’t act now, you’re going to lose out.
Though in the case of the shopping network you lose something you probably don’t already have, the Treaty Principles Bill meant the risk of potentially losing something we did have. Regardless, this leverages the scarcity principle; the perception of limited availability – products or time – increases the perceived desirability of a particular decision.
This is persuasive because we’re generally more sensitive to the fear of missing out on something than we are to the potential benefits of acquiring or doing something. Or, in a label that millennials will understand, Fomo (fear of missing out), a term apparently coined by a Harvard student in 2004. Fear is generally a highly motivating emotion, but it can also backfire if people don’t know how to avoid the feared consequence. In this situation, though, that’s not the case because the way to reduce the fear is clear, reasonably simple and doable. Make a submission.
When something is perceived as scarce, we’re often motivated to find “social proof”. Social proof is the endorsement of others for a course of action. If others are acting quickly to avoid Fomo, we’re more likely to perceive their action as more desirable and act ourselves. We also value the example set by people we feel closest to. That used to be a much smaller circle before, first, mass media-fication and, more recently, the advent of social media. It’s hard to know how much difference being jostled to submit by people you know only as a username on Instagram might have.
Our own research shows the tide has changed. In the 1990s, New Zealanders said the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi was one of the most important and defining events in our history. More people believe that now, and more consider Aotearoa to be functionally bicultural than back then.
Though it’s possible to argue the overwhelming opposition in the submissions might not fully represent the views of everyone, the numbers are pretty persuasive. They are also broadly consistent with opinion polls that tell us three things: more New Zealanders opposed the bill than supported it, a sizeable chunk of folk didn’t feel they knew enough about te tiriti and the bill, but an overwhelming proportion of us believe a respectful discussion about te tiriti is important.
It seems to me if the aim of proposing the bill was to have a conversation about the operationalisation of the principles of te tiriti then surely that has been helped? Of course, Seymour says that hasn’t happened, so he’s going to keep shouting “it’s alive!” until, he hopes, the conversation goes his way.
