Submissions have reopened on the Treaty Principles Bill after a record-breaking number of submissions crashed the Parliament website. If you have not done so already, you now have until 1pm on Tuesday 14th January to submit. System Change Aotearoa made a submission to the Select Committee, which you can read below.
The current campaign against the Treaty Principles Bill is aiming to ensure that the National Party and New Zealand First stick to their respective commitments to vote down the Bill at second reading. Because of this, it is incredibly important for as many submissions to be made opposing the Bill as possible. If the number of submissions in favour of the Bill greatly exceed the number of submissions opposed, it could tempt National and NZ First to change their minds and progress the Bill further.
Generally speaking however, parliamentary submissions are not how change is made. The power does not lie with Parliament, it lies with the people. Submitting to MPs is a process which empowers Parliament as an institution; the left is strongest when we base our tactics upon methods which empower grassroots movements in communities, workplaces and on the streets.
Hīkoi mō te Tiriti may have been the biggest protest in the history of Aotearoa. To further increase the pressure on the Coalition to drop the Treaty Principles Bill, and to mount a broader opposition to the government’s other attacks on Te Tiriti, on workers and on the planet, an even bigger show of force is necessary. We do not just want the Treaty Principles Bill to be stopped; the Fast-track Approvals Bill and the Regulatory Standards Bill are just two other examples among many dangerous proposals being put forward by the government.
2025 is the year to mobilise en masse. Not just against the Treaty Principles Bill, and not just against this government; but against the system that disregards indigenous rights, workers’ rights and the very planet we live upon for the sake of profit. A better world is possible if we fight for it.
Submission to the Justice Select Committee on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill
By Elliot Crossan and Evelyn Henare Maxwell-Garner on behalf of System Change Aotearoa
We oppose the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill in its entirety.
In November, 42,000+ people marched on Parliament as part of hīkoi mō te Tiriti. It was the largest protest in Wellington history. Another 40,000+ marched in other locations across Aotearoa. We stood united, calling for the Treaty Principles Bill to be dropped immediately. The Bill should not have made it this far. It is a damning indictment of our House of Representatives that the process has progressed to the Select Committee stage. Hear our voices now: the people of Aotearoa, whether tangata whenua, tangata tiriti, or tauiwi, will not allow this divisive, destructive Bill to advance any further.
System Change Aotearoa is an activist group whose campaign work focuses primarily on combating climate change and inequality. We are committed to upholding tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake. This is central to our work as an organisation.
The Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill seeks to override all rights guaranteed to Māori under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, with the sole exception of those rights agreed upon in Treaty settlements. This is an attempt to ignore the status of Māori as the indigenous people of Aotearoa who never ceded sovereignty. Indigenous rights are protected under both New Zealand law and international law; this Bill seeks to violate both. In doing so, the Bill would undo decades of progress towards honouring Te Tiriti in law and in society as a whole.
The government of New Zealand was created through the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, as part of a partnership between hapū and iwi Māori and the British Crown. Some hapū signed Te Tiriti; in doing so, they granted the Crown the right to govern its own people on this land, on the promise that hapū and iwi would retain their absolute sovereignty. Other hapū did not sign Te Tiriti, and did not give the Crown the right to govern them at all — a fact that is all too often forgotten in discussions around Te Tiriti o Waitangi as the “founding document” of this nation.
Regardless of whether or not their hapū signed Te Tiriti, Māori retain their absolute sovereignty and their right to self-determination. In the words of Moana Jackson, in 1840 “ceding mana or sovereignty in a treaty was legally and culturally incomprehensible in Māori terms.” At time of signing, Māori outnumbered settlers by a ratio of 40-1.
The Bill, if implemented, would be an attempt by the Crown to unilaterally rewrite Te Tiriti o Waitangi without consulting Māori. The idea that one party can rewrite an agreement without consulting the other is both morally and legally unthinkable. There is no justification for this brazen attack on tangata whenua.
The Bill would go against the New Zealand government’s international responsibilities under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), of which we are a signatory. The Bill violates Articles 3-5 of UNDRIP by undermining the rights of Māori to self-determination and sovereignty, and to the legal mechanisms that uphold and recognise this sovereignty. It also goes against Article 37, which states that ‘Indigenous peoples have the right to the recognition, observance and enforcement of treaties…’. This Bill would not only breach domestic treaty obligations, but also international law.
The Treaty Principles as they currently stand have come about as a result of decades of work by a range of lawyers and constitutional scholars with a deep understanding of the text of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the context in which Te Tiriti was written, and its relation to New Zealand law. In contrast, the rewritten principles proposed in the Treaty Principles Bill are utterly irrelevant and unrelated to any credible interpretation of Te Tiriti. The proposed principles have no legal or academic backing, and are based on the ahistorical idea that Māori willingly and happily ceded all sovereignty to the Crown in 1840, a myth so plainly and insultingly false that it is shocking that any politician would believe it.
These proposed principles were written to please a fringe and reactionary segment of New Zealand society. The ACT Party seeks to erase the rights of the indigenous people of this land, and replace them with libertarian, individualistic values which are simply not relevant to the actual contents of Te Tiriti.
One of the reasons why the ACT Party is attempting to tear down Te Tiriti o Waitangi is because the Treaty stands as a barrier to privatisation and corporatisation. This is a cynical ploy to further ACT’s free market agenda, which will further accelerate Aotearoa’s already-obscene levels of inequality.
The fact that Te Tiriti stands in the way of privatisation and corporatisation is one of many examples of how honouring Te Tiriti benefits our society as a whole. System Change Aotearoa opposes any attempts to trample over indigenous rights in order to further sell off public assets.
Our Recommendations:
- Te Tiriti o Waitangi has never been properly upheld by the Crown. For nearly two centuries, the Crown has violated the agreement it made with tangata whenua in 1840. Some progress has been made in recent decades to reverse the wrongs of colonisation, but this progress has been nowhere near enough. This Bill would represent a backwards turn towards the 19th Century approach of trying to nullify Te Tiriti, and it is a disgrace. More, not less, needs to be done to uphold Te Tiriti. The Crown must acknowledge that hapū and iwi Māori retain their tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake. The New Zealand Government and the House of Representatives must begin to act accordingly.
- Every single Member of Parliament must vote to reject the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill.
