David Seymour’s lonely crusade

Comment: The long-awaited introduction of the Treaty Principles Bill in Parliament on Thursday was anticlimactic.
For all of the urgency that preceded the introduction, with the Waitangi Tribunal rushing out a second interim report on Tuesday night and leaks revealing the Government had moved up the timeframe for bringing the legislation to Parliament, there was little focus on it on its actual day of introduction.
No speeches and almost no questions in the House referenced the bill. It won’t actually get its first reading – and first shot at public debate – until next Thursday. The introduction came quietly in the early afternoon in the form of a press release notifying reporters that the bill had now been introduced.
Its sponsor and chief supporter, Associate Minister of Justice and Act leader David Seymour, was in Napier, not Wellington. That left no one to defend the legislation in the halls of Parliament, given the resistance to it from the three Opposition parties and the other two governing parties.
The text of the bill itself is a paltry four pages and nine sections. Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer called it a “four-page joke of a bill”. But there were few surprises within.
Long before Thursday, the details of what was contained in those four pages had been released by Seymour himself and by two scathing reports from the Waitangi Tribunal.
The only change from the model laid out by Seymour in earlier Cabinet documents was to further narrow the scope of the proposed second principle: rights of hapū and iwi will only differ from those of other New Zealanders where agreed to as part of a Treaty settlement, where the previous draft principle also allowed included rights described in other legislation and agreement with the Crown.
Perhaps the biggest announcement on the day came not from the governing benches but from across the House, where the three Opposition parties issued a joint press release calling on Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to oppose the bill at first reading.
The Prime Minister has been clear that National will vote it down after it returns from select committee, but the coalition agreement with Act binds him to supporting it at its first hearing in Parliament.
That the Opposition is making this call is not surprising – each party has been saying something similar for nearly a year. But the conscious decision to join forces and stand together with a single voice is interesting.
It’s relatively rare in New Zealand politics for even aligned parties to run joint campaigns like this. The Labour and Greens joint electricity policy before the 2014 election comes to mind.
The parties would like it to be seen as a signal that this issue is above politics. While perhaps one party could benefit from better positioning in the continual jockeying for attention on the Opposition benches, the decision to work together is meant to convey that the three parties are putting the nation ahead of their own self interest.
In reality, there’s little daylight between the parties’ preexisting policies on the Treaty Principles Bill, even if the rhetoric does differ. Nor is the combined push likely to force Luxon to back down on supporting the bill at first reading.
What it does do, however, is underscore just how lonely Seymour is. His absence from Parliament on Thursday highlighted that further.
Te Pāti Māori said the decision to advance the bill to select committee was potentially “treasonous”. Chris Hipkins said it overrode the voices of Māori, and Chlöe Swarbrick called it a “desperate, divisive, imported culture war”.
Seymour’s own governing allies were hardly more supportive.
“The National Party supports the Treaty Principles Bill to go to first reading, select committee and then we’ll vote it down,” Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka told reporters.
New Zealand First’s Shane Jones, a couple of minutes later, said the bill was a result of the coalition negotiations.
“Our position is clear, it’ll be introduced but it will not be voted upon by New Zealand or ever take root in the Parliamentary landscape.”
The political isolation of Seymour on this topic, in Parliament at least, has been clear for months. But the Act leader is a loud politician and skilled at garnering headlines (such as this one).
Sometimes the disproportionate space he takes up in the news obfuscates that his is still a minority position. When that loud voice left town on Thursday, it hammered home how lonely David Seymour is.