Thoughts on David Seymour's attempt to rewrite our Treaty Principles

The first thing that struck me about Act's determination to rewrite Te Tiriti Principles was the way that Act's version of the principles that they proposed ought to apply - changed remarkably between 10th October 2022 and 2 November 2023

In October 2022 - Act suggested the principles should be :

1. ) The NZ Government has the right to govern New Zealand.

2.) The NZ Government will protect all New Zealander's authority over their land and other property.

3.) All New Zealanders are equal under the law with the same rights and responsibilities

But according to RNZ by 2 November 2023 Act had changed all that to :

1. ) All citizens of New Zealand have the same political rights and duties.

2.) All political authority comes from the people by democratic means including universal suffrage, regular and free elections with a secret ballot.

3.) New Zealand is a multi-ethnic liberal democracy where discrimination based on ethnicity is illegal.

The second set had narrowed into just political rights and notions of discrimination on prohibited grounds - probably to attack notions of co-governance more acutely but also to hide from critical attack.

You may have noticed that principle 2.) in November 2023 - is a line stolen from the Labour Party constitution ( having memorised it as you do ) ...and how - other than words from Dame Anne Salmond concerning how Act had recently invented principles - that do not derive from Te Tiriti - there was bugger all media coverage about this discrepancy and the rationale for the crazy difference from Act in just over 12 months.

The so called "world class" teams of Jessica and Jenna never touched the topic, forget about Hosking and don't even mention the NZ Herald.

The second thing that interested me was the way in which David Seymour attempted to sell this matter in interviews with Moana and Mihingarangi in the months leading up to the 2023 election.

Seymour proceeded along the lines that he looks around the world and he sees Liberal Democracies flourishing...and he's proud - equally proud of the part of him that is Māori and all the other blood quantum running through his veins from parts of Europe - which are all equivalent and equally special in his enlightened universal humanism.

But David is deeply troubled by the notion that two babies born in the same hospital at the same time side by side should have different chances in life based upon who their ancestors were.

Seymour goes on to suggest that at some point in distant eternity - there will come a time when we should say no to kinship based membership in political communities like Nation States - and have the conversation which he is trying to engineer now - about interpretations of Te Tiriti that he has objections to.

Seymour challenges his hosts to show him any nation state or liberal democracy in the world where having two peoples - like Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti has worked? Satisfied - Seymour smirks as if he's won that debate.

Seymour concludes that this Treaty business is incompatible with liberal democracy...and many an unread average joe thinks he is making a great deal of sense - after all they want to belong as much as anyone else - and not be limited on prohibited grounds like race - and have the same self interest that so many feel.

To their credit both Moana and Mihingrangi strenuously pointed out to Seymour that in New Zealand we have a Treaty - and how it's a contract which has not been extinguished just cos Seymour is over it.

Seymour added he is okay with customary rights and very specific rights attached to very specific places but nothing further.

Seymour typically ducked back to how he thinks the principles derived by the Court of Appeal and the Waitangi Tribunal in the late 1980s and early 1990s are wrong...and how he prefers his principles to theirs.

Clearly that's an act of throwing the past in a rubbish bin rather than deriving principles in a consistent way from what constitutes New Zealand as a state.

At this point I wish to introduce a few concepts that David Seymour had not mentioned which are more robust forms of argument.

Firstly there's a distinction between all Liberal Democracies and Western Settler Democracies like CANZUS - Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the US. This distinction revolves around a colonising power arriving at a relatively recent point in time and either via a doctrine of discovery or treating for a ceded Sovereignty - the constitution of a new democracy is enabled which has boundaries and those people outside those boundaries are excluded.

So much for Universal human rights. As they say ...

"Our rights who art in charters, hallowed by thy claims

They Kingdom come thy will be done

In practice as in theory"

The boundaries around a liberal demos are formed by citizenship rules - which usually involve three principles - 1.) being born here 2.) having a parent or blood quantum with citizenship or via 3.) reaching a set of conditions as a resident then gaining citizenship.

Here is where Act's arguments get sticky.

If one of the two babies born side by side in the same hospital has a mother or father with indigenous blood from another liberal democracy ( or nation state like Canada ) then that child likely has a right to citizenship in that nation state - while the other baby's right's are limited by comparison.

eg. If the hospital was in NZ and one of the babies had a Canadian parent who was 100% from an "Indian Nation" within Canada - well that baby has a set of rights that the other baby does not have.

The point here is that Liberal Democracies must have boundaries that by their very nature exclude some people from membership and to the extent that the very rules that constitute membership in Liberal democracies concern descent ( blood quantum ) - it must be considered that this forms a reasonable limit on the rights of others - ironically on a prohibited ground under human rights law.

Not everyone can belong to a tribe in Canada I am afraid David and I am not Canadian so is it fair? What about my Universal Human Rights?

"The liberal state has not succeeded in differentiating itself from the family and in fact relies on genealogy and race to constitute itself in ways that are not distinguishable from kinship ties..."

Membership is both inherited AND distributed.

BOOM there goes Act's arguments.

Before I get boring - kinship groups that exist ( like Whanau, Hapu and Iwi ) before a social contract is put in place can't just have their continuous rights extinguished arbitrarily by Seymour at some stage ( as pointed out by Moana and Mihingarangi ) and let's be certain that no doctrine of discovery applied in New Zealand according to the British Colonial Office ( James Stephen in particular ) - who wrote Hobson's Instructions with only minor alterations by his superiors.

What we are seeing is Seymour pit "social contract theory" from the likes of Hobbs, Locke and Rousseau ( limited government by consent ) and the "civic nation state" against "ethnic tribes" - where social contract models over emphasise individual agency when individuals are constituted by their communities.

What does that mean?

It's like consent versus kinship by Jus Sanguinis ( the right of blood )

It means you exist in a social matrix and a community and most of us are members of a family in which we are connected morally to people we have not chosen ( can't choose your relatives, sorry David. ) by blood.

The best person I have discovered so far on these topics is a New Zealander living in Aussie named Associate Professor Kirsty Gover ( google her she is great ).

She points out that these folk like ACT don't usually investigate the principles upon which a demos is constituted.

Among those are the principles of the Te Tiriti - which were derived from the text signed...and explained.

Which brings us back to the principles in Te Tiriti derived first by the Court of Appeal.

1. The acquisition of sovereignty in exchange for the protection of Rangatiratanga;

2. The Treaty requires a partnership and the duty to act reasonably and in good faith;

3. The freedom of the Crown to govern;

4. The Crown duty of active protection;

5. Crown duty to remedy the past breaches;

6. Maori to retain chieftainship (Rangatiratanga) Over their resources and taonga and to have all the rights and privileges of citizenship;

7. The Maori duty of reasonable co-operation;

8. On whether the Treaty creates a duty to consult.

In summary David Seymour has tried to use Universal Human Rights as an accessible argument to garner support from non Māori and wants to use a majority via referendum to throw away constitutional rights by inventing brand new principles targeting political rights.

The way Act's principles morph about shows they are about a political agenda not - the real principles of Te Tiriti as a scholar would derive them.

This is not new, it's old and being attempted all over the world by liberals similar to Seymour ( shock horror ) to attempt to assimilate indigenous kinship based tribes into dominant individual based social contracts via consent.

The attempts by Seymour to argue this - are themselves at odds with Liberal democracy and the way we define our boundaries as a nation.

He's a hypocrite in a nutshell.

The last poll by Newshub on this matter showed 55% of us are against a referendum and only about 31% support Seymour - something he takes full credit for as he attempts to get that number up over 50% during 2024 ...

Something we should all oppose and argue strongly against because Act's Principles are a conveniently invented crock of shite - as I hope some of the above article demonstrates.

Thoughts on David Seymour's attempt to rewrite our Treaty Principles

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