When Māori Party MP Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke rose to her feet inside the New Zealand parliamentary chamber, began to perform a haka and ripped up the piece of legislation that is currently dividing the nation, the challenge was directed at one man.
The Māori Party has brought challenges to the floor of the parliament before and Clarke herself used her first speech in the chamber in January to perform a haka, but this was different.
The upheaval in New Zealand society over the past year has really been building to this moment.
Almost a year ago to the day, New Zealand’s right-bloc coalition government reached an agreement that minor party leader David Seymour would be permitted to draft a controversial piece of legislation called the Treaty Principles Bill.
It’s that coalition agreement that allowed Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, from the New Zealand National Party, to take office.
The Treaty Principles Bill was something Seymour campaigned on before he and his ACT Party won 8.64 per cent of the vote.
And while his coalition partners permitted him to draft the bill, they have said they will not support it becoming law.
Every other party in parliament is opposed to the bill too, including Labour, the Greens and the Māori Party.
Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke led the protest for the Māori Party this week. (AP: Charlotte Graham-McLay)
There is currently no political path forward for Seymour’s bill and he has known that since February when the prime minister ruled out the Nationals supporting the bill beyond the committee stage.
Still, the bill was drafted, tabled in parliament and now is not expected to be voted down and ultimately defeated until well into next year.
In the meantime, New Zealand will see more protests over what one prominent former National attorney-general says is a bill that is “divisive, going nowhere” and “should really have been killed stone dead some months ago”.
The story behind Clarke’s protest
The document at the heart of the debate is New Zealand’s founding document, The Treaty of Waitangi.
The treaty is an agreement between Māori and the Crown, one that promises to protect Māori treasures.
It was signed in 1840 and for a long time it was neglected. But over the past 50 years, New Zealand has been working to acknowledge the intention of that agreement in modern life.
That has been a bipartisan project.
As Luxon said this week: “Treaty issues are complex, they’ve been negotiated, debated, discussed for over 184 years.”
“It is simplistic to assume that through the stroke of a pen, you can resolve all of that.”
It was the most scathing the prime minister has been about a draft bill he himself has permitted to exist.
While the Treaty of Waitangi is not legally binding, after decades of advocacy many pieces of legislation enshrining Māori rights now make reference to it and there is a tribunal that hears cases relating to treaty interpretation.
Seymour, who is a Māori man himself, has proposed a bill that would reinterpret who the Treaty of Waitangi applies to. He wants the treaty to apply to all New Zealanders, not just Māori, so all Kiwis have the same rights and privileges.
David Seymour tabled his Treaty Principles Bill in New Zealand parliament this week. (AP: Charlotte Graham-McLay)
That notion has sparked protests for a year, and so when the full version of the draft bill was brought to parliament, the Māori Party was ready to challenge both the bill itself and its creator.
“Our thinking was that each person within our party had a role to play,” Māori Party co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer told the ABC.
“It is Hana’s generation that is going to have to clean up this mess … so it was appropriate that it was Hana leading off.”
The Māori Party won 3.08 per cent of the vote at the last election, but it secured six out of seven electorates dedicated to Māori representation.
Ngarewa-Packer said that gave her party a mandate.
“We just do what our people put us there to do,” she said.
“We had to be intentional. We had given the speaker every chance with multiple points of order, we had asked and requested … for this debate to be referred to the Waitangi Tribunal, so we’d used all the levers available to us.”
Co-leader of the Māori Party Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said there was an expectation her party would respond to the bill. (Getty Images: Hagen Hopkins)
She said the protest was a rejection of the idea the Treaty of Waitangi should be debated in parliament.
“The tiriti (treaty) and debating the tiriti is something that only belongs with the chiefs of Māori iwi and hapu (tribes) and the Crown,” Ngarewa-Packer said.
Following Clarke’s lead, Ngarewa-Packer and her fellow co-leader, Rawiri Waititi, directed their challenge towards Seymour, who was also in the chamber.
But the Māori Party was joined by other opposition parties and people in the public gallery.
“I know from our perspective, we had to challenge the designer of that bill, the person creating the harm,” Ngarewa-Packer said.
“So the haka was a wero — a challenge to the challenger of our whole existence.”
Speaker Gerry Brownlee eventually suspended the sitting, cleared the gallery and dealt Clarke a punishment that meant she couldn’t return for 24 hours.
Eventually though, the MPs did vote and the prime minister delivered what he promised Seymour in coalition negotiations and the bill was passed at its first reading.
Members from Labour, the Greens and the Māori Party did not support it.
When asked about whether the debate and impact on New Zealand was worth it given the Treaty Principles Bill was unlikely to progress any further, Seymour told the ABC: “Not a single person, Māori or otherwise, would be harmed by this bill.”
“What does cause division is successive governments treating New Zealanders based on their ethnicity, which is the problem the Treaty Principles Bill seeks to solve,” he said in a statement.
“It commits to give equal enjoyment of the same fundamental human rights to every single New Zealander. The challenge for people who oppose this bill is to explain why they are so opposed to those basic principles.”
For those who do oppose it, that interpretation would diminish the rights secured for Māori by their ancestors who negotiated the treaty with the Crown nearly 200 years ago.
It’s worth noting that the Treaty Principles Bill is landing in an environment that has seen dedicated Māori policies wound back, as the Luxon government changes the approach to issues like language, heath and land management.
‘Congratulations David Seymour’
Christopher Finlayson said the Treaty Principles Bill was “looking for a problem where there isn’t one”. (ABC News: Emily Clark)
Luxon did not escape blame in the house this week, with former Labour prime minister Chris Hipkins as well as Greens leaders pushing him on how debate over a bill that would ultimately fail could be allowed to get this far.
Ngarewa-Packer said it was essential to resist the bill, but the political reality made the debate difficult to endure.
“The hardest thing is actually knowing that the prime minister … is prepared to have that debate, and that revolting division come at us … for nothing,” she said.
“We actually have to fight and do all of this for nothing.”
Former National attorney-general and minister for treaty relations Christopher Finlayson said Seymour was “looking for a problem where there isn’t one” and Luxon should have shut his bill down a long time ago.
He also said the National Party of old would not have made the coalition deal that led New Zealand to this place.
“I would have simply said … David, you’re not going to have this legislation,” Finlayson said.
“And if he’d had a tantrum and said, ‘Oh, I’ll sit on the crossbenches,’ well, I know what John Key would have done.
“He would have said, ‘Go and sit on the crossbenches. I’ll personally stand against you at the next election and I’ll destroy you.'”
Former New Zealand PM John Key once warned that if any government went after Māori electorates, there would be a “hikoi from hell”.
For Māori, the Treaty of Waitangi is the ultimate red line and Finlayson said he could see the Treaty Principles Bill had wedged open a wound that really didn’t need to be touched.
“Congratulations David Seymour,” he said.
“We just don’t need this rubbish in this country and I thought we were beyond it but, as I say, congratulations David. You’ve really created a most unfortunate incubus, and how we get out of it and how we solve [it] is going to require a lot of statesmanship.”
The division in the house will again be visible on New Zealand streets as another major protest moment approaches.
A hikoi, or protest march, has been moving through New Zealand and it will arrive in numbers expected to be in the tens of thousands at the steps of parliament on Tuesday.
The Treaty Principles Bill may be doomed, but the path forward for race relations in New Zealand is now much less clear.