A House divided, a leader nowhere in sight

Analysis: When David Seymour started talking about the democratisation of Te Tiriti he seemed sure the conversation wouldn’t divide the nation.
“I wouldn’t underestimate people’s ability to engage in a high-quality conversation,” Seymour told Newsroom back in August.
On Thursday, during the first reading of his Treaty Principles Bill, the division was impossible to ignore.
While Seymour was the lone voice speaking in support of the bill that aims to rewrite the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the rest of the Parliament spoke with varying degrees of passion against it.
National MPs made arguments against the bill, but for the first reading – as agreed to in the National-Act coalition agreement.
Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori voiced their strong opposition, which led to two MPs being suspended from the House.
And while the House of Representatives split down the middle, the Prime Minister was nowhere to be seen.
Christopher Luxon flew out to the Apec summit in Peru on Thursday evening. Before leaving Wellington, he held a press conference in the capital where he openly offered lengthy criticisms of his coalition partner’s bill.
“You do not go negate, with a single stroke of a pen, 184 years of debate and discussion, with a bill that I think is very simplistic,” he said.
His comments came a day after a group of 42 King’s Counsel lawyers joined in other legal experts, including the Waitangi Tribunal, in calling on the Prime Minister to abandon the bill at first reading. They cited concerns about the “substance” of the coalition Government’s bill, as well as about “wider implications for New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements”.
Luxon said National’s long-held position was that it was more sensible to “grapple” with difficult issues on a “case-by-case” basis: “We can have a conversation respectfully without actually having to go into demonising each other.”
While Luxon has been ramping up his verbal opposition over time, Te Pāti Māori said it was too little, too late.
Co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer called Luxon “cowardly”.
Initially the bill was scheduled to be read next week, but timings were changed at the last minute, and the bill was put on the order paper for this week. While the Prime Minister argued he couldn’t control the timings of the Apec leaders’ summit, there’s no doubt he could control when the bill would come before the House.
“Sadly, we have the ducking around corners, the short cutting of kaupapa, because there’s a cowardly behaviour. There’s absolutely no balls shown in what’s happening here,” Ngarewa-Packer said.
While the Prime Minister put literal distance between himself and the bill, his most senior Māori ministers – Tama Potaka and Shane Reti – were also absent from the first reading of the legislation.
After a Question Time dominated by debate over the bill, which saw the ministers of education, Māori development and justice defend their Government’s position ad nauseam, it came time for the first reading.
When the speeches began, Seymour was mostly drowned out by what Speaker of the House Gerry Brownlee called a “constant barrage”. 
Points of order from opposition MPs littered Seymour’s speaking slot. Attempts by the Greens and Te Pāti Māori to discharge the bill before it could be read were unsuccessful, but gave a flavour of the any-means-necessary approach still to come.
Through it all, Seymour insisted his bill was a chance for the country to finally have a say over its founding document and its application in modern-day New Zealand.
“The principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill fills a silence this Parliament has left for five decades,” he said.
On Thursday, Parliament was anything but silent.
“Shame. Shame. Shame,” chanted Labour MP Willie Jackson in response to Seymour’s speech.
Jackson said understanding of the Treaty’s principles and the rights and obligations that partnership afforded both parties had been created over the past 50 years.
“The principles are clear … They’re about partnership, they’re about equity, they’re about active protection, and they’re about redress. Simple. Why does this offend this minister so much?”
Jackson said: “I denounce this foul attempt to rewrite the constitutional framework of this land; of this nation, simply because the Prime Minister is too weak to stop the dangerous extremism of the Act Party.”
His words were met with applause from the House and the public gallery, before the Speaker warned those in the public gallery to be quiet, or risk being thrown out.
In an act of silent resistance, those in the gallery swapped their audible clapping for signing; hands waving in the air in response to various speakers.
The Labour Party MP started and ended his speech with a personal dig at Seymour: First to say Seymour’s hapū Ngāti Rēhia would be “ashamed” of him, then to pass on a message from those at Hīkoi mō te Tiriti: “You fuel hatred and misinformation in this country. You bring out the worst in New Zealanders. You should be ashamed of yourself. And you are a liar.”
When the Speaker called on Jackson to withdraw and apologise for calling Seymour a liar – language that is considered unparliamentary – he refused. The Speaker ejected Jackson from the House; suspending him for the rest of the afternoon.
Chlöe Swarbrick called on Government MPs to vote based on their conscience, rather than along party lines – something Luxon said wasn’t an option due to the coalition agreement.
“Are you here to listen to your conscience, or are you here to give it all up on one of the most significant votes in this house in our lifetimes? 
“Because if you wear the mask for a little while, it becomes your face,” she said. “We are what we do. If you vote for this bill, this is who you are, and this is how we will be remembered.”
Then, in an impassioned speech on behalf of Te Pāti Māori, Rawiri Waititi said the Parliament had no right to try and re-write the Treaty.
“The only reason this Parliament exists in Aotearoa is because our tīpuna consented to it.”
Only the signatories of the Treaty – the monarch and the rangatira of hapū of Aotearoa – had the power to change Te Tiriti,” he said. “Now, tell me David Seymour, which one of those are you?”
Waititi said: “Act seems to be pulling the strings and running the country, like the KKK with a swipe card to the Beehive. And Luxon doesn’t care that there’s a ghost in his chair.”
With both Luxon and Winston Peters overseas, Seymour will be sitting in the driver’s seat for the coming days.
Speaking for NZ First, Casey Costello said she supported a national discussion, but not this bill, saying her party held firm to the belief that the Treaty of Waitangi did not have principles.
Neither Peters, nor Shane Jones were there.
Minister for Justice and Treaty negotiations Paul Goldsmith recycled a version of his Prime Minister’s points from earlier in the day, as did Social Development Minister Louise Upston.
“This is a crude way to handle a very delicate subject with a wave of wand, as it were, we would undermine more than 30 years of jurisprudence,” Goldsmith said.
While the pursuit of equality was important, Parliament shouldn’t be blind to the realities of living in a democracy, he said, adding that all western democracies had their “kinks”.
“It is simply not realistic to suggest 184 years of debate can be settled with the broad stroke of a pen,” Upston said.
The last person to speak on the bill was the first-term MP who would now have the job of shepherding the bill through what Willie Jackson earlier referred to as a “six-month hate tour”.
Justice Select Committee chair James Meager used just half of his coveted speaking slot to call on MPs to engage with the upcoming select committee process in a respectful way.
Meager was the only National MP with Māori whakapapa to speak on the bill.
Then, the haka.
As the Speaker called the vote, Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke tore the bill in two and began Ka Mate.
The public gallery, the rest of Te Pāti Māori and some of Labour and the Greens, including former minister Peeni Henare, joined in.
Maipi-Clarke, alongside the party’s two co-leaders, rounded on Seymour and inched towards the Act benches.
The 22-year-old turned towards Brownlee as she finished the Ngāti Toa haka.
The Speaker watched on with pursed lips, and when the second round of the haka finished, he suspended Parliament and called for the public gallery to be cleared.
When the House resumed, the Speaker called Maipi-Clarke’s conduct “appallingly disrespectful” and “grossly disorderly”, before naming her and calling on the House to judge her actions. Maipi-Clarke was suspended from Parliament for 24 hours.
The bill passed its first reading, and will now go to the Justice Committee for six months, before returning to the House, where the Prime Minister has committed to calling the bill up for second reading and voting it down. He does not have a deadline for when a line will be drawn under this.
Speaking to reporters in Parliament following the bill’s first reading, Seymour seemed to have developed a new take on the mood of the nation: The division was always there, he said. And the Treaty Principles Bill was now exposing it.
“This problem hasn’t been created by my bill,” Seymour said. “There’s clearly already people with those attitudes. What my bill has done is expose that people have those attitudes. That is something that everybody needs to see.”
Seymour rejected any suggestion his bill could be playing a part in stoking this division.
“We respect their right to have debate according to the rules of Parliament. They have to reciprocate. Otherwise it doesn’t work … The idea that some people have a greater right to obstruct other people’s right to be represented. That’s a lot about what this bill is about, the idea that we should each have equal rights.”
Seymour used the opportunity to paint the actions of Te Pāti Māori as divisive, while they pointed their fingers straight back at him.
As the country watched an unprecedented display in the House on Thursday, Hīkoi mō te Tiriti gathered further support in Rotorua.
By the time the hīkoi reaches Parliament next week, organisers expect it will be the largest protest the country has ever seen.
And this is just the beginning of the Treaty Principles debate.