Around 35,000 thousand demonstrators descended on the capital of New Zealand this week, many of them adorned in traditional native dress amid a fluttering sea of red, white and black ‘Maori sovereignty’ flags. They were there to decry a bill looking to redefine New Zealand’s founding treaty.
The Treaty Principles Bill, introduced earlier this month by one of the National party-led government’s junior coalition partners, has virtually no chance of becoming law. But the bill’s sponsor, the libertarian ACT party leader David Seymour, insists it offers a ‘certainty and clarity’ long missing in New Zealand. He also wants the country’s constitutional arrangement to have an explicitly democratic basis in law. His bill has three articles:
- The New Zealand government has the right to govern all New Zealanders.
- The New Zealand government will honour all New Zealanders in the chieftainship of their land and all their property.
- All New Zealanders are equal under the law with the same rights and duties.
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