Why the Maori are protesting against equal rights in New Zealand 

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.