by frog
This just in: National’s policy of getting rid of the Maori seats without asking anyone except 61 predominantly white MPs has been roundly condemned by a prominent New Zealand political leader. He has called it “totally divisive”, “a blunt tool”, and “a recipe for serious racial disharmony”, adding:
A bunch of largely white MPs should not just decide to get rid of the Maori seats. I think, as a nation, we would regret such a decision being made in that way.
Who is this sage voice of reason? Why, Peter Dunne, National’s last best chance at a coalition partner. So, let’s get this straight: of all the parties in Parliament, only two believe the Maori seats should be scrapped without consultation with Maori. One of those two parties won’t be in Parliament in five days’ time. National will soon be feeling very alone on this issue.
I feel a new slogan coming on:
Party Vote National – We’ll Promise The Earth, And Get Nothing Done!
Published in Campaign | Justice & Democracy | Society & Culture by frog on Tue, September 13th, 2005
Tags: environment
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
While I don’t agree with you that the Maori seats are necessarily a good idea, I do agree that this is a big enough issue that it should be put to a referendum.
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So the self-styled voice of common sense has at last said something sensible in the campaign.
What a pity Peter Dunne can’t apply the same considered reasoning to his party’s illogical stand on cannabis prohibition, on which he continues, with no factual basis, to issue rabid statements designed only to attack the Greens.
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Come now Frog, every political parties’ promises are made with an implicit “if enough of you vote for us” caveat.
You’re promising to raise the minimum wage to $12, decriminalise cannabis, and lower the casino gambling age to 18: do you really think it fair for us to accuse you of failing to live up to your word if you get above even 10% and don’t enact all these policies?
People now know (and it’s nice that they do prior to the election) if they want equality before the law, and an end to discrimination, then National is the only party for which to vote.
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And Frog, I also find your suggestion that National would seek to bypass select committee scrutiny rather absurd.
Does the reference to 61 MPs denote some shift in your thinking about the size of any overhang? =)
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hasn’t National already said they’d put it to a referendum??
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Edge – the reality is that no one party is going to have a set of policies that anyone is going to completely 100% agree with.
An issue such as this really does require a mandate from more than just MPs. It’s important the public have a say in how our Government is formed and the structure it takes – and a General Election is NOT the way for us to have our say.
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Ah, yes, Peter – and remind us how many Maori passed the act creating the Maori seats in the first place?
I also don’t see Dunne opposing any bills regarding women’s health because, well, Parliament’s majority is (still) made up of folks with penises. He also voted for Homosexual Law Reform despite there being exactly ZERO out gay/lesbian MPs in the House in 1986.
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Well actually Peter Dunne’s stance on cannabis prohibition is completely logical if you look it at from a point of view of political opportunism, rather than political principles.
I mean the fact that Dunne is in favour of prohibition even though he realises that prohibition is unfair, doesn’t work and is harmful, and even though he told the 2001 Health Select Committee Inquiry that prohibition doesn’t work … well this is not much of a big deal when there are so many votes to be won from bigots and vested interests who are opposed to law reform.
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Craig
Just how is the manner the seats were gained, through the good will or otherwise of the majority, have any bearing on the JUSTICE of taking them away without Maori having an equal say in whether they should go and on what conditions?
respectfully
BJ
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Peter Dunne spoke on campus at Otago University today, and I asked him a question about United Future’s policy on the Maori seats. It’s pretty weird that he put this press release out an hour later, because his response at the time certainly wasn’t this emphatic. He basically said he thought the time was ready to “debate” the future of the seats, that he wasn’t opposed to them going, and that he hoped it would happen only after “consultation” of some form. He certainly didn’t say anything about largely white MPs deciding their future, and in fact mooted a referendum on the issue, which raises some entirely new issues of its own.
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This is Dunne’s conclusion in that press release:
“…frankly, this is the kind of issue that should go to a referendum.”
Um, is there much ethical difference between putting the abolition of Maori seats to a vote in a largely white parliament, and putting the same question to a universal referendum in a largely white country?
Someone needs to go back to Peter Dunne and ask him who gets to vote in this referendum. Hey, if this is an issue wanting any kind of vote or debate, who wouldn’t be happy to see a Craig Ranapia vs Tim Selwyn rumble in macrocosm? But why should non-Maori opinion have any weight in this matter whatsoever?
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Because removing the Maori seats would have a significant impact on the make-up of Parliament (especially if you consider that the Maori seats tend to go to those of a left-leaning nature).
A decision that affects all of us really should be put to all of us. This isn’t a question of policy, but the result would affect all New Zealanders (Maori and non-Maori) and potentially the policy direction of the country.
It would concern me if such a decision were to be made by Maori only – does that mean they can also choose to increase the number of Maori seats?
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BJ:
I’m just pointing out Dunne’s utter hypocrisy. You know something, BJ, we elect a Parliament to legislate – including to debate and vote on electoral law.
If Dunne hasn’t figured that out after 21 years, it’s time for him to get on his worm and go.
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If I’ve received any impression on the opinions of those who support the removal of the Maori seats, it’s that they either have the impression that the seats give Maori extra representation in Parliament, or they openly admit that the seats disadvantage their party of choice. It still suprises me that there is that level of misinformation out there and that people would be so callous.
And that National is so keen on exploiting these misinformed sentiments…
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hmmmm, I would hope very much that any good Maori MP in any party would be able to enter Parliament either as a list MP or through their electorate. At the moment Maori MPs seem to be assigned to Maori electorates, but removing the Maori seats doesn’t necessarily mean removing those Maori MPs from Parliament.
That would be the real test – to see if there was good Maori representation without the Maori seats – I would hope that would be the case.
For interests sake, I’ve pulled up the Labour Candidates list:
5. Parekura Horomia
10. Dover Samuels
15. Mita Ririnui
and so it goes…
My personal opinion is that we don’t need the seats anymore – the Maori MPs are good enough to get in on their own backs (and for the record, I’m not a right-winger either!).
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Actually when the Maori Seats where first formed in 1857 there should have been 15 seats not 4. This link has some interesting history:
http://www.elections.org.nz/study/history/maori-vote.html
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Damm right. If the maori in parliment influence anything to do with the non-maori population, then the non-maori population has the right to have a say in this matter!
Saying that non-maori should not have an opinion is as bad as Don Brash saying that all maori seats should be abolished on his say so.
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Absolutely! And if a Referendum were to support the retention of the Maori seats, then I’d happily have them stay until public opinion were changed.
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Craig – Electing a Parliament and having a majority is all well and good, but I have to reckon that the concept of Justice is not well served by the tyranny of the majority in all things. In particular I tend to doubt that it is well served in this of all things.
As for Dunne’s hypocrisy you have a decent argument, but I don’t recall that the opposing sexes ever signed a treaty and the warfare continues to this day… but Dunne? You probably have the right analysis of him…
respectfully
BJ
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Love yer selective quoting Logix. Try this one on for size:
‘The Royal Commission on the Electoral System in 1985-6 gave considerable thought to the future of the Maori seats. It concluded that separate seats had not helped Maori and that they would achieve better representation through a proportional party-list system. The Commission therefore recommended that if the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system was adopted, the Maori seats should be abolished. ‘
http://www.elections.org.nz/study/history/maori-vote.html
Fact of the matter is so long as National find it hard to court the Maori vote (so they don’t bother), the Maori seats will continue to be a source of friction under a MMP system.
For most of the 20th century Maori people have generally voted for left wing parties. Yet they still remain a very poor minority in NZ. For the last 6 years unemployment has come down and economic growth has been strong yet a Left wing government has failed to close the employment gap between Maori and Europeans (remember that u-turn flipflop on ‘closing the gaps anyone?). I think there is a moral in this story.
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It is apparent though that if the 1853 decision had allocated an equitable number of seats to Maori, the political history of this country may well have been a lot different, for better or for worse I cannot tell.
And if Maori had been voting for right wing parties for much of the last 100 years, can you predict for me the outcome of that?
Maori economic failure has it’s roots in a complex of issues. Maori society is exceedingly class oriented; whakapapa being the critical determinant of your place in the Maori pecking order. This is an aspect of Maori culture us Pakeha’s are fairly blind to. In particular there is a layer of Maori society whose forebears, prior to colonisation were slaves, and whose descendents nowadays still languish at the bottom of the Maori social order, and who form that group of Maori who stubbornly feature in all the worst statistics. Ask any provincial town police sargeant and he will tell you the names of the families who from generation to generation have made a generous contribution to local criminal activity. The names of these same families are also known to the local iwi as having no “whakapapa”, ie they are the descendents of slaves.
One of the escape routes for these people is Sydney. And as Winston Peters has repeatedly stated, they do very well over there, and I would observe that this is at least partly due to their relative freedom from the social oppression visited upon them in this country, by both their own people, and the generally low expectations white New Zealand has of them generally.
And before anyone wants to leap down my throat on this one; I make no claim that this is the whole story, merely an aspect of it that few care to talk about.
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Tihei Mauriora!
Don’t know if anyone posting is from the Waikato, but historically, National/Liberal was the position of Dame TeArikinui, otherwise known as the Maori Queen, and her forbears of the Mahuta family.
Labour hasn’t had all the support, and we’re ignoring Georgina Te Heuheu completely in contemporary times – as are her National party collegues. Maori generally don’t get a lot of traction in the general roll seats, and often Maori roll MP’s get that held against them during the Parliamentary term (anyone remember Tukuirangi Morgan’s undies scandal???) There’s a lot of good reasons for letting this have an entire forum of its own to be debated in, not just to be a sideshow topic for a General Election.
Noo reira, nga mihi ki a taatou noo Waikato, nohora mai
na katie
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did anyone spot that Dunhills TV ads have a little worm going across them and going up and going up – presumably to try and recapture the glory days of 2002 in the minds of the voters.
Dunhill needs to realise that the astonishing last-minute increase in the Disunited No Future party vote in 2002 was bugger all to do with the worm, and bugger all to do with “stopping cannabis law reform” and everything to do with MMP-smart National voters, realising that National couldn’t win on their own, trying (and obviously succeeding) to give Labour another coalition option besides the Greens.
This time, now that National can win the election on their own, no-one is going to switch to Disunited No Future, and Dunhill’s tactics from last time won’t work. Yippeee!!!!
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Soy:
I’ve heard arguments that in cold, hard strategic terms abolishing the Maori seats would hurt National – all those uppity darkies off the reservation and looking for utu in all those blue ribbon seats. I don’t think it’s an entirely convincing argument, but even if it was, for me there’s a principle involved – and I don’t shit can my principles when they’re politically inconvenient.
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People, no matter who they are, deserve to choose who represent them. How do supposedly freedom loving people reconcile the fact that they are going to take away the right to have someone to represent Maori?
Taking away seats from Parliament is a huge constitutional step, and with the level of support the seats enjoy among Maori, a racist one. One more patronising colonial act of disempowerment.
As a Pakeha supporting Tino Rangatiratanga!
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Rachel :
Because removing the Maori seats would have a significant impact on the make-up of Parliament (especially if you consider that the Maori seats tend to go to those of a left-leaning nature).
I suspect that the existence of the Maori seats tends to “ghettoise” the left-leaning Maori vote (if we allow that right-leaning Maori tend to opt for the general roll, to make their votes count more). The result of abolition, as Craig hints, would therefore probably to give more extra seats to the left than are lost.
In any case : in any referendum, it’s clear that there would have to be two electoral colleges (formed by the General and Maori electoral roles), with a majority in both required for any change in the status quo.
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Alistair:
I wasn’t actually suggesting how the make-up of Parliament might change, just that it would, and that a lot of the Maori electorate MPs would remain in Parliament through the list or general electorate seats.
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Ask each party “If the Maori electorate seats did not exist, would you introduce them?”
How would they respond?
United Future would say no. They are the party of inertia.
How would the other parties respond?
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Yellow Peril is dead right. It is naive to think that a referendum in a country where 13% of eligible voters are Maori is a better place to debate Maori represention than a parliament in which 15% of the members are Maori. At least Parliament has a select committee, for what it’s worth. Either way, Maori don’t have the numbers to win in what Pakeha like to think of as a fair democratic process.
And if they lose, guess who gets to decide how many Maori are represented in parliament – the people who put together the party lists (and, less directly, the people who vote for those party lists). Ask Georgina Te Heuheu how well Maori representation is going in her party.
Maori can already increase (or decrease) the number of Maori seats, every five years. They do this by deciding whether or not to enrol on the Maori or general roll. The number of seats increases or decreases depending on the number of Maori who decide to sign on. “If all M?ori electors enrolled on the M?ori roll there could be as many as 13 M?ori seats. If all M?ori enrolled on the General roll, there would be no M?ori seats.” (Electoral Commission website) I think about two thirds have chosen to be on the Maori roll. There’s your referendum.
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You may be right about that, Rachel. Political parties are, for the most part, smart enough to select Maori list candidates in order to get a share of the Maori vote (though National, for one, might have difficulty finding willing candidates, after putting Georgina through the wringer)
This is a fairly recent development (if distant memory serves, the first Maori to be elected to a general seat was a certain Winsome Peters, way back in the Cretaceo-Muldoonian epoch).
But this is beside the point : the question is, in a practical and philosophical sense, one of constitutional principle (even though, obviously, there is no written constitution, and the Maori seats have no organic link to the Treaty). Distinct representation for Maori goes hand in hand with recognition of a specific Maori place in NZ society, through the Treaty. It is no accident that National want to abolish both.
It is perfectly valid for National to campaign on this twin theme. However, any actual change, implemented by a mere majority vote in Parliament, would have no moral legitimacy.
Thankfully, there is no actual prospect of it happening. National would need at least 63 seats to do it (majority with overhang, minus Georgina)
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Alistair (and others),
to abolish the Maori seats National will have to repeal ss 23(3) and 23(4) of the Electoral Act 1993. This section is entrenched. National will require at least 90 votes (assuming no overhang).
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Will : Your hypothetical is only semi-interesting.
You don’t start every new day with a clean slate. Changing the constitution is not to be done lightly (or is that just me getting old and conservative?)
Actually, if the Maori seats had never existed, and we had MMP, I would expect Maori to be somewhat under-represented in Parliament. I would expect that several Maori parties would have tried to enter parliament, and missed the threshold. There might well be a strong case for creating Maori seats, but it would not be a compelling one because (see above).
Anyway, your hypothetical is no more relevant to the current election than debating about what life would be like if Hitler had won WWII.
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Resistantsoy wrote:
How do supposedly freedom loving people reconcile the fact that they are going to take away the right to have someone to represent Maori?
I reply:
Quite easily, Soy. I don’t waste time reconciling myself to false – and utterly absurd – premises.
I am Maori, and have always been on the general roll. I have never voted Labour or New Zealand First, so I wonder in what sense ANY MP from the Maori seats has ever “represented” me? And to coin a phease, Maori Party – NOT IN MY NAME!
Unless I’ve fallen into an alternate universe, nobody is proposing removing the franchise from me or anyone else of Maori descent. So, what’s the reasoning behind your statement, Soy. I have my suspicions, but I find them so utterly offensive that I’d rather not put them into your mouth.
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I don’t believe Dunne has any bottom lines regarding the Maori seats – he’s issued a press release – why would the Greens take anything Mr Dunne says seriously – any explanations?
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alistair,
I agree, “Changing the constitution is not to be done lightly.” As Edge observes it can’t be done lightly in this case.
I don’t accept your proposition that Maori would be “somewhat under-represented in Parliament” if the seats did not exist. Under MMP Maori would be proportionately represented.
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Something many people don’t know/forget is that while the 86 Royal Commission recommended getting rid of the seats, they also recommended abolishing the MMP threshold for ‘Maori’ parties as well.
(it should also be noted that under the RC model the threshold would have been 4% – hello Christians in 1996!)
Now personally I don’t think there should be a threshold at all, and not having one for Maori parties only would be even worse than the status quo.
But I think there is a compelling argument that by getting rid of the Maori seats you actually benefit Maori more than by keeping them. Some of the reasons have been alluded to above.
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Edge – please go back into your cave at the Law school and stop trying to stifle each and every discussion with a quote from the statute books. Get a life, somewhere else in the blog universe, pretty please…
Craig makes the very valid point that Maori enfranchisement is for Maori voters – I don’t tell people how to enrol or how to vote, I just encourage every person to do both, and express their own personal views and beliefs; that is after all, the purpose of elections and referenda, not providing entertainment/intellectual massages for the political populace.
‘-) katie
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Edge and Will, I assume you’re talking about ss 28(3) and (4) – regarding the make-up of the Representation Commission for determining the boundaries of Maori Seats.
If so, your logic is flawed.
The Maori Seats themselves are not entrenched, so a National Government could approach it in two ways. Either remove the Maori Seats and maintain a Representation Commission to decide on the boundaries of the non-existent Maori Seats. Not very tidy, but you’d imagine the meetings would be fairly brief.
Or argue that it is untidy and that the opposition were being stupid insisting on maintaining a Commission to decide on non-existent boundaries and remove the entrenching provision with a straight vote and then remove ss28(3) and (4).
Whatever, there’s no impediment there to a straight vote in Parliament removing the Maori Seats.
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Katie, apologies for statute book references.
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Katie:
Don’t say massage, I’d almost forgotten the traditional campaign cramp right between my shoulder blades…
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Chris, I disagree with you about the lack of a threshold: A threshold is necessary so that a democratic society can have a balance between stable government (which requires that every ideology be given a fair shake, but not certainly every miniscule cause, as would be the case without a threshold( and fair representation:
Incidentally, weren’t thresholds introduced because the Weimar Republic’s lack of a threshold allowed for a certain National Socialist party to get its foot in the Reichstag’s door?
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Interestingly enough, the lack of a 5% threshold in this election would have made no difference to the result.
All the parties that scored between 1.2% (the “natural” threshold for our parliament) and 5% won at least one electorate seat, which validated their party votes.
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