Whose race card is this anyway? Judith Collins and David Seymour both appear to have found the same wedge issue
ANALYSIS: You would be forgiven for not having heard of the He Puapua report before the weekend.
Indeed, many in the Government who commissioned it don't appear to have given it much thought. Minister for Treaty Negotiations Andrew Little hasn’t read it himself.
Yet it dominated Question Time on Tuesday, after National leader Judith Collins made the “divisive report” the centrepiece of a big political speech on Saturday.
So what on earth is it?
He Puapua – literally “a break” – is an obscure report from a working group commissioned by this Government in 2019 on how Māori could take on more governing.
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The aim of the report was to create some kind of long-term plan to meet a UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples signed onto by the National-led Government in 2010. (It has been very politically useful to the current Government that National began this process.)
The report itself proposes an ambitious set of possible constitutional changes including a Māori upper house of Parliament and a separate court and justice system for Māori.
According to the Government, none of this is anywhere near Government policy. Indeed, it hasn’t even been to Cabinet yet – although Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson has prepared a draft paper on it.
But Collins has seized on the report as the foundation to a wider argument she's been making about the “separatist” agenda of the Government ever since Little proposed setting up a Māori Health Authority; a skeleton key to the Government’s plans that has been hiding in almost plain sight this whole time.
“This divisive government document spells out a clear vision for New Zealand in 2040 under a ‘two systems’ Treaty view. It includes two systems for health, two systems of justice,” Collins said on Saturday.
Collins rejects that this isn’t Government policy yet – arguing that the Māori Health Authority and the end to citizen-initiated referendums on Māori wards showed the Government was already implementing it by stealth.
Health Minister Little has in turn rejected that take – arguing he hadn’t read the report and based the Māori Health Authority on the appalling difference in health outcomes for Māori , who die about seven years earlier than non-Māori on average. He also points to the broader Treaty imperative of “partnership” between the Crown and Māori, which strays us into the territory Collins is complaining about.
Collins’ move to take National back into this very racialised area of politics has drawn criticism from many, including on the right of politics. Ben Thomas, a former press secretary to National Party Treaty Negotiations Minister Christopher Finlayson, said Collins had fallen for the “dangerous lure of ‘one law for all rhetoric’” – which had failed to elect Don Brash when he had tried it in 2004 with his Orewa speech.
Of course, the famous speech by Brash, decrying “racial separatism” in similar terms, did not see him elected – but it did see him shoot up in the polls, especially as he consolidated some of the vote on the right.
Collins could really use some movement in the polls. It’s a long way until the next election, so she doesn't need to overtake Labour right away, but getting out of the dreaded 20s would provide her leadership with stability from the constant rumours.
At some point if she wants to be PM, Collins would need to win over some votes from Labour – it won 50 per cent of the vote last October – but for now, she would make do with taking a couple of points off the ACT Party, who had 7.6 per cent of the vote last year and appear to still be polling well.
ACT voters are definitely more likely to be susceptible to racialised politics than the average voter. Indeed, National appears to be a bit late to the party on this very report. ACT first put out a press release on the report on April 14, long before Collins’ speech, and even got Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to basically rule out the Māori Parliament idea in Question Time.
The tension between these two parties was evident at the first Question Time back after a long break on Tuesday. By dint of luck, Seymour started questioning Ardern on the matter before Collins got her chance. By the time Collins started questioning her the obvious questions on the actual document had already been traversed, so Collins stuck solely to the Māori Health Authority itself.
It isn’t the end of the world for Collins that ACT is making the same argument as her. She gets a bigger megaphone as leader of the opposition – with weekly media slots on the big networks and generally a lot more attention paid to whatever she says.
But in Parliament itself Seymour often commands Question Time just as much as Collins. On the TV news the attack will be sold as coming from “National and ACT” – not just National. And Seymour has latitude to go far further in his attacks than a leader of a bigger party does – which could actually earn him more media attention. He also risks far less than Collins with this move. There are not a lot of current ACT voters who are likely to be turned off by this kind of politics, but there definitely could be some National voters who are – or potential ones. New Zealand in 2021 is not quite New Zealand in 2004.
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