Naylor JonoJONO NAYLOR (National): Ā tēnā koe e Te Mana Whakawā tēna koutou ōku hoa o ngā whare Pāremata.[And so acknowledgments to you Mr Deputy Speaker and to my colleagues of the houses of Parliament.]It is a great pleasure to be able get up and make a contribution on this bill. I have always had a little bit of a fascination with oaths and declarations: as a mayor I used to oversee a lot of people taking their oath of affirmation or otherwise during citizenship ceremonies; and in fact even going back to being a social worker from having to go into court and give evidence and having to swear on the Bible. The good book has been mentioned by my colleague Pita Paraone already. The thing that has always fascinated me actually about oaths and declarations is that in the very Bible that people swear on often there is the Book of James chapter 5 verse 12 which says: Above all my brothers and sisters do not swear—not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. Just let your yes be yes and your no be no." So ironically even swearing on the Bible is kind of counter to what it says in the Bible but that is OK. That is just by the by—a little bit of a sidetrack. I am sure we can have the theological debate about the rights or wrongs of that argument afterwards. But there have always been views about oaths and declarations and the various aspects of them and what is appropriate and what is not appropriate when making those oaths. When I first heard of this idea I thought perhaps this has some merit. There is no doubt that the Treaty of Waitangi actually has a very very special and significant place in New Zealand's history. No one is doubting that. No one is doubting that it was significant and that it is important that we take cognisance of it. As the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations has said already this evening he has spent a good part of his time here in that role settling some of those grievances that are around the Treaty of Waitangi. So absolutely is this Government committed to the Treaty of Waitangi? Yes. Is it committed to settling grievances around it? Yes it is. Is it committed to ensuring that our laws and our statutes reflect aspects of the Treaty of Waitangi? Absolutely. But where I started to come unravelled in my thinking—some of these people think I was coming unravelled in my thinking about this—and where it was that I actually started to have some doubts about this was the idea the notion that people would have an ability to make an oath in accordance with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. With all due respect to the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations and Attorney-General who obviously has a very clear understanding of the principles actually there are a lot of people who do not. In fact I was one of those people and probably still am to a certain degree. In the year 1995 I took probably what was my most interesting ever university paper. It was 52.55 and something in the title referred to the Treaty of Waitangi. It was taken by Sir Mason Durie who was the best lecturer I ever had. I had to do a very concise assignment one day on the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. The difficulty I had at the time was choosing what principles to do. Because it was only to be concise I elected to use the three that were highlighted in the Royal Commission on Social Policy of 1988 and these are the ones that are often commonly accepted by people: Partnership Protection and Participation. So I focused my essay on those three. Well I got a C+ and not from Sir Mason Durie but from the guy who was the tutor for that paper. But anyway I got a C+. Thankfully I made up for it at the end of the year because I got an A-. I got marked down because I picked only those three principles. The issue I have with this bill is not the importance of the Treaty of Waitangi in our society. It is important. It is the vagaries and the lack of understanding by the general populace of what is meant by the principles. There have been some good arguments put forward as to why this bill is not necessary. I support those arguments and believe that going forward we do not need to incorporate this. We need to have oaths and affirmations and declarations that are easily understood they are black and white and they have no level of ambiguity and so for those reasons I and this side of the House will be voting against this bill."