Abel SteveSTEVE ABEL (Green): I'll take it. Thank you.Hon Willie Jackson: Made a big impression on you clearly!STEVE ABEL: Clearly! The incoherence of this Government that purports to believe in local democracy and speaks in terms of rights-based frameworks—we hear the term equality" used. Well an equality that relies on taking rights from one group—iwi Māori—to somehow make us all more equal is snake-oil equality. We are all the poorer for it. By saying that a majority can vote on the rights of a minority or that a majority can vote on indigenous rights betrays a profound lack of understanding of basic democratic principles.This law is not democracy; it is the tyranny of the majority. The greatest unspoken majority in the current structure of our local democracy is the ratepayer—the ratepayer who has multiple votes potentially. What is being done to correct that utter imbalance of your supposed advocacy for one person one vote?Why do we have a bill of rights? We have a bill of rights because it has been well understood for centuries in the formulations of democracies across the world that there was a very evident problem with democracy: the tyranny of the majority—the tyranny of the majority. It is impossible by a purely majority rule to protect minority interests and indeed persecution of minorities becomes nearly inevitable if you allow that tyranny. Therefore all functional democracy have bills of rights to guard against the tyranny of the majority.What's more: we have something exceptional in this country even beyond the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. We uniquely have a founding agreement that recognises the right to self-determination of tangata whenua Māori. That is something we should be profoundly proud of. Indeed Te Tiriti o Waitangi—in the words of Moana Jackson and you'll hear me say it time and again—is a profound and visionary base on which to build a country. If we are to uphold that founding agreement we must listen to the means by which Māori wish to express their self-determination and if that means as Māori wards then we must listen to that. That is the fulfilment of our agreement.It is the poisonous untruth that permeates the programme of this anti-Māori Government: that by nullifying Māori rights we make us all the better; we make us somehow more equal. It is a profound untruth and a poisonous divisive idea. My colleague talks of bringing the country closer together; well it doesn't come by dishonouring that founding agreement. That is not a way to bring the country closer together—by dishonouring and nullifying that founding agreement. It doesn't come by trampling on the relationship between the Crown and iwi Māori. It doesn't come by that. It doesn't come by showing disrespect to the means of self-determination that Māori express. That is not how you bring the country closer together. It comes by listening by respecting by honouring the relationship by realising that that honouring is a profoundly—[Interruption]By honouring that relationship we have the pathway to profoundly coherent nationhood. We do not have that pathway by dishonouring it.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): Mr Abel could you just mention the bill before you finish once.STEVE ABEL: The Māori wards bill? I have mentioned the Māori wards. Yes I have mentioned it. Thank you Mr Speaker."