Williams ArenaARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): The speech from the previous member Cameron Brewer when he tries to claim that National MPs who have contributed to this debate want more Māori representation at local bodies and want more expertise around the local council table when it comes to iwi relationships is pretty rich when that member sat on a local board I believe it was the Rodney local board in a year where I as the general counsel for Ngāti Whātua o Kaipara was seeking to establish with that board a relationship agreement between the board and the iwi and it was blocked over and over. That local board could not agree with its local iwi to enter into an agreement to work together. That is the posture of this Government to come to this House and say Oh we want success for Māori we want Māori to be succeeding and thriving but we won't let them around the council table and we certainly won't have Te Tiriti o Waitangi enshrined in our legislation because that would be a step too far." It would be a step too far to tell te Iwi Māori to tell rangatahi Māori of Aotearoa that their concerns are of importance to this House that their concerns are of importance at a local government level and that they deserve to be enshrined!This debate has been complicated by a number of constitutional issues. But it really is simple that in 2021 Labour removed the barrier to democratically elected councils to determine whether or not around the council table they saw fit to establish Māori wards. These democratic decisions are being overridden by a central government who is determined not to let local governments make that decision for themselves in the normal way that councils use to determine their representation processes. Since that law was enacted 45 councils have elected to have a Māori ward. The Government comes to this House and they say that there is a choice for local councils but the choice is that they can either scrap Māori wards that exist or send them to a binding referendum that they know will be ugly because these politics are ugly. Do you know why these politics are so ugly? It's because we have parties on that side of the House who are drumming up an ugly divisive debate that has no place in Aotearoa which is imported from US politics which is about kicking people when they're down—in this case kicking Māori. But it could be anything. It could be kicking renters when they're down by taking away 90-day no-cause elections. It could be kicking disability communities when they're down by taking away the very entitlements they rely upon. This Government is on a collision course to take it out on the people who cannot fight back and it's shameful.It's shameful that we are having a debate in this House today which has been couched in terms of re-democratising of making things better for the communities when in fact we have mayors around the country saying to the Government that this will drum up the kind of rhetoric in their communities that they do not want to oversee that this is something which mayors in Aotearoa are saying will be hurtful and divisive and undermine social cohesion in Aotearoa. We should listen to them. Instead the ACT Party members have come to this House today and called those mayors "activist mayors". At the same time as they think that they're championing democracy they're also using their parliamentary privilege to sledge every mayor who dared to have an opinion about democracy in their local area.You would laugh Mr Speaker if this were at all funny but this is the reality that rangatahi Māori in Aotearoa have to grow up with. It is a real shame that we have a Government in power which is determined to use its legislative power to use the politics of division in Aotearoa to garner the votes of people who would see Māori progress set back. I can tell you Mr Speaker that Labour will stick up for Māori; it will stick up for those "activist mayors" who are worried about the undermining of social cohesion in their cities and regions who have been democratically elected to represent people's interests at a local level; and we will stick up for those outcomes that we see when we have more Māori representatives around the council table—more cohesion more expertise in te taiao and the representation of Māori people around the council table because that can only be a good thing. That is why we should not vote for this bill."