Franks Stephen: Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Deletion Bill — First Reading 
Franks Stephen: Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Deletion Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:626;Page:21175] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 I am very glad to rise for the ACT party and announce that we will be voting for this bill which will be no surprise. This bill of course is the signal of the end of an era. This bill is the end of the treaty era. This bill together with Peter Dunne’s bill to change the name of the Treaty of Waitangi says an awful lot more than just getting rid of the spurious principles. The reason why we make the same arguments about the principles and about why the name Treaty of Waitangi no longer has any magic is that the treaty era is finished. It might take a few years before the last sorry dregs disappear but the era is over when this Parliament is now being reported as actively debating what New Zealanders have been speaking about for 20 years in the pub in their living rooms and over dinner while the politicians in a cosy consensus between National and Labour pretended that it was not happening. 
That cosy consensus of course included New Zealand First. When Derek Quigley introduced his bill in 1998 to put a time limit on claims every party in this House howled “racist” at him. Now it is official policy. One of the amusing things about Mr Peters’ bill and it needs an awful lot of work in a select committee but we will look forward to that task would be to read through the list of enactments from which he needs to repeal sections that refer to the so-called treaty principles. Nearly all of those more recent bills are bills that New Zealand First has voted for. Only one party in the House has not voted for them and we have been consistent in our principles—that is that there is no such thing as a treaty principle. We have voted against almost every one of the recent bills that Mr Peters has now listed for revocation including some enacted as recently as this Parliament. 
Just a month ago New Zealand First voted for a bill that contained references to the treaty principles. New Zealand First had its own arguments for doing that and they were not bad arguments. But if New Zealand First were really standing for principle its message would have been very straightforward: “We don’t believe in these principles.” New Zealand First should have said: “We don’t believe in them any more than we believe in this fanciful partnership.” Sadly the bill introduced by Mr Peters does not do anything about this mythical partnership created by the courts. I pity the judges who were forced to create something out of the deliberately fuzzy and meaningless words that Parliament inserted as a compromise between David Lange and Tainui at the time of the Coalcorp case. The judges had to do something so they created this nonsense partnership. They talked about the living document; the spirit of the treaty. They invented fanciful principles of good faith between partners as if we were in a partnership between the leaders of a white race and the leaders of a brown race. 
New Zealand left that scenario in 1840. Now he iwi tahi tatou—now we are one people. At the Kohimarama conference only 20 years later that sentiment was repeated by the chiefs—one people. For 30 years in this House politicians from the two major parties have been deliberately creating political capital out of fostering the idea that there was a future for us in pretending that we could discern race difference. 
This is a very significant bill. It is hopelessly badly drafted. It repeals whole chunks of sections. It does not even say what a provision is. A provision that contains a reference to treaty principles is being repealed instead of trying to be replaced with something more meaningful so we would see whole regulations just disappear. This bill is a political statement. ACT will be looking forward to turning it into good law in select committee.