Coffey TamatiTAMATI COFFEY (Labour—Waiariki): Madam Speaker thank you for this. I've been sitting here actually listening to everybody's speeches in the House tonight and it's gotten me quite emotional actually—emotional because this is a deep issue. This isn't a surface kind of issue. Issues of equality in New Zealand run deep. Issues of equity for Māori run really deep. In fact we in this House should be reminded by all of the wreaths that sit around our House looking down on us from all of those people the men and women that went away to war especially those Māori that fought in those wars. Why did they fight in those wars? They fought in them because that was the price of citizenship. That was the price that they needed to pay to ensure that their tamariki mokopuna were looked after by this Government—this Government. No other Government; our Government. They fought in those wars they died in those wars and we have them hanging around our Chamber here as constant reminders of that price that they paid. Some paid the ultimate price of citizenship.It absolutely frustrates me that we stand in this House week after week giving apologies to iwi that come through here to hapū that have been wrong done by and we apologise to them and we give them the good talks about how we're moving forward together and then on a day like this we're actually standing here talking about an issue which seems so fundamentally simple in its logic: the thought that if we have general seats that are entrenched actually our Māori seats should be entrenched too. So everybody in this House that today is going to be voting against this bill should hang their head in shame. They should absolutely hang their head in shame and they should be reminded every time they get up and they spiel on about partnership in this country that actually they voted against true partnership. They voted against tino rangatiratanga. They voted against mana motuhake. So that's the thing that I've been thinking about as I've been listening to these speeches.Some of the rhetoric from the Opposition talking about how many Māori are moving off the Māori seats they're moving into the general seats—let's not ignore the fact that it was actually National Party policy not too long ago to get rid of the Māori seats. So does this smack of that? It probably does. Let's just acknowledge that fact that it was a policy of their party not too long ago to actually get rid of the Māori seats and today it looks like they're one step closer to actually ensuring that we're going to continue to not have that equity in our country.The irony of this whole situation is that these seats the very seats that we're sitting in today are actually a completely foreign construct. They are a foreign construct that was brought in from a country a long way away and we dealt with that as Māori people. We rose to the challenge. We saw our Māori seats as the thing that was going to bring us a guaranteed voice in this Parliament. So that's why we participated in that system. But is it an equal system? Well obviously not. If we're standing here in 2019 having had this bill come through the House before in many iterations—and let me just spell them out because it was the Hon Mita Ririnui the previous MP for the Waiariki that brought this bill to the House first. It was then handed to the late Parekura Horomia. It was then handed to again the Waiariki MP Te Ururoa Flavell and it's my colleague here Rino Tirikatene that's bringing this to the House. Why? Because it's logical. Why? Because actually anything that our general seats have our Māori seat should absolutely have too and that doesn't happen.For all the arguments that the Opposition are coming up with I'll tell you that one thing they're not talking about is that partnership that partnership that this country is supposedly founded on the partnership that they're continuing to ignore by not supporting this bill by not putting it through today. Our Māori seats are about the whakapapa of our people. We've had some great people standing in our Māori seats coming through this Parliament and I'm sure that they would've thought that by 2019 we would've had equity when it came to the entrenchment of our parliamentary seats. I'm sure that they would be rolling over in their graves looking back thinking that actually we're still standing here in 2019 disappointed as all hell hoping that really one day we get that partnership that they fought for the reason that they came into this parliamentary House. It's still not happening and it's 2019.I commend this bill to the House and I really hope that the Opposition take a good hard look at themselves.