The Treaty Principles Bill and the Erasure of History
News that potentially tens of thousands of submissions made on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill may not be processed in time to be considered by Parliament’s Justice Committee and therefore will not form part of the public record is deeply concerning on multiple fronts. In excess of 300,000 submissions were received on the Bill, shattering previous records. But each submission needs to be checked by parliamentary staff to ensure it complies with requirements before it can be formally accepted and received, and the indications are that large numbers will remain unprocessed by the committee’s 14 May 2025 deadline to report back to the House. Newsroom reports that those unprocessed submissions will have no formal status unless Parliament passes a resolution to have them archived.
The Prime Minister and others may declare themselves relaxed about this prospect. But they should not be. As legal scholars have noted, in our parliamentary system of ‘unbridled power’, members of the public have almost no formal input into law-making processes between elections. One of the few mechanisms available to them is to make a submission to a select committee. Record numbers of New Zealanders chose to do so with respect to the Treaty Principles Bill. Now they are being given the clear message that their opinions are unimportant and can safely be discarded and ignored. And this comes after only a small fraction (542) of the more than 15,000 people who indicated they wished to speak to their written submissions were given the opportunity to do so.
Besides the contempt for basic democratic norms that this outcome would represent, it would also be concerning from another perspective. If the submissions are not processed and don’t form part of the official record then they would not be available to researchers to read and consider. In the normal course of events, evidence given before parliamentary select committees is, after a period of time, lodged with Archives New Zealand for future generations to access. I spend much time reading nineteenth-century evidence given before the very same Justice Committee (or the Native Affairs Committee, now the Māori Affairs Committee).
It is always a fraught exercise to predict what future historians might be interested in. But it is plausible to imagine that a Bill which attracted a record number of public submissions, and which drew what might also have been a record number of people for the final day of the hīkoi mō te Tiriti to Wellington in November 2024, could well appeal to at least some researchers as a topic for future investigation. The submissions would probably say a lot about early twenty-first century Aotearoa New Zealand.
On some levels it is not difficult to understand why there might be a desire to be done with the Treaty Principles Bill as soon as possible. It is a Bill which the Waitangi Tribunal concluded would constitute ‘the worst, most comprehensive breach of the Treaty/te Tiriti in modern times’ if passed. But having agreed to the Bill’s introduction, the government should now ensure the submissions received on it form part of the official record.
Aku mihi
Vincent O’Malley