Seymour’s principles of privatisation

David Seymour’s Treaty principles bill is now in select committee phase, and open for submissions.

National and New Zealand First claim they won’t support it going further, but public opposition will need to be clear and overwhelming to ensure it doesn’t proceed.

If the bill went to referendum, current polling suggests it would have a good chance of passing, with 36 percent of the public supporting redefining the Treaty principles, and 30 percent undecided.

For those opposed, there are a few important things to consider, writes Ryan Ward.

 

We can expect an all-out propaganda campaign in favour of the bill.

This will be led by right-wing lobbying groups like Hobson’s Pledge, the Taxpayer’s Union, Groundswell, and others. Hobson’s Pledge has already indicated they have tens of thousands of submissions in favour of the bill ready to go and will be soliciting many more. They and other lobbying groups will also blitz the media with ads and messaging in favour of the bill.

David Seymour has been laying the groundwork for this campaign all along. His consistent and careful messaging surrounding the bill has framed its goal as providing equal rights to all New Zealanders, rather than giving special rights to different groups depending on their ancestry.

He has repeated this message over and over. According to Seymour, it’s about democracy and fairness.

This political messaging will be extremely difficult to counter using the predominant oppositional messaging which focuses on the bill’s racism or ignorant interpretation of the translation or meaning of the Treaty.

It will not be enough to loudly proclaim that the bill is racist toward Māori (it is very much so) or that Seymour is ignorant of the true meaning of the Treaty (he is not).

As evidenced by his dismissal of expert opinion and the haka and protest in parliament, and his minimisation of the hīkoi last week (possibly the largest protest in New Zealand’s history), Seymour is unmoved by factual argument or large shows of public disapproval. (A petition against his bill currently has just over 290,000 signatures, more than the 246,000 people who supported Act in the last election.)

By framing his bill in terms of “equality for all”, David Seymour has shrewdly tapped into the existing racial biases that have successfully torpedoed recent attempts to provide more representation and equity for Māori.

Much of the campaign messaging in the last election by Act, National, and New Zealand First railed against ideas of “co-governance” and unequal treatment of Māori at the expense of the rest of New Zealand. Seymour and his backers will continue to use this divisive rhetoric to turn the public against Māori and in favour of the bill. The recent Voice referendum in Australia and our own recent election results indicate that the public is very vulnerable to this type of dishonest and divisive political messaging.

Getting sucked into the race-war rhetoric that Seymour and his backers are trafficking in has been a losing strategy so far. It puts the opposition on the defensive: the disingenuous arguments about equality for all New Zealanders seem to place Seymour and his bill on an obvious moral high ground and are very difficult to counter effectively.

As Seymour said at the bill’s first reading: “The challenge for people who oppose this bill is to explain why they are so opposed to those basic principles.” We already know how difficult it is to win against such disingenuous framing.

Those opposing the bill need to find another political message that will resonate with the public. A simple message that can’t be co-opted by leveraging entrenched racial biases and relying on the public to understand complex legal and translational arguments.

A recent editorial in the Spinoff by Rupert O’Brien pulls the curtain back on Seymour’s dissembling language of equality and provides an offensive rather than a defensive oppositional rhetorical strategy.

O’Brien notes that while most of the discussion and analysis of the bill has been related to whether it accurately interprets the meaning of Te Tiriti, the real motive behind the bill is related to Act and its backers’ long-term strategy of deregulating business and opening up New Zealand to corporate investment, extraction, and exploitation.

As O’Brien writes, Act and their benefactors “know that it [Te Tiriti] stands as a major obstacle in their goal of deregulation and promoting laissez-faire economics.”

“They aim to achieve deregulation by, in part, turning government departments into state-owned enterprises (corporatising) and subsequently selling these as going concerns on the private market (privatising) . . .

“The Treaty principles have proved a significant roadblock to both corporatisation and privatisation in the past and present a clear threat to any plans of future development of public assets to the private sector.”

This is likely the real, though unspoken, reason that Seymour and his backers are pushing so hard to redefine the Treaty principles. By framing the bill as a means for equality for all New Zealanders, and then inflaming the race-war rhetoric that results from the justified outrage from Māori, Seymour can avoid discussing the real reasons behind the bill and his ties to domestic and international corporate interests that will profit handsomely from opening up Aotearoa to unregulated corporate development. Industries such as gas and mining have been long stymied by the legal interpretation and enforcement of the Treaty.

Focusing on the race war stops the public from “following the money”, as the saying goes.

But the money has been followed. And it leads to domestic and international right-wing lobbying and funding groups whose main goal is to enact policy that results in upwards wealth transfer and corporate exploitation. Many of Act’s largest donors are individuals such as Graeme Hart and the Gibbs family, who profited handsomely from the privatisation of New Zealand’s public sector in the 1990s under National.

There is a reason why Seymour desperately wants to keep the real motivations for his Treaty principles bill secret. The public generally don’t look favourably on politicians and political agendas that are blatantly in favour of corporate interests at the expense of the rest of us. If the real reason for the bill were made clear and widely known, the current framing would crumble, and the equality-race-war rhetoric would no longer likely be an effective strategy to win public support for the bill.

This is why an oppositional strategy focused only on the race-war rhetoric will fail, and why those opposing the bill should be taking every opportunity to hammer home to the public the corporate ties held by Seymour and his backers and their intention to extract Aotearoa’s resources and siphon the profits to the wealthy here in New Zealand and to international corporations.

It’s not about equality, it’s about opening up New Zealand to corporate exploitation.

By making this crystal clear to the public, and focusing relentlessly on a simple oppositional message, we can unite Aotearoa and turn the tide against Seymour and his reinterpretation of the Treaty principles.

 

Ryan Ward is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago.

E-Tangata, 2024