Staying Together

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More than 40,000 people protested in New Zealand’s capital Tuesday against a bill that would reinterpret the country’s founding document, signed in 1840, between the British Crown and Māori chiefs, with critics saying it would erode the rights of the Indigenous community, Al Jazeera reported.

The demonstrators marched in Wellington, dressed in traditional attire and carrying traditional Māori weapons and the Indigenous group’s national flag.

Tuesday’s demonstrations follow a nine-day march that began last week in the country’s far north in opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill introduced earlier this month by the libertarian ACT New Zealand party.

The draft law stipulates that New Zealand should reinterpret and legally define the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. This foundational agreement grants Māori tribes broad rights to keep their lands and still guides legislation and policy today.

Decades of rulings by courts and a separate Māori tribunal have tended to expand the rights and privileges of the Indigenous group, which makes up around 20 percent of New Zealand’s population of 5.3 million people, the BBC added.

But the ACT party – a partner in New Zealand’s coalition – said the treaty’s core values have led to racial divisions, not unity.

Critics, including New Zealand’s former leaders and Indigenous rights groups, feared that the bill would take rights away from the Māori. Others also expressed concern that the proposed legislation would reverse years of policies aimed at empowering the community, which has higher rates of poverty and incarceration and poorer health outcomes than the broader population.

Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, co-leader of Te Pāti Māori (Māori Party), told the BBC that the governing coalition is trying “to divide an otherwise progressive country and it’s really embarrassing.”

While ACT’s two coalition partners have said they will support the bill in its first three readings, they will not pass it into law.

Among them was Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, who said, “We don’t think through the stroke of a pen you go rewrite 184 years of debate and discussion.”