Why David Seymour Is Wrong.

And why denying history will not make us a better nation.

In his State of the Nation speech in January of this year David Seymour spelled out why he is advancing his politically doomed Treaty Principles Bill, the core of which lies in the two following paragraphs from it.

“If you believe that the Treaty is a partnership between races, then you have to believe that tangata whenua have different rights and duties in New Zealand from tangata Tiriti. And that means people get different positions in government, they get treated differently in the workplace, they get treated differently based on who their ancestors were, not on what they do today and the character of their own behaviour.

Or you can believe that we are all equal and that each of us should have a chance and a choice in life to be the best that we can. My belief is that the latter way is the only way forward for any society. Every time we say that people have different rights based on ancestry, we breed resentment. And more importantly, we create the idea that which group you're a member of is more important than your basic value as a person.”

OK, so, are we “all equal” and should “ each of us “ have a chance in life  and a choice of life to be the best we can?”  Yes. Absolutely.

But that does that mean we are all made the same and get the same start in life?  No.

We all have different ancestries that have not only helped shape who we are today but, in many instances, have wired in a lot of our life chances.

I was born in Scotland . My last name, Bruce, tells you my clan or iwi. Anyone who knows anything about the history of Scotland knows that for a very long time its people were oppressed by the conquering English and kept poor by depriving them of their land ( the ‘Clearances’) their natural resources and the all the other devices of oppression.

But the Scottish people did not abandon their identity. For more than 300 years they fought with cultural and political defiance to keep it.

Finally in 1997, there was a referendum where the Scottish people voted for Scotland to regain much of the independence it lost in 1707 and once again have its own parliament.

So, now on the island nation of Britain the indigenous people of Scotland have special rights because of their ancestry.

On the island nation of Aotearoa New Zealand Māori also have special rights as guaranteed by the Treaty of Waitangi, but which were undermined by colonisation and the people impoverished by the taking of their lands and the other resource eroding strategies of invasion. Rights that have been slowly returned to them.

So while I can agree we are “ all equal and that each of us should have a chance in life  and a choice of life to be the best we can,”  we do not all start from the same place in life and I can hardly be the best human I can be by pretending the rights guaranteed by law to others do not exist, and that I don’t know the difference between equality and equity (fairness).

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