When Māori Party MP Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke stood up in the New Zealand parliament chamber, began performing the haka, and ripped up the law that now divides the country, the challenge was directed at one man.

The Maori Party has posed challenges to parliament before, and Clarke used his first speech to parliament to perform the haka in January, but this was different.

The upheavals in New Zealand society over the past year are indeed continuing to this day.

Almost a year ago, New Zealand’s right-wing bloc coalition government agreed to allow junior party leader David Seymour to draft a controversial piece of legislation called the Treaty Principles Bill.

It was this coalition agreement that allowed Prime Minister Christopher Luxon of the New Zealand National Party to take office.

The Treaty Principles Bill was an issue Seymour campaigned on before he and the ACT Party won 8.64 per cent of the vote.

Although his coalition partners allowed him to draft the bill, they said they would not support its passage into law.

All other parties in parliament also oppose the bill, including Labour, the Greens and the Maori Party.

There is currently no political path forward for Seymour’s bill, and he has known this since February, when the prime minister sidelined the National Party, which backed the bill beyond the committee stage.

Still, the bill has been drafted, tabled in parliament, and is not expected to be voted down and ultimately defeated until next year.

New Zealand, meanwhile, will see more protests over a bill that a prominent former attorney-general described as “divisive, going nowhere” and “really should have been stoned dead a few months ago”.

The story behind Clarke’s protest

The document at the center of the debate is New Zealand’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi.

The Treaty is an agreement between Maori and the Crown that promises to protect Maori treasures.

It was signed in 1840 and was neglected for a long time. But for the last 50 years, New Zealand has been trying to come to terms with the purpose of this agreement in modern life.

This was a bipartisan project.

As Luxon said this week: “Treaty issues are complex; they have been negotiated, debated, debated for over 184 years.”

“It would be simplistic to assume that you can solve all this with the stroke of a pen.”

This was the harshest speech the Prime Minister has ever made on a draft law that he himself has allowed to exist.

Although the Treaty of Waitangi is not legally binding, after decades of advocacy, many laws protecting Maori rights now refer to it and there is a tribunal that hears cases regarding the interpretation of the treaty.

Seymour, himself a Maori citizen, has proposed a bill that would reinterpret who the Treaty of Waitangi applies to. He wants the agreement to apply to all New Zealanders, not just Maori, so all Kiwis will have the same rights and privileges.

The idea sparked protests for a year, and when the full version of the draft bill was introduced to parliament the Maori Party was ready to challenge both the bill itself and its creator.

“Our sense was that every person within our party has a role to play,” Māori Party co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer told the ABC.

“It will be Hana’s generation that will have to clean up this mess… so it was only fitting that Hana be the one to lead the way.”

The Maori Party received 3.08 per cent of the vote at the last election, but committed six out of seven voters to Maori representation.

Ngarewa-Packer said this gave her party a mandate.

“We’re just doing what our people put us there to do,” he said.

“We had to be deliberate. We gave the speaker every chance with multiple points of order, asking and requesting that this debate be referred to the Waitangi Tribunal, so we used all the tools at our disposal.”

He said the protest was a rejection of the idea of ​​having the Treaty of Waitangi debated in parliament.

“The Tiriti (treaty) and the tiriti debate is something that belongs solely to Maori iwi and hapu (tribes) chiefs and the Crown,” Ngarewa-Packer said.

Following Clarke’s lead, Ngarewa-Packer and fellow co-leader Rawiri Waititi directed their challenge to Seymour, who was also in the room.

But the Maori Party was joined by other opposition parties and people in the public gallery.

Speaker Gerry Brownlee eventually suspended the session, cleared the gallery and gave Clarke a penalty, meaning he could not return for 24 hours.

But in the end, MPs voted and the prime minister fulfilled his promise to Seymour during coalition talks and the bill was passed on first reading.

Members of the Labor Party, the Greens and the Maori Party did not support it.

Asked whether the controversy and impact on New Zealand would be worth it, given the slim likelihood of the Treaty Principles Bill going any further, Seymour told the ABC: “Not a single person, Maori or non-Maori, would be harmed by this bill.”

“What has caused division is successive governments’ treatment of New Zealanders based on their ethnicity, which is the problem the Treaty Principles Bill seeks to solve,” he said in a statement. he said.

“It commits every New Zealander to the equal enjoyment of the same fundamental human rights. The challenge for those opposing this bill is to explain why they are so opposed to these fundamental principles.”

For those opposed, this interpretation would reduce the rights granted to Māori by their ancestors who negotiated the treaty with the Crown nearly 200 years ago.

It is worth noting that the Treaty Principles Bill enters an environment where Maori policies are in decline as the Luxon government changes its approach to issues such as language, health and land management.

‘Congratulations David Seymour’

Luxon could not escape impeachment in the House this week; Former Labor prime minister Chris Hipkins and Greens leaders pressed him on how debate on a bill that would ultimately fail could have been allowed to get this far.

Ngarewa-Packer said it was essential to resist the bill, but the political reality made the debate difficult to bear.

“The hardest thing, actually, is knowing that the prime minister is prepared to have this debate and that this disgusting division is coming at us for nothing,” he said.

“We actually have to fight and do it all in vain.”

Former National Attorney General and Minister of Treaty Relations Christopher Finlayson said Seymour was “looking for a problem where there was no problem” and should have shut down Luxon’s bill long ago.

He also said the old National Party would not do the coalition deal that brought New Zealand to this point.

“I would simply say… David, you are not going to pass this legislation,” Finlayson said.

“And I know what John Key would do if he threw a tantrum and said, ‘Oh, I’ll sit across the rows.’

“He would say, ‘Go and sit on the opposite rows.’ In the next election, I will personally be against you and destroy you.”

Former New Zealand Prime Minister John Key once warned that if any government went after Maori voters it would be “a hikoi from hell”.

For Māori, the Treaty of Waitangi is the ultimate red line and Finlayson said he could see that the Treaty Principles Bill had opened a wound that really did not need to be touched.

“Congratulations, David Seymour,” he said.

“We don’t need this nonsense in this country and I thought we were beyond that, but like I said, congratulations David. You’ve really created a very unfortunate nightmare, how do we get out of this and how do we solve (it’s) going to take a lot of statesmanship.”

The division at home will be visible again on the streets of New Zealand as another major moment of protest approaches.

A hikoi, or protest march, is underway in New Zealand, with tens of thousands of people expected to reach the steps of parliament on Tuesday.

The Treaty Principles Bill may be doomed to fail, but the path forward for race relations in New Zealand is now much less clear.