Protesters, that is. Gathered in front of Parliament to demonstrate their opposition to the then Labour government’s foreshore and seabed legislation.
Twenty years later, on Tuesday, November 19, 2024, the number was 42,000 — a truly vast crowd spilling out of Parliament grounds and into the surrounding streets. This makes the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which began at the tip of the North Island, and the tail of the South Island, nine days earlier on November 11, one of the largest demonstrations in New Zealand’s political history.
On the surface, David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill seems too puny a thing to have provoked such an extraordinary outpouring of opposition.
After all, no party represented in the House — apart from Act New Zealand — is committed to supporting the Bill beyond its second-reading debate.
Those determined to prevent the Treaty Principles Bill from becoming law — thereby precipitating a binding referendum on its content — have already won.
How, then, is it possible that a Bill with just six months left to live has inspired 42,000 mostly Māori New Zealanders to gather outside the parliamentary complex to demand its instant demise? If they’ve already won — why are they still fighting?
They are still fighting because they know that Seymour is right. His Bill might be killed at its second reading, but the issues he has raised will not die.
He has placed a question on the parliamentary table. A question which a great many more than 42,000 New Zealanders would like to hear answered: "Is this country to be forever constrained by the content of an agreement entered into 184 years ago, by individuals long since deceased, binding entities that have long since disappeared, in order to resolve issues that have long since been decided?"
Another way of framing that question is to ask: "Should the New Zealand that was built after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, and very largely in spite of it — i.e. the New Zealand of today — be radically refashioned, constitutionally, administratively, politically, economically and culturally, in accordance with the alleged understandings and intentions of te Tiriti’s 19th century Māori signatories?"
But that question immediately raises another — and this one is much more dangerous: "With the benefit of hindsight, do the Māori of today regret the decision of their ancestors to sign the Treaty? Or, at least, do they lament that their tīpuna did not make clearer what they expected to get by entering into a formal relationship with one of the 19th century’s most powerful states?"
Which, in turn, raises another: "Is that what has really been going on these past 50 years: have Māori, alongside their Pakeha allies in the judiciary, the universities and the public service, been quietly revising the Treaty’s meaning so that it better reflects, and serves, the needs of Māori living in the 21st century?"
It is precisely to prevent these sorts of questions being asked — let alone answered — that Māori are so determined to "kill the Bill".
It also explains why sending Seymour’s Bill to the justice select committee has been so energetically resisted by so many Treaty "defenders": everyone from a curious clutch of Christian clergy, to a concerned collection of King’s Counsel.
The very last thing they, and the organisers of Tuesday’s extremely impressive hikoi, want is for the meaning and purpose of the Treaty of Waitangi to be openly debated for months at a time.
Seymour’s great sin has been to offer an alternative to this covert effort to change the constitution of New Zealand by changing the Treaty’s historical meaning. Those who argue that the Treaty Principles Bill is a blatant attempt to rewrite the Treaty are quite right.
What they omit to say, however, is that Seymour is only doing openly what Māori nationalists and their Pakeha allies have been doing, quietly, in legal chambers, common rooms and public service offices for the past 50 years.
The critical difference, of course, is that Seymour was proposing to give the rest of us a vote on his version.
Leaving us with one, final, question: "Is 42,000 enough to stop him?"
■Chris Trotter is an Auckland writer and commentator.
