DON BRASH: The Total Annihilation of Te Tiriti in the Health System

This is the heading on a press statement issued by Lady Tureiti Moxon referring to the Government’s decision to change the wording in the Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Act from “give effect to” Te Tiriti principles to merely “take into account” those principles.

She claims this “weakens Treaty obligations in health legislation” and represents “the total annihilation of te Tiriti in the health system”.

What on Earth is she talking about?

The press statement went on to suggest that the change in wording in legislation “will lead to avoidable suffering and preventable early death for Maori who already die seven years earlier than any other cohort in the population”.

“It is not an abstract constitutional debate”, she said. “It is about whether Maori live longer, healthier lives or whether governments continue making decisions that knowingly harm our people”.

This is an outrageous statement, and were I the Minister of Health I would be tempted to sue her for implying that the Government is, or will be after the wording change, “[continuing to make] decisions that knowingly harm our people”.

Of course, there is absolutely no reason why health legislation should refer to the Treaty, or te Tiriti, at all. It is a modern fashion.

The Treaty, whether in English or in te reo Maori, is an extremely simple document: it involved the chiefs agreeing to cede sovereignty to the Queen in perpetuity; in return, the chiefs were guaranteed the continued ownership of all their property; and all New Zealanders were to have equal rights.

In New Zealand, we don’t have a written constitution but those basic principles remain central to our unwritten constitution. The Queen, or now the King, is our Head of State; we all have the right to own property (although the state has steadily qualified that right for all New Zealanders, Maori and non-Maori); and we are equal under the law.

There is absolutely no need to “give effect to” or “take into account” the Treaty in either language, or in any legislation, except perhaps to assert that all New Zealanders, no matter when they or their ancestors arrived on these shores, have equal rights.

Yes, on average Maori life expectancy is a little short of the average life expectancy of European New Zealanders, though it is vastly better than it was in 1840, and the gap is no doubt largely explained by life style choices around smoking and diet.

The life expectancy of Asian New Zealanders is a couple of years longer than that of other New Zealanders, and nobody is seriously suggesting that that is because the New Zealand state discriminates in favour of Asians.

The Government is absolutely right to look carefully at references to the Treaty of Waitangi in legislation, and in my view most of those references should be removed entirely.

But we would all be better off if we had an agreed understanding of what the Treaty actually provided, and for that reason it was a tragedy that Parliament threw out, without any serious consideration, the Treaty Principles Bill promoted by the ACT Party.

At some point, we will need to agree what the Treaty meant, and what it did not mean. Until we have agreed that, we will endlessly be debating rather silly arguments of the kind advanced by Lady Moxon.

And it will become more and more meaningless as we continue to marry across ethnic lines. Lady Moxon’s mother was Margaret Hawkins, so it is at least possible that Lady Moxon herself has both Maori and European ancestors.

Don Brash

29 May 2026