MURIEL NEWMAN: The Future of the Maori Seats

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program – Milton Friedman.

The future of the Maori Seats has once again been raised as an important issue for New Zealanders to consider.

Introduced in 1867 as a temporary measure to ensure Maori men could vote at a time when property requirements excluded many from the franchise, the Maori seats were retained even as universal suffrage in 1893 removed the rationale for their existence.

New Zealand First has now put the matter back on the table. They say the race-based seats should be abolished because they are discriminatory and distort the proportionality of Parliament.

Accordingly, they have drafted a Private Members’ Bill to hold a binding referendum on the future of the Maori seats at November’s election. Their proposed Yes/No referendum question asks: “Should there be separate Maori seats in the New Zealand Parliament?”

Ironically, the opposition already has a Maori Seats Bill in the Parliamentary Members’ Ballot. Following Labour’s failed attempt to entrench the seats in 2019, Green MP Huhana Lyndon lodged the Electoral (Equal Protection of Maori Seats) Amendment Bill in January to do the same in order to make it harder for the Maori seats to be abolished.

Under democratic conventions, a country’s voting system is deemed to be of such constitutional significance that it is afforded special protection in law to prevent those in power from manipulating it for their own advantage.

In New Zealand this democratic safeguard comes in the form of the entrenchment provisions found in Section 268 of the Electoral Act, which ensures any proposal for change has widespread public support either through a supermajority vote in Parliament of 75 percent of MPs or a simple majority in a nation-wide binding referendum of voters.

Crucially, while neither the general electorates nor Maori electorates are entrenched - and could be changed by a simple majority in Parliament – other matters such as the voting age, the length of the Parliamentary term, the secret ballot, and the MMP electoral system are entrenched, as is the work of the Representation Commission and the mechanics of dividing the country into electorates.

The ACT Party agrees that the Maori seats should be abolished and have stated that their preference is to pass legislation to that effect in Parliament, bypassing the idea of a referendum altogether.

While the Maori seats could be abolished by a simple majority vote in Parliament, there is a suggestion that doing so could trigger court challenges.

This claim rests on the erroneous argument that the entrenchment of the Representation Commission, which draws electorate boundaries, might somehow protect the Maori electorates.

But since the Commission’s entrenchment protects the process for drawing electorates, not the existence of the electorates themselves, any court action would almost certainly fail.

A binding referendum on the other hand, is definitive. Should a majority of the population vote in favour of abolition - as is likely - then the Government has a legitimate public mandate to remove all references to separate Maori representation from the Electoral Act, including section 45 on Maori representation, section 269 on the creation of Maori electoral districts, and sections 76–78C on the Maori electoral option.

The need to abolish the Maori seats is no longer a matter that can be ignored. Their existence is now having such a distortionary impact on our Parliament, that in the interests of true democratic representation, it cannot be allowed to continue.

At the present time New Zealand has a record 33 Members of Parliament who claim to have Maori heritage. They now exercise political influence through every major party: Labour has 9, the Maori Party 6, the Greens 6, National 5, New Zealand First 4, and ACT has 3.

With New Zealand’s 54th Parliament having a total of 123 MPs, Maori MPs now make up a record 27 percent of Parliament, far exceeding their 17 percent share of the population.

If the seven reserved seats were removed, there would be 26 Maori MPs making up 21 percent of Parliament – still an overrepresentation, but less so.

That means any argument that the Maori seats are still required to ensure Maori have a voice in Parliament is no longer valid.

The Maori seats are in fact discriminatory and racist. By granting those who identify as Maori a separate electoral pathway and guaranteed Parliamentary representation that’s not available to other ethnic groups, they violate the foundational democratic principle of equal rights. By treating New Zealanders unequally on the basis of race, they contravene both our Bill of Rights’ commitment to equal treatment, and the Article Three Treaty promise that Maori would have the same rights and duties as all other citizens.

The system also distorts MMP proportionality through overhangs.

At the last election, the Maori Party gained 3 percent of the party vote entitling them to just four MPs. But by winning 6 of the 7 Maori seats, they gained six MPs, creating a two-seat overhang in Parliament. This gave a small race-based party disproportionate influence and leverage that unfairly amplifies the group’s power. And with the Maori Party vote currently collapsing, the overhang may well be greater after the next election.

These outcomes were, of course, predicted by the 1986 Royal Commission on the Electoral System, which was tasked with reviewing New Zealand’s electoral framework amidst growing public dissatisfaction with First-Past-the-Post voting. Its landmark report, “Towards a Better Democracy”, unanimously recommended adopting MMP - a system that allocates seats proportionally based on party votes, supplemented by electorate wins.

Crucially, the Commission argued that if MMP was adopted the Maori seats must be abolished, recommending in Section 3.74 of their report: “In the form of Maori representation we have proposed for MMP, there would be no separate Maori constituency or list seats, no Maori roll, and no Maori option. All New Zealanders would vote in the same way for the party they wish to govern, and for a constituency MP.”

They strongly argued that the separate seats had “not helped Maori”, since they segregated Maori issues to the small group of reserved seat MPs, effectively marginalising them from broader parliamentary consideration and perpetuating a dependency culture that had long hampered Maori self-development and achievement.

Furthermore, they warned that retaining separate seats alongside a proportional electoral system would risk “disproportionate and discriminatory over‑representation”.

In other words, the Maori seats were never meant to coexist with MMP since if they did, they would distort the very principle of proportionality that is at the core of the MMP system of voting.

Initially, the Bolger National Government took on board the Commission’s advice and when the first MMP Bill was introduced to Parliament in December 1992, it stated: “No provision is made for separate Maori seats.”

However, Maori leaders mounted a strong campaign to retain the seats, culminating in a meeting at the Turangawaewae Marae in Ngaruawahia where they claimed unanimous support. As a result, National caved in and the bill was amended during the select committee process to re-introduce Maori seats as constituency seats, with the number based on a Maori Electoral Option.

Since that first MMP election in 1996, calls to abolish the Maori seats have grown louder.

This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentary is the speech given by National’s leader Hon Bill English in July 2003, when he declared, “We are the party of national unity in one standard of citizenship, and national ambition for a higher standard of living. There can be a future where New Zealand will be united and successful. National intends to lead it” - and with that he announced that his Party would abolish the Maori seats:

"I am here today to explain to you why citizenship, one standard of citizenship for all, matters so much… We have been at our best when we have worked to make sure citizenship is fulfilled and preserved. Citizenship erases the prejudices and privileges that go with birth, race or belief. One standard of citizenship is the foundation of national unity, national pride and national ambition for every New Zealander.

“Many Maori have the same vision of a shared future… We have faith in the capacity of Maori to strive and succeed in work and politics on the same basis as everyone else… That's why a National-led Government will abolish the Maori seats.”

In his 2004 State of the Nation address at Orewa, National’s new leader Don Brash renewed the call for abolition with an impassioned plea that labelled the seats an “anachronism” that fostered special race-based privileges for Maori.

The party’s spectacular rise in the polls following that speech – from 28 percent in December 2003 to 49 percent by March 2004 - demonstrated widespread public support for the fundamental truth that New Zealanders do not want to be a nation divided by race.

In 2008, John Key pledged abolition but with a proviso - only after all Treaty settlements had been resolved. However, even that was dropped once National formed a Coalition with the Maori Party.

Since John Key’s willingness to compromise on this core democratic principle, National has largely sat on the fence on what is an issue of key importance for the future of New Zealand.

The ACT Party has consistently advocated for the removal of the Maori seats, emphasising the need for one law for all.

Similarly, New Zealand First has called for their abolition over recent years, most notably in 2017 when Winston Peters made a binding referendum a “bottom line” in any coalition agreement, arguing the seats had become irrelevant under MMP.

Since that bottom-line promise was forgotten once New Zealand First entered into the Ardern Coalition, questions are now being raised about just how genuine the Party’s commitment really is.

In 2008, a leading Constitutional Lawyer and Professor of Law at Canterbury University Dr Philp Joseph KC, undertook the most comprehensive clinical analysis of the Maori seats since the 1986 Royal Commission in order to ascertain whether they should be abolished or retained. He concluded, “There are four reasons why the Maori seats should be abolished: they are anachronistic, they institutionalise Maori separatism, they represent a form of reverse discrimination and they threaten to manipulate MMP electoral outcomes through ‘overhang’.

Depicting the Maori seats as a form of “reverse discrimination” and “a symbol of racial separatism” he explained that the strongest case for abolition is that “the Maori seats that the Maori Party will win have the potential to thwart proportionality and the expressed will of the people.”

While the case for the abolition of the Maori seats is now overwhelming, anyone wavering needs to reflect on the point made by Professor Joseph, that the Maori seats have the potential to significantly undermine the outcome of an election, and as such represent a grave democratic risk.

A hint of what was being planned emerged in 2024, when, buoyed by their protest to Parliament, Maori Party members claimed they could win 20 Maori Seats in our Parliament by encouraging Maori voters to switch from the General Electoral Roll onto the Maori Electoral Roll.

Such an outcome would, of course, completely destroy the proportionality of Parliament, undermining our democracy and reducing non-Maori representation to a fraction of what it should be. And while it would be difficult - if not impossible - to achieve such a high number of Maori seats, the sobering point is that the mechanism to allow this sort of result is nevertheless embedded in our electoral law.

This is an issue National can no longer ignore. It needs to get off the fence and explicitly state whether or not it will support a referendum on the Maori seats.

And, to avoid doubt, each New Zealand First MP needs to personally pledge that if a referendum on the Maori seats is not held at the 2026 election, then their demand for a binding referendum in the next term of Parliament is an issue they are not prepared to compromise on during post-election coalition negotiations. Only then will their word be credible.

This article was first published at NZCPR. Dr Muriel Newman established NZCPR as a public policy think tank in 2005 after nine years as a Member of Parliament. A former Chamber of Commerce President, her background is in business and education.