NZ Attempts to Define Indigenous Treaty in Law, to Be Met With Nationwide Protest

Junior New Zealand coalition partner, the ACT Party, introduced legislation that could prove to be the most controversial of this government’s term. The bill is ACT’s attempt to establish, in statute law, what exactly is meant by the three clauses of the Treaty of Waitangi, considered to be the document on which New Zealand was founded. The Treaty was signed in 1840 and was an agreement between the British Crown and many (but not all) Māori chiefs. For decades, it played no significant role in lawmaking or the courts, but over recent decades it has come to guide the relationship between the Crown in New Zealand (embodied by the government) and Māori....