Honouring Te Tiriti — The Opportunity Party

The Policy: TOP Honouring Te Tiriti — September 2023 →

Pitched as a centrist commitment to genuine Crown partnership with Māori, the Opportunity Party's "Honouring Te Tiriti" policy sets out five concrete pledges aimed at reversing what the party frames as two years of legislative retreat on Treaty obligations under the National-led coalition government (2023–2026).

What it does

• Repeal the Treaty Principles Bill and Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Amendment Bill if these are passed. The Treaty Principles Bill was voted down 112-11 at its second reading on 10 April 2025 — only ACT's 11 MPs supported it — so the repeal pledge focuses primarily on the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Amendment Act, which passed in October 2025 over fierce opposition. That Act requires iwi and hapū seeking customary marine title to prove continuous exclusive use and ownership since 1840 — a threshold critics say almost no group can meet, and which the Waitangi Tribunal found breached Treaty principles of partnership and active protection.
• Include Aotearoa history, including Te Tiriti, at all levels of the education system. ANZ Histories became compulsory for Years 1–10 in January 2023, but the National-ACT coalition agreement pledged to "restore balance" to the curriculum. Education Minister Erica Stanford flagged changes for 2025; teachers' associations, including PPTA president Chris Abercrombie (18-year history teacher) and Te Akatea Māori Principals Association president Bruce Jepsen, warned revisions risked removing perspectives Māori students were "seeing themselves in" for the first time.
• Support growth in the numbers of qualified te reo Māori teachers. Demand for te reo in schools has surged: 495,100 students are learning te reo at some immersion level — the highest recorded — and 28,382 are taught more than half the curriculum through te reo, up 71% since 2000. Yet qualified teachers remain critically scarce; the Ministry of Education's Teacher Demand and Supply report (released 2025) identified te reo as one of the most under-supplied specialist subjects nationally, alongside STEM. Rāwhiti School in Christchurch has operated a bilingual waiting list for years due to excess demand.
• Support devolution of services — backed by real resources and autonomy — in key areas where outcomes are unequal, especially health and justice. Māori health disparities are documented and persistent: the 2024/25 NZ Health Survey found Māori are 11% less likely to rate their health as good, experience 50% higher psychological distress, and Māori and Pacific people are 50% more likely to have poor heart health than non-Māori. One in three Māori children live in homes where food runs out regularly. The Waitangi Tribunal found in 2019 that the Crown had breached Te Tiriti by "failing to design and administer the current primary health care system to actively address persistent Māori health inequities." TOP's devolution commitment aligns with a broader policy thread — its Citizens' Voice platform also promises Māori voices will be "integral to every Assembly through direct participation and dedicated engagement with iwi."
• Support equitable Treaty settlements. A 2025 Auditor-General report found that while around 150 public organisations hold approximately 12,000 individual commitments under 80 settlements, every audited organisation had difficulties meeting some commitments as intended. As of 30 June 2025, $2.738 billion of financial and commercial redress had been transferred since 1996 — but implementation quality remains the outstanding challenge.

The result

TOP's Te Tiriti policy is positioned as a principled middle-ground: not aligned with the assimilationist thrust of ACT's Treaty Principles Bill, but also not committing to the expansive co-governance structures Labour built under He Puapua. Leader Qiulae Wong, appointed in November 2025, has articulated the party's broader pitch as national unity and "dialling down the anger" — a framing that may appeal to voters uncomfortable with both the current government's rollbacks and more transformative Māori sovereignty proposals.

The 2026 context is highly charged. In April–June 2026, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith announced plans to weaken Treaty references across up to 23 pieces of legislation — downgrading obligations from "give effect to" to "take into account" (the lowest existing standard) and repealing clauses in five Acts outright. Officials warned the changes had "no apparent benefits" and carried "significant risks." The Waitangi Tribunal's May 2026 stage-one report found the education changes breached Treaty principles of partnership and good government; presiding officer Rachel Mullins said the proposals were "as bad as the Treaty Principles Bill." Carwyn Jones (law academic) told the full Tribunal hearing in June 2026 that the combined changes represented "the most damaging collection of clear and considered legislative treaty breaches" in modern history. Hope Tupara (Māori Women's Welfare League president) said the proposals made her feel "like a second-class citizen."

ACT's David Seymour, whose Treaty Principles Bill was the catalyst, has pledged to "reignite" the debate for the 2026 election — keeping Treaty issues central to the campaign. TOP's repeal-and-restore position appeals to voters who see the current trajectory as destabilising — but critics from the left, including Te Pāti Māori's Tākuta Ferris, regard incremental centrist approaches as insufficient given the scale of the rollbacks. The World Socialist Web Site characterised TOP in June 2026 as a capitalist party unlikely to fundamentally alter structural inequalities.

The impacts to watch

• Court challenges: Officials warned the Treaty clause weakening is likely to trigger costly legal challenges — a reversal if TOP (and Labour/Greens) were in government would need to navigate any litigation already in progress.
• Te reo Māori pipeline: Scaling qualified te reo teacher numbers requires sustained investment in initial teacher education and workforce retention — a years-long project; a single term of government may produce policy settings but not visible outcomes.
• Settlement implementation: 12,000 commitments across 80 settlements remain inconsistently delivered; meaningful progress on "equitable settlements" depends as much on public sector capability and funding as on political will.
• Coalition mathematics: TOP is polling at 3–4% heading into 2026, just below the 5% threshold. If it does not reach 5% and wins no electorate seats, its policies — including this one — carry no weight in Parliament.

*Neutrality note: Te Tiriti and constitutional arrangements for Māori are subjects of genuine disagreement among legal experts, iwi, and the public. This overview represents stated positions across the spectrum without endorsing any.*