Equality: NZ’s highest principle or socialist delusion?

What is going on with the Act Party and the principle of equality? On the one hand we have the drafting and promotion of the Treaty Principles Bill, which is, superficially at least, about the promotion of equality. The third principle of this bill is quite literally the ‘right to equality’:

Everyone is equal before the law and is entitled to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination. Everyone is entitled to the equal enjoyment of the same fundamental human rights without discrimination.

On the other hand, we have one of Act’s founders and former leader, Richard Prebble, resigning from his (late 2024) appointment to the Waitangi Tribunal because its strategic plan includes ‘citizenship rights and equality’ as one of the things the Tribunal might enquire into. For Prebble, this amounts to interpreting the Treaty as a “socialist manifesto“.

He said: “When you say that the Treaty promises equality, that’s the socialist dream. That’s what socialists are in favour of. And socialist regimes, communist regimes, have all attempted to make everyone equal, and they’ve all failed.

“To have it now as a Treaty guarantee means that we’re going to have successive governments will [sic] have claims that they haven’t achieved equality. Well, I hate to be the first person to say this, but they, regardless of their intentions, they will never achieve that. People just aren’t equal.”

Which is it? Equality as one of the highest principles we should uphold as a nation, which Act leader David Seymour claims to be the premise of his Treaty Principles Bill? Or equality as a pie in the sky, socialist delusion?

Of course, the principle of ‘equality’ is complex and multi-faceted and, as with other principles or high-level concepts, it really depends what you mean by it. We can consider equality of opportunity, equality of treatment, or equality of outcome (equity), for example. Each is somewhat different.

Act is primarily a supporter of the equality of treatment ‘before the law’. It likes to argue that everyone is the same, everyone should be treated the same, differences of ‘race’ (their term, not mine) shouldn’t matter.

At first glance, this sounds right and attractive. However, there are many, many ways in which, as a society, we don’t treat people the same, and certainly not ‘before the law’. We don’t treat children the same as adults, criminals the same as law-abiding citizens, we don’t treat differently-abled people all the same, or expect those in wheelchairs to use the stairs.

This Government doesn’t treat all home-owners the same either. They give special tax breaks to landlords, but not to people who own and live in their one and only home. They have brought back charter schools, which don’t have to teach the national curriculum or have teachers trained to a nationally accredited standard.

Act is clearly happy to give some communities and groups ‘special rights’, but not others. Its espousal of ‘equality before the law’ distracts our attention from the fact it supports laws that discriminate against some and favour others.

All of which reminds us that we shouldn’t leap to the support of any and every espousal of equality without first inquiring into what kind of equality is being invoked, who it will apply to, what its effects would be, who would benefit from it and who might actually be disadvantaged – and do those who are espousing equality really mean it?

Act is a political party of the right. It is a supporter of big business, including increasing privatisation of public assets. We have been there before as a country and in some cases – the airlines and the railways, for example – had to buy crucial national assets back after their multinational owners bled them dry for their shareholder profits and failed to invest in maintaining them.

Several commentators have argued that Act’s interest in privatisation and exploitation of national assets is really what is behind the Treaty Principles Bill. According to this view (a persuasive one from where I sit), when Act talks about ‘equality’, they are invoking an appealing concept that disguises their real intention to promote the interests of corporations over ordinary New Zealanders of all ethnicities. Even a brief study of the history of the party would bear this out. The kind of equality it stands for is one that favours the wealthy and private enterprise over everyone else.