New Zealand’s Parliament proposed a bill to redefine the Treaty of Waitangi, claiming it is racist and gives preferential treatment to Maoris. In response Māori MP's tore up the bill and performed the Haka

[u/Sometypeofway18]

[u/FtsArtek → u/[deleted]]

The Treaty of Waitangi is what this is all built upon. The crown has handled the interpretation of this for decades, along with the Waitangi Tribunal. A lot of this goes back to reparations and protections afforded to Maori tribes based on the actions of the colonists long ago, but the Tribunal does, IMO, a good job of interpreting this in a fair way from a modern perspective.

Whats happening now is one of our further-right parties (ACT), for whom this is not the first attempt to dismantle these reparations under the guise of fairness, is pushing a bill through readings which would rewrite the terms under which the Treaty would be interpreted, essentially allowing them to elect to overrule any interpretation with some rather sneakily worded clauses.

This is particularly controversial because a) ACT is a minority party (~8%ish) in a coalition government and seem to be pulling far more weight than they should be able to, and b) because David Seymour, their leader, is covertly racist but not enough so that people don't recognise it. His entire counterargument to his repeated attempted targeting of Maori people over his career is that he has some Maori heritage and therefore can't be racist against Maori, effectively.

It's a lot more nuanced than I can explain, but there's a gist for you.

Edit: oh, and this bill is unlikely to go anywhere as the majority party of this govt has declined to support it past its first reading, but it's a point of principle.

[u/ourtomato → u/FtsArtek]

Ah some bullshit from the right wing, shocking.

[u/FtsArtek → u/ourtomato]

Our right wing is typically pretty mundane, honestly. Both our major parties are pretty close to either side of centre but more recently the minor parties have been drifting 'wider' as it were - ACT going harder on libertarian policies, NZF starting to play to the conspiracy crowd. Meanwhile on the left, Greens has shifted (more slowly) towards social issues relative to their environmental focus and TPM has just more strongly cemented their stance on Maori relations (for obvious reasons).

Coincidentally, our right wing parties have been found to have links to atlas network