Over 300,000 Submissions for Contentious Race Bill Causes NZ Parliament Website to Crash

People attend a protest criticising the government for its policies toward the Indigenous Maori population which they say are racist policies and undermine a treaty that protects their Indigenous rights, outside the New Zealand parliament in Wellington on May 30, 2024. (Photo by Dave Lintott / AFP) Photo by DAVE LINTOTT/AFP via Getty Images

The deadline for New Zealanders to comment on the controversial Treaty Principles Bill has been extended by a week after the volume of submissions caused the parliament website to crash.

Initially, it was thought to be a DDOS (distributed denial of service) cyber attack, but it turns out, the majority of people left their submissions until the last two days—resulting in 300,000 over a 48 hour period.

The Justice Select Committee has since agreed to reopen submissions from 1 p.m. on Jan. 9, to 1 p.m. Jan. 14. The deadline was originally 11.59 p.m. on Jan. 7.

What is the Issue?

The issue revolves around a proposed bill to define the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.

The Treaty was signed in 1840 in an agreement between the British Crown and many Māori chiefs as part of the nation’s founding.

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.

However, because the principles were never clearly defined—even with translation differences between two versions of the document—the Waitangi Tribunal has been left to determine their scope of power through a series of judgements, effectively elevating Maori to the status of equal partners with the Crown.

The Treaty Principles Bill, proposed by the libertarian ACT Party, aimed to define the principles in law and override common law.

New Zealand's libertarian ACT Party leader David Seymour speaks during question time at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand on March 6, 2024. Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

Yet the Bill is destined for the archives, given the ACT’s coalition partners—the National Party and NZ First—have only supported it to go through the first reading stage and to a Select Committee, and no further. This means it has no chance of becoming law, unless there is a future party policy change.

Opposition to the Bill

Despite that, nothing in New Zealand’s recent history has attracted as much opposition and criticism, with tens of thousands of people marching the length of the country against it when it passed its first reading at the end of last year, and an estimated 42,000 people assembling at Parliament as the marchers arrived.

Labour’s spokesperson for Māori development, Willie Jackson, said there had been a concerted effort to encourage submissions as the closing date approached.

“This is the most ... anti-Māori kaupapa [set of principles] we’ve had to deal with in the last generation,” he said.

The previous record for parliamentary submissions was 107,000 received on the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill in 2021, which outlawed attempts to change or suppress someone’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression through “a prayer-based practice, a deliverance practice, or an exorcism.”

Clerk Says Parliament Was Prepared for Load

Tech experts have said the problems with Parliament’s website could be due to the government’s cost-cutting measures which have been imposed across the entire public service, and said that installing more servers would have avoided the crash.

But Clerk of the House David Wilson said Parliament had attempted to prepare for what was anticipated to be a heavy load on its IT infrastructure.

“The Office of the Clerk is aware that the unprecedented volume of submissions being made simultaneously caused issues for the Parliament website and submission portal,” he said in a statement.

“While we anticipated a high volume of submissions and had made improvements to deal with them—within the constraints of the current architecture—the amount of traffic was even greater than expected.”

He said his office was not required to make any savings from its baseline during Budget 2024.

If passed hypothetically, the Bill would trigger a referendum, something which party leader David Seymour says is necessary because “New Zealanders as a whole have never been democratically consulted on these Treaty principles.”

ACT’s draft principles focus on protecting “land and property rights” and making all New Zealanders “equal under the law.”

But even before it went to Parliament, it faced opposition from officials at the Ministry of Justice, who must prepare a Regulatory Impact Statement on all proposed legislation.

They said, “although the proposal to introduce the bill could have some value, we consider the status quo is more beneficial” because to change decades of common law would “introduce more uncertainty into our constitutional arrangements.”

The Waitangi Tribunal also released two interim reports on the Bill, calling it the “worst, most comprehensive breach of the Treaty in modern times.”

Most public opposition centres on the idea that it attempts to change the nature of the relationship between Māori and the Crown without consulting Māori, one of the Treaty’s signatories.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has defended allowing the legislation to get to the Select Committee stage.

“Honestly, people are focused on the economy, they’re focused on law and order, they’re focused on public services,” he said.

“I appreciate that there is an ACT party position that is very different from the National Party position, but what we have—as I’ve said, and I’ve been very pragmatic and up front about it—we have a compromise, that’s reflected in the coalition agreement.”