Heather du Plessis-Allan: David Seymour and the UN letter

I’m as interested as anyone on this mystery about whether David Seymour is in trouble over the letter he sent to the UN. 

Whether the media reporting is right that the Prime Minister gave Seymour a telling off, or whether David was right that it was just a nice chat, or whether the media reporting is right that Winston is cross with David for sending the letter, or whether David’s right that Winston is fine and is basically going to send the same letter again, or whether Winston is right when he says that’s not true – I’m as interested as you are in what the truth is. 

But regardless of whether David is in trouble, he was right when he called the letter "presumptive, condescending, and wholly misplaced". 

I personally think he did us a favour giving the UN a slap-down for piping up on the Regulatory Standards Bill with their letter, which started the chain of correspondence. 

In particular, what the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples got wrong is his assertion that the bill fails to uphold indigenous rights guaranteed in the Treaty, including partnership. 

There is no partnership guarantee. It’s not in the Treaty. It was a judge's comment in the mid 80's and was subsequently misinterpreted to mean partnership. 

He apparently also claims Māori have been excluded form consultation, which is again not true, because we’ve just had a full week of select committee hearings which included submission from Māori. 

Both of these facts could’ve been discovered with a simple Google search. 

Unfortunately for the UN this makes the case, again, for the thing being scaled back to what it was originally set up for: preventing WWIII. 

They should get out of everything else —climate change, indigenous rights, advocating for wealth taxes— because it’s gone way beyond its original remit. 

It's too political and it's frankly not very good at any of it. Just look at the fact that it hasn’t stopped climate change. 

So thank you to David Seymour for giving the UN a well overdue slap-down. 

Even if he wasn’t really supposed to. 

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