Geoff Parker: Beware The Referendum Trap

Winston Peters has a gift. He knows exactly how to press the public’s emotional buttons without ever quite delivering what many think he’s promising. His 2026 pledge of a referendum on the Māori seats is a classic example. It sounds bold. It sounds democratic. It sounds decisive. But New Zealanders should pause — because this may be the most dangerous way imaginable to deal with a constitutional issue.

If Peters were genuinely serious about ending separatist parliamentary seats, he wouldn’t be floating a referendum at all. He would campaign openly on abolition of the Māori seats. The legal mechanism already exists. Repeal section 45 of the Electoral Act 1993 — along with the consequential provisions that support it — and the Māori seats disappear. Clean. Parliamentary. Accountable.

Instead, Peters offers a referendum.

That choice matters, because referendums don’t just remove things. They can just as easily entrench them.

And this is where the public needs to be brutally honest about what’s really going on. This isn’t about principle. It’s about covering his own back. A referendum lets Peters say he “gave the people a say” no matter what happens. If it fails, it’s not his fault. If it passes, he claims the win. Either way, New Zealand carries the consequences — not him.

Referendums are campaigns, not philosophical exercises. They are won by money, organisation, institutional backing, and cultural pressure. On one side of this issue sits a loose and often complacent group of voters who believe in one-law-for-all and assume common sense will prevail. On the other sits a deeply entrenched, heavily resourced tribal-political machine: iwi organisations, the Māori Party, most unions, most universities, large parts of the public sector, much of local government, and a largely sympathetic mainstream media.

That imbalance should worry anyone who thinks a referendum is a safe bet.

The polling Peters may be relying on should give pause as well. Yes, around 38 percent of voters say the Treaty has too much influence on government decisions. But the rest of the numbers matter just as much. Roughly 34 percent say it’s “about right”, and another 16 percent say it has too little influence. That’s half the electorate either content with the status quo or actively wanting more Treaty-based governance. In referendum terms, that is not a commanding position — it’s a knife-edge.

Recent history reinforces the danger. In the 2025 Māori ward referendums, the combined national vote favoured keeping Māori wards, even though many individual councils voted them down locally. That result alone should shatter the comforting assumption that “most people oppose this stuff”. A nationwide referendum on Māori seats could easily follow the same pattern — and once lost, it would be lost for good.

Polling, recent Māori-ward results, and Peters’ own history all point to the same risk: a referendum could cement what it is meant to dismantle.

Add to this around 70,000 new young voters entering the roll, educated in a system where Treaty primacy is taught as moral truth rather than political choice, plus new immigrants introduced to New Zealand through a carefully curated narrative that presents race-based governance as settled and virtuous. This is not a neutral electorate walking into a neutral vote.

Those calling casually for referendums on Māori issues need to understand the risk. A failed referendum doesn’t simply leave things unchanged. It legitimises and hardens the outcome. Lose once, and the result will be brandished for decades as proof that “the people have spoken”. What began as an attempt to remove Māori seats could end by entrenching them permanently.

We’ve been here before. In 2017, Peters campaigned on a referendum to abolish the Māori seats. Then, when the Māori Party was wiped out of Parliament, he abruptly changed his tune. Suddenly the “political environment had changed”. The principle evaporated. The seats remained. That alone should temper today’s enthusiasm.

It gets worse. Ahead of the 2017 election, Peters described a binding referendum on Māori seats as a “bottom line” policy. Yet when coalition negotiations began with Labour, the referendum didn’t even make it onto the table. According to David Farrar, Labour sources later confirmed that New Zealand First never raised the referendum during negotiations. A supposed “bottom line” vanished the moment power was within reach.

And this exposes the deeper problem. Peters repeatedly treats the Māori Party as the issue, rather than the Māori seats themselves. But parties are temporary; constitutional structures are not. If Māori seats are wrong in principle, they are wrong regardless of which party occupies them. By tying abolition to the fortunes of one political party, Peters quietly concedes that the seats themselves are acceptable — until Māori voters use them in ways he dislikes. That is not a constitutional argument. It is a power-management one.

And let’s dispense with the myth that Parliament cannot act without a referendum. New Zealand governments override democratic processes whenever it suits them. In 2004 Helen Clark settled the foreshore and seabed issue by legislation rather than referendum. In 2021 Nanaia Mahuta removed citizens’ petitions on Māori wards with a simple legislative stroke. No referendum. No public mandate. Just political will.

Yet when it comes to Māori seats — the central powerbase of racial politics in Parliament — we’re told only a referendum will do?

That isn’t consistency. It’s calculation.

With few voices pushing one-law-for-all, and a massively organised and well-funded tribal movement pushing in the opposite direction, a referendum could be the very mechanism that locks New Zealand into a tribal future it never consciously chose.

Caution isn’t cowardice. Sometimes it’s realism.

Before cheering this referendum, New Zealanders should ask one hard question: who is actually taking the risk here — and who is protected from it? The law makes it clear: parliament could abolish the māori seats tomorrow with a simple majority — no referendum needed, no special entrenchment — yet a politically convenient referendum is being offered instead.

Geoff Parker is a passionate advocate for equal rights and a colour blind society.