Act Party leader David Seymour has hit out at a former prime minister and ex-Treaty negotiations minister who have criticised him and his Treaty Principles Bill.

Seymour said former PM Dame Jenny Shipley was “grossly irresponsible” to say he was inviting civil war with his bill, and then criticised her handling of Mainzeal, a collapsed construction firm Shipley and other company directors allowed to keep trading despite being insolvent.

“It sounds like she took about as much care on those [civil war] comments as she took on reviewing the accounts when she was the director at Mainzeal,” he told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking Breakfast Show.

Act leader David Seymour. Photo / Andrew MacDonald

Seymour then said former Treaty negotiations minister Chris Finlayson’s comments about the bill doing “great damage” showed “haughtiness and bitterness” and he needed to move on from being a politician.

“He’s showing the sort of haughtiness and bitterness that is unbecoming of someone who has had their time as a politician and should really be proud of their achievements and be ready to move on.

“The real truth of both those two is that race relations are very much a product of the influence that they’ve had in the last 20 years.

“People believe there’s division. It hasn’t been created by my bill. It has been revealed by my bill because my bill calls for equal rights for all New Zealanders.

“And what we’ve seen is that there are a lot of people who don’t want equal rights, they want a society where some people are tangata whenua and some people are tangataTiriti.”

Bill passes first reading after fiery debate in Parliament

Seymour’s contentious bill passed its first vote in Parliament on Thursday, but not until after a fiery and impassioned debate which saw one Te Pāti Māori MP suspended, a senior Labour politician kicked out and the entire public gallery cleared.

The House was temporarily suspended as the legislation – which would define the principles of the Treaty – was being voted on after Te Pāti Māori’s Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke began a haka intended to challenge the Government over its support for the bill.

The Hīkoi mō Te Tiriti crosses the Auckland Harbour Bridge on day three of the hīkoi. Photo / Greenpeace Aotearoa

Seymour said: “Te Pāti Māori are representing and bringing up the worst in Māoridom.”

A mass demonstration against the bill has been held across the country since last Monday. The HīkoimōteTiriti (March for the Treaty) will reach Parliament about 9am tomorrow morning after starting at Cape Rēinga last Monday. Thousands of protesters took over the Auckland Harbour Bridge last Wednesday.

Seymour said he would meet them. However, he said: “It’s their behaviour that I don’t want to meet with. Happy to meet with anyone else.”

More than 40 King’s Counsel, some of New Zealand’s top lawyers and legal experts, wrote to the Prime Minister outlining their “grave concerns”. They said Seymour’s bill “seeks to rewrite the Treaty itself” and called the coalition Government to “act responsibly now and abandon it”.

‘I would fight against it’ - Dame Jenny

Shipley, prime minister from 1997 to 1999, said Māori had every right to fight the bill.

Shipley said: “While there have been principles leaked into individual statutes, we have never attempted to – in a formal sense – put principles in or over top of the Treaty as a collective. And I caution New Zealand – the minute you put the Treaty into a political framework in its totality, you are inviting civil war.

“I would fight against it. Māori have every reason to fight against it.

Former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley. Photo / Mark Mitchell

“This is a relationship we committed to where we would try and find a way to govern forward. We would respect each other’s land and interests rights, and we would try and be citizens together – and actually, we are making outstanding progress, and this sort of malicious, politically motivated, fundraising-motivated attempt to politicise the Treaty in a new way should raise people’s voices, because it is not in New Zealand’s immediate interest.”

Seymour said Shipley and Finlayson had a responsibility “in creating today’s reality”.

He said: “Now Jenny Shipley and Chris Finlayson have fostered that belief that New Zealand is a partnership between two collectives, which in turn are defined by ancestry. It’s never worked anywhere in the world,it’s not working here.

“I’m challenging that and saying New Zealand should be a society based on a Treaty that gave us ngā tikanga katoa rite tahi, or the same rights and duties. If they don’t like that, that’s fine but they have to talk some responsibility for their role in creating today’s reality.”