Toitū te Tiriti Lawyer, Tania Waikato, is calling the Deputy Prime Minister’s ‘bots’ claim a ‘huge insult’ for all those who took part.
In an interview with RNZ last week, David Seymour said that 99.5 percent of the 23,000 submissions regarding a discussion document for the Regulatory Standards Bill were ‘bots’.
“[It’s] an absolute insult to all of the people who engaged with that process, took time out of their summer holidays to do this.
“We went really hard in the last five days, before that deadline closed, because it was just after the Treaty Principles Bill submissions were supposed to close, and we hammered it,” said Waikato.
Waikato says she and her friends, who are content creators, helped make submission templates to help the general public navigate the ‘confusing’ document shared by the Ministry of Regulation.
“So many people responded to use our templates.
“We know for a fact that that was all people and they were not bots, so it’s a huge insult for [Seymour] to come out now and say it was bots, that it was machines, they were trying to rig the system, it’s an absolute insult.”
Seymour later backtracked to the media, saying he meant “online campaigns” and that the generated “non-representative samples” do not accurately reflect public opinion.
He said he would also take a swing at RNZ’s journalism.
“Any decent journalist would know the online campaigns I was referring to, I suspect the general public certainly will. Any decent journalist would also know that presenting non-representative samples as reflecting public opinion is breaching basic standards of journalism,” he wrote in a statement to RNZ.
Waikato called both the original comment and the correction a deliberate move on the Deputy Prime Minister’s part.
“He is a minister who is in charge of this piece of legislation, who is supposed to be running a democratically fair process for people to participate.
“For him to even come out and make comments like that, about people who are trying to engage in that process, in my opinion, is just absolutely unacceptable behaviour for a minister,” she told Te Ao Māori News.
The feedback on the discussion document regarding the bill in January indicated that 88 per cent of respondents opposed the bill, with 0.33 per cent expressing support or partial support.
Submissions for the bill itself are still open, with people able to have their say until June 23.