One said Māori were like seagulls: if you feed them “more come - and then they start crapping on you.”

Another said that over the years there’d been a “self-serving reinterpretation of the Treaty to benefit the Māori elite”.

Yet another reckoned that before Pākehā brought colonisation and war Māori “were killing each other anyway”.

There was talk of what percentage of Māori ancestry should count, and an assertion that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon wasn’t brave enough to investigate Māori organisations with charity tax status.

Holy fucking shit. I hope that even Seymour might have winced at these comments.

A right wing politician speaking to a room of rich white racist retirees who think the natives are too uppity and need taking down a peg or two; if ever there was a generation who I wish would just shuffle off this moral coil.