Watch: Select Committee hearings on Treaty Principles Bill resumes

The full video of Thursday's hearings is at the top of this page.

Former minister of Justice Kiritapu Allan made a submission as the Justice Committee continued to make its way through 80 hours in total of listening to submitters on Thursday.

The Committee, on its second day of hearings, also heard from organisations such as YouthLaw Aotearoa, Te Hunga Roia Māori o Aotearoa and the Council of Medical Colleges.

A full day of submissions took place on Monday, hearing from a range of legal and acedemic experts - and the Minister in charge of the Bill, David Seymour.

Thursday's hearings ran for two hours.

Te Hunga Roia Māori, the Māori Law Society, said the government's commitment to kill the Treaty Principles Bill was cold comfort for Māori.

President Tai Ahu said the bill had already increased institutional distrust by Māori toward the government.

"The assurances of the Prime Minister are cold comfort to Māori whose historical experience of the law has been one of land confiscation, of denigration of culture and langauge, and the denial of indigenous and Tiriti rights."

Ahu says those assurances also ignored the divisive impact of the Bill so far, and the damage was being done right now.

A professor of economics at the University of Auckland said the debate around the bill was important for New Zealand to remain a multicultural nation.

Ananish Chaudhuri used his submission to question those saying Māori did not cede sovereignty.

"Is it really possible to have separate laws, separate schools or separate health systems for one ethnicity? It does not work. A liberal democracy cannot survive unless everyone is treated equally."

Chaudhuri said he was worried New Zealand was heading down a path of ethnic tension and hostility.

Former National MP Sandra Goudie said claims of a partnership between Māori and the Crown were an attempt to exclude non-Māori from the conversation.

Goudie, a former Thames-Coromandel mayor, said principles of the Treaty of Waitangi must be established.

"Because we cannot trust the government to uphold the rule of law and ensure we are all equal in the law, and that's the government's greatest Treaty breach of all."

Goudie said the government shouldn't continue to ignore the broader responsibility of the crown in its representation of all New Zealanders as a party to the Treaty.

Former Justice Minister Kiritapu Allan told the committee the bill was a "simple abomination".

Allan said the Bill seeks to erase Māori in their own land.

"This is not just about erasing fifty years of Treaty jurispudence that has evolved since 1975, this is a bill that is about scrubbing us from history. Further, the bill erodes and undermines every undertaking made between the Crown and hapū and iwi."

Allan said the bill showed core components of the country's constitutional arrangements were up for grabs in coalition talks.

A former Minister for Conservation, she also spoke about section 4 of the Conservation Act that requires the Act to be interpreted and administered as to "give effect to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi." The Department of Conservation administers one third of the land mass in Aotearoa, she said.

"This comprises lands that were taken by raupatu - illegal land confiscation"

Allan said the Crown had accepted raupatu was a breach of Te Tiriti, and if the bill was enacted, section 4 would be "stripped of any meaning in effect."

"It becomes a hollow and meaningless clause."

The Council of Medical Colleges said the bill wilfully ignored the data for Māori health statistics.

Board member Dr Jo Lambert used an example of responding to a patient to explain the principle of "equality."

She said equality "assumes that we all have the same experience, that we all have the same resources, the same privileges, that we come from the same background."

Lambert said if she applied the principles of equality in a health setting to a patient came in vomiting - "whether they're a six-month-old pēpi, whether they're a 12-year-old male, a 30-year-old person with a uterus, or an 80 year old" - that would mean she would ask the same questions, order the same investigations, offer the same advice and medicine.

"By using the principle of equality I would be wasting resources because three out of those four people don't need a pregnancy test.

"I possibly could kill two of them - the baby and the older person - by giving the same medicine."

In health she said, "we have to take in all things, we have to take in ethnicity".

Maringi James, who helped coordinate a petition against the Bill, was appearing before the committee as well as iwi organisation and social service provider Te Rūnanga o Whaingaroa.

Lorraine Toki of the Iwi Leaders Forum and retired District Court Judge David Harvey were also submitting, alongside John Milne, an Accredited Fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Directors.

Committee chair James Meager said the committee had worked to ensure there was a broad range of views heard in the first sessions.

Every political party representative on the committee was able to put forward submitters they knew had made submissions, or whose submissions had been processed.

The approach around how the rest of the oral submissions are selected will be confirmed later today.

The committee aims to finish hearing all oral submissions by the end of February.