David Seymour, who leads the right-wing ACT Party, made the comments on Thursday in a speech marking national Waitangi Day celebrations, an annual political gathering that gives Indigenous tribes a chance to air grievances.

Rising to offer a prayer during the dawn service Friday at the Waitangi Upper Treaty Grounds where New Zealand’s founding document was signed in 1840, dozens of people started booing and shouting for him to stop.

Another person blew into a conch shell in an attempt to drown out Seymour’s speech.

“The silent majority up and down this country are getting a little tired of some of these antics,” Seymour said.

The deputy prime minister’s administration has been accused of seeking to wind back the special rights given to the country’s 900,000-strong Maori population.

And he told journalists the hecklers were “a couple of muppets shouting in the dark”.

On Thursday, Seymour, who himself is Maori, told those assembled at Waitangi that colonisation had been a net positive for the Indigenous people of New Zealand.

“I’m always amazed by the myopic drone that colonisation and everything that’s happened in our country was all bad,” he said.

Maori today remain far more likely to die early, live in poverty or be imprisoned than New Zealand Europeans.

Following Seymour’s prayer Friday, left-wing Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins was also loudly jeered by those in attendance.

The previous day indigenous leader Eru Kapa-Kingi told parliamentarians “this government has stabbed us in the front,” and the previous Labour government had “stabbed us in the back”.

“Why do we continue to welcome the spider inside the house?”