GRAHAM ADAMS: Maori nationalism takes a hammering in 2025

At the end of 2024, Māori nationalists were riding high in their quest to assert a special place in the nation’s laws and policy.

In November, the video of Te Pāti Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clark leading a haka in Parliament and ripping up a copy of David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill racked up hundreds of millions of views worldwide.

The nationwide hikoi that arrived in Wellington a few days later also protesting against the bill was declared by media commentators to be a huge success. It dominated the news cycle for more than a week, with estimates of how many protesters were heading to Wellington seemingly swelling with each new breathless account.

Now it has reached quasi-mythical status with party president John Tamihere telling Te Pāti Māori’s AGM early this month there had been 120,000 protesters marching on Parliament — which is nearly three times the official police estimate of 42,000.

In those heady days last year, Te Pāti Māori was regularly polling above the five per cent threshold to Parliament and the political heft of the nationalist movement it represented looked to be on an unstoppable roll.

However, as the end of 2025 approaches, the movement is lurching seriously close to disaster. Most dramatically, Te Pāti Māori looks to be locked in a death spiral with little hope in sight.

Polling tracks its collapse: the latest 1News Verian poll results put it at one per cent — and, in fact, the party’s final result was actually just 0.6%, then rounded up.

That dismal figure — which is only marginally better than TOP’s result — is a far cry from the seven per cent it achieved in December 2024 from the same pollsters.

A Māori issues reporter at Stuff summed it up: “Is Te Pāti Māori dead? That’s a sentence I never thought in January that I’d be writing by December.”

But although the party’s implosion is momentous given it has been the political spearhead of the nationalist movement, there are other signs that the push for Māori autonomy is weakening generally. Among them are the feeble reactions to the challenges coming from the government.

Was there any more uninspiring stunt than Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and (now former) Te Pāti Māori MP Tākuta Ferris standing together next to a rubbish bin and burning a copy of the Marine and Coastal Area Amendment Bill on Parliament’s forecourt in a brisk breeze in October? The big reveal was Ferris turning the bin around so viewers could see it was marked “rāpihi”, Māori for “rubbish”.

It was part of a lacklustre Burn the Bill campaign that included

hapū lighting fires on beaches protesting at the government not only making it significantly harder for iwi and hapū to claim Customary Marine Title over most of New Zealand’s coastline but also making the legislation retrospective to July 2024, thereby overturning titles already granted by the courts.

Ironically, the hikoi against the Treaty Principles Bill was aimed at legislation that was never destined to go beyond a second reading yet when an immediate danger to notions of ancestral rights emerged in the shape of the MACA amendment bill, the hikoi protesters were presumably all hikoi-ed out.

While the response to that legislation was relatively subdued, defenders of what they see as Treaty rights were voluble in their condemnation of Erica Stanford’s removal in November of Section 127 in the Education and Training Act 2020 that had made it obligatory for school boards to “give effect to Te Tiriti”.

There was something tragi-comic about 1800-odd school boards writing letters to the minister proclaiming they will continue to “give effect to Te Tiriti” when her tweak of the law simply made it optional.

The response has been like a five-year-old running to their bedroom, shouting “You’re not the boss of me!” after their parents said they could go to a sleepover but the child mistakenly thought they had been told they couldn’t.

What the flood of letters declaring schools’ allegiance to the Treaty has achieved is to confirm many people’s suspicions that a majority of schools’ management are hotbeds of Treatyism and Māori nationalism.

That perception was reinforced by a photo of the principal of Christchurch’s Haeata Community Campus, Peggy Burrows — who complained loudly to the media about mouldy lunches — standing outside her school with a red, black and white tino rangatiratanga flag flying on a pole.

Taxpayers might wonder why a state school is promoting the symbol of a separatist political movement and why their taxes are going to support it. Needless to say, Haeata was among those writing to the minister.

Given most schools’ immersion in Treaty politics, their letter campaign should not have surprised anyone. After all, institutions that have bent the knee for years at the altar of the Treaty are hardly going to change their policy overnight.

As one North Island school board wrote in asserting its right to do exactly what the new law allows it to do: “The school has operated under this kaupapa, our collective vision and commitment for many years and will continue to do so.”

This orchestrated episode of political theatre has been a gift to Stanford who has seized the opportunity to emphasise that the best way to honour the Treaty is to raise the educational standards of Māori pupils. And she can brandish statistics that show ensuring schools dedicate an hour on average each day to reading and maths is achieving exactly that.

The overly defensive reaction to s127 being removed is a distinct sign that the educational establishment knows the jig is up for imposing Treatyism and they fear their political position is far less popular than they pretend. After all, if they were confident that giving effect to the Treaty was approved by most parents, they wouldn’t be so anxious about the legal obligation being removed.

What no doubt alarms them is the door is now open for more parents to make it clear they don’t want to see their children’s education focused heavily on Māori separatism, spirituality and Treatyism — and to pressure existing board members to pay more attention to the basics of education.

In short, the mere act of making schools’ obeisance to the Treaty optional has seriously discombobulated their management, in the same way that making it voluntary to join a union in the early 1990s alarmed union bosses. And their concern was justified — union membership subsequently collapsed.

Other developments this year that countered the spread of Treatyism include 75 per cent of the University of Auckland’s Senate voting to make its compulsory first-year course on the Treaty and mātauranga Māori optional; the Healthy Futures (Pae Ora) Amendment Bill removing the requirement for Health New Zealand to engage with Māori partnership boards; and the referendums on Māori wards held in conjunction with local body elections resulting in 25 of 42 areas rejecting them.

A delegation led by Lady Tureiti Moxon that went to Geneva in November to present a laundry list of complaints to the UN turned out to be counter-productive inasmuch as it succeeded mainly in advertising the government’s pushback against special rights for Māori.

The litany of alleged sins presented to the Committee on Eliminating Racial Discrimination (CERD) included Seymour’s Regulatory Standards Act; the disestablishment of the Māori Health Authority and Māori wards; the removal of targeted bowel cancer screening and the reversal of tobacco laws; the promised review of references to Treaty principles in legislation and the scope of the Waitangi Tribunal; the fast-track legislation; proposed changes to freshwater protections known as Te Mana o te Wai, under the Resource Management Act; and giving schools the option to no longer “give effect to Tiriti”.

The doozy was the complaint about the suspension of three Te Pāti Māori MPs for three weeks for performing a haka in the House during the reading of the Treaty Principles Bill.

The irony of lodging objections about New Zealand with a UN body whose members include notorious human-rights abusers such as China and Turkey was evidently lost on Moxon.

The debate about the role of the Treaty in the nation’s political framework is not going away. In fact, it will undoubtedly intensify as the general election campaign steps up next year.

David Seymour alone will ensure it is a live issue. When the Treaty Principles Bill was voted down in April, he promised that wouldn’t be the end of Act’s push for equal rights for all New Zealanders.

This month, he reiterated that pledge: “We will be campaigning [before the election] on the idea that New Zealanders, whatever wave of settlers you may be part of — the first being Māori, or any later ones — you nonetheless are human beings with hopes and dreams and equal rights in this country.”

Chris Hipkins, meanwhile, is on the horns of a dilemma. He wants to take all seven Māori seats and will thus be obliged to promise their voters the Earth to head off the rump of Te Pāti Māori which will be doing exactly that while he also tries not to frighten the horses in general seats.

Some of what Labour has in store for the nation if it wins was foreshadowed — perhaps indiscreetly — by senior MP Peeni Henare during the campaign for September’s Tāmaki Makaurau by-election. He promised the next Labour government would provide $1 billion in funding for Māori initiatives and that it would revive the Māori Health Authority as well as the compulsory “Aotearoa New Zealand Histories” programme in schools — implemented by none other than the Minister of Education in Jacinda Ardern’s government, Chris Hipkins himself.

Despite Henare’s bold assertions, Hipkins has kept quiet so far about any plans he might have for reinstituting aspects of co-governance if Labour wins office — and the legacy media seem disinclined to ask.

His reticence undoubtedly indicates that he doesn’t think promoting He Puapua or Māori nationalism generally will be a vote-winner. But, of course, Jacinda Ardern — with Hipkins in tow — never campaigned on it before the 2020 election either but then proceeded to insert it everywhere in law and policy.

Graham Adams is a freelance editor, journalist and columnist. He lives on Auckland’s North Shore.