ZORAN RAKOVIC: When Identity Picks Winners and Taxpayers Pick Up the Bill

While Māori business success is worth celebrating, the Crown’s quiet offloading of Treaty obligations onto non-Māori citizens is tilting the market—and it’s time we talked about it.

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There is much to celebrate in the Māori business renaissance. The recent announcement of the Investment Summit on Māori Business Success, hosted with fanfare and optimism by the New Zealand Government, marks yet another milestone in the growing visibility and sophistication of Māori enterprise. The summit’s purpose—to connect Māori businesses with investors and unlock future capital—was noble. Its language was hopeful. Its ambition clear.

Māori businesses are blossoming across sectors. From land-based industries to tech startups, from iwi-owned agribusinesses to boutique cultural exporters, the Māori economy is carving out a strong identity built on heritage, resilience, and innovation. Such strength deserves applause. No rational observer would wish failure upon any business community—let alone one that is shaking off the shackles of historic dispossession.

But economic growth does not happen in a vacuum. When investment is drawn disproportionately into one sector or group because of legislative scaffolding rather than merit alone, we must ask whether the playing field remains fair. The current policy architecture in New Zealand increasingly suggests that success for Māori businesses is being primed not just by effort, strategy, and creativity, but also by a regulatory and fiscal environment that shifts risk, cost, and treaty responsibility onto others. And this comes with consequences.

This is not a complaint about Māori. Nor is it a hidden racial critique. Let that be stated clearly and early. Māori success in business is something to be admired and emulated. Rather, this is a critique of how the Crown, in its anxiety to atone for historical wrongs, has created a market environment in which non-Māori businesses may find themselves subsidising their own competitive disadvantage.

Consider the practical mechanics of treaty implementation. As the Crown broadens its application of Te Tiriti o Waitangi across law, policy, and procurement processes, we see increasing examples of obligations being imposed not on the Crown itself, but on individual citizens, councils, contractors, and service providers. Whether it’s local government consultation practices, education curricula, or regulatory frameworks that demand “alignment with iwi aspirations,” a notable trend emerges: the cost of Treaty compliance is being offloaded.

When these obligations are written into legislation or funding criteria, Māori businesses—by virtue of their identity—are naturally positioned to meet them with ease. Non-Māori businesses must then retrofit themselves with external consultants, cultural advisors, and compliance officers simply to keep pace. What began as a moral commitment by the Crown risks transforming into a bureaucratic and financial burden borne disproportionately by others.

This divergence is already observable in public procurement. Many government tenders now include language requiring demonstrated commitment to Te Tiriti principles, co-design with iwi, or track records of engaging Māori stakeholders. For Māori-owned enterprises, such criteria are either inherent or administratively straightforward. For others, it becomes a costly box-ticking exercise, one often characterised by performative consultation and superficial alignment.

Over time, this has a gravitational effect on capital. Investors—who are rational, bottom-line-driven actors—are drawn toward businesses that can move seamlessly through regulatory and funding gates. Māori enterprises, under this configuration, become attractive not just for their performance or potential, but for the compliance discount they enjoy. This is not a consequence of Māori manipulation, but of Crown abdication.

One might argue that this imbalance is simply a form of redress. That after decades—or centuries—of economic exclusion, it is right and just that Māori businesses be given a tailwind. That argument holds some moral appeal. But if the cost of redress is passed not to the Crown that caused the harm, but to fellow citizens who did not, then the policy ceases to be reparative and becomes redistributive in a dangerous way. It risks breeding resentment, and—more gravely—undermining the legitimacy of the redress itself.

Already we hear murmurs across New Zealand's SME sector. Business owners are frustrated not because Māori are succeeding, but because they are succeeding under different rules. Not because Māori are advantaged, but because others are increasingly disadvantaged by policy tools that favour cultural alignment over commercial merit. This is not an appeal for sameness, but for fairness. Not for the flattening of difference, but for the recognition that fairness requires shared responsibility, not selective imposition.

The current Government’s presentation of the Māori Investment Summit openly signalled its intent to prioritise identity-based economic policy, framing Māori businesses not just as commercial actors, but as cultural symbols deserving special treatment and targeted support.  Also, in 2022, while serving as a minister in Labour government, Willie Jackson spoke of Māori as natural entrepreneurs and guardians of economic potential, invoking an identity-infused rationale for why Māori businesses deserve not only attention but preferential treatment. But where does this leave the dairy farmer in Southland? The toolmaker in Hamilton? The immigrant-owned café in New Plymouth? They are not invited to investment summits. They are not beneficiaries of treaty-driven procurement policy. They are citizens too—but find themselves slowly edged out of the national narrative about economic aspiration.

What then is the solution?

It begins by recognising that two wrongs do not make a right. Correcting past injustices should not create new injustices—however subtle—in the present. The Treaty obligations must be upheld by the Crown through its own mechanisms, not by exporting its obligations to private actors. Where Māori success requires investment, let that investment come through principled, transparent Crown channels—grants, equity instruments, capability-building—without distorting the commercial field on which all others must operate.

Secondly, we need courage to separate cultural recognition from economic policy. Cultural identity is vital. But when policy frameworks begin to reward identity over competence, the market begins to warp. We must not allow the principle of equity to become a proxy for preferentialism. If we do, we do not elevate Māori—we reduce the dignity of their achievements by framing them as state-dependent.

Thirdly, there must be compensation mechanisms where legislation imposes treaty duties onto non-Crown entities. If a council is compelled to fund cultural engagement plans to fulfil a duty the Crown has towards Māori, that cost must be reimbursed. If a contractor must hire an iwi liaison to qualify for a government tender, that is a treaty cost, not a commercial cost, and should be treated as such. Only in this way can we restore a sense of economic balance.

Finally, we must re-centre the idea of a shared future. Māori prosperity is essential to New Zealand’s wellbeing. But so is the prosperity of every other community. If the state gives the impression—however unintentionally—that one group’s success must be purchased by another’s restraint, we poison the well of social cohesion. The economy is not a zero-sum game, but legislation and procurement rules can make it feel that way.

We are all walking forward together. There is no virtue in resentment, but neither is there virtue in silence when imbalance emerges. New Zealand cannot afford a business environment where cultural taxonomy determines access to capital, or where Treaty compliance becomes a barrier for non-Māori innovation.

If Māori enterprise is to lead, let it lead by example, by excellence, and by ingenuity—not by the crutch of Crown overcompensation. And if the Crown is sincere in its Treaty obligations, let it bear the costs of these obligations itself, not defer them onto the shoulders of private citizens and businesses merely trying to build, compete, and contribute.

For when one part of the market is lifted by genuine success, we all win. But when one part is lifted by the state while another is weighed down by regulatory obligation, the market becomes not a forum for exchange but a theatre of inequality.

We can do better than that. And Māori business, if left to shine on its own terms, surely will.

Zoran Rakovic is a structural engineer with nearly 30 years of experience, who has helped design and strengthen buildings across New Zealand. His substack is HERE.