The coalition is racist.
Nearly a year on from the fateful 2023 election that saw the two-term Labour government swept away in a tide of reactionary fervour, Te Ao Māori has come under fire. The New Zealand Herald spreading Hobson’s Pledge propaganda, a stringent rewrite of the Marine and Coastal Area Act on the table, and perhaps more dangerously, the coalition’s support for a first reading of the Treaty Principles Bill that cuts at fifty years of legal developments in protecting the rights and tikanga of iwi and hapu across the country.
The Coalition’s attack dogs Winston Peters and David Seymour have been more than happy to pour gasoline on the cultural relations of the nation. The minister of treaty negotiations Paul Goldsmith made the claim that colonisation in New Zealand has been ‘a good thing’. Liberal notions of equality are now defined by ensuring that everyone lacks access to health, social, and education services, rather than selective triage of our most vulnerable; all the while billionaires, corporations, special interests, and cartels eagerly eye up the profit potential of a privatised New Zealand.
Where Rogernomics put us in the dirt, Luxonomics may be the final nail in the coffin. Māori buried deeper than many others.
Rank populism and reactionary persecution aren’t exactly new tools in the colonial government’s playbook. From Rangiaowhia to Ruatoki twice over, the dispensation of injustice has been something of a pastime for successive colonial regimes. From Governor Grey to his irascible heirs – the National and ACT parties – little has changed in the material interests for promoting such attacks on Te Ao Māori, as another round of land grabbing and mineral exploitation is pushed by the reigning coalition and their primary industry lobby donors.
In May, resource minister Shane Jones attended a hui in Blackball, a small West Coast town credited with being the birthplace of the Labour Party. Jones’ keen interest in mining was framed as a means of supporting workers there. ACT’s resource spokesperson Simon Court was also in attendance.
The counter-protesters evoking environmental concerns were outnumbered by the supporting workers who flocked to hear the bombastic adulation of an industry with historically horrible consequences, such as black lung for the body, and environmental degradation for the earth, a legacy of the industrial revolution that stirs in our upper atmosphere even today as the climate crisis grows ever onward.
Jones, of Te Aupouri and Ngai Takoto whakapapa, channelled the frustrations of those abandoned by neoliberalism towards the modern Labour Party.
“I deliberately chose to come to Blackball because we need to re-legitimise [and] reinvigorate mining,” the former Labour MP said. “It’s been abandoned by the Labour Party. They are now a metropolitan, identity–driven party that feels embarrassed about those historic roots.”
At the same conference in Blackball, Court had this to say on the matter: “A high-wage economy depends on affordable and reliable energy. In other words, we need to drill, baby, drill.” Court pushed for changes along the same vein at the Aggregate and Quarry Conference in 2022 in regard to the regulations of the Resource Management Act.
“We would codify enviro practices, and eliminate consent requirements for things like erosion and sediment control, the basic stuff that’s cut and paste into consent conditions at great cost and time to the applicant.”
Following on from the conference as election season came into full swing, the National Party committed to repealing the existing RMA by Christmas.
During the 2023 election season, NZ First candidate for Rangitata Robert Ballantyne was widely lambasted for this choice quotation, “Cry if you want to, we don’t care. We are the party with the cultural mandate and the courage to cut out your disease and bury you permanently.” However, little attention was paid to the rest of his speech in which he connected the decline of the national economy in the 1970s to the establishment of “a fatal mistake.” That is the Waitangi tribunal. It is the secret web of elite Māori that is causing the economic crisis. Corrupt, litigious, and legally restrictive in character.
A false narrative.
The history of our country is one in which land moguls, business pirates, and special interests, from the New Zealand Company to the entire farming sector, have profited over the accumulation of land, its theft from Māori, and the rapacious drive to extract from the environment for profit. That Māori have suffered from these economic conditions of land loss, alienation, and proletarianisation is a given and the basis upon which the suffering of many Māori continues today.
That has not stopped the coalition from arguing that the current economic conditions can be blamed on Māori and that in sweeping away stringent regulation, they will save both the economy and the soul of colonial New Zealand.
The current coalition’s assault on Māori cultural rights is a continuation of the historical colonial project, but with the support of Australian mining magnates, and local capitalists interested, a cloak-and-dagger approach is adopted.
Māori resistance to the exploitation of Papatūānuku is framed in a narrative of dealing to Māori social “privileges.” In attacking Te Reo, promoting one rule for all, this government hopes to expand the mandate of the primary sector and segments of the tertiary sector.
The racialisation of Māori economic participation in the capitalist economy is a foregone conclusion in a settler society built on said racialisation and the violent intervention into Māori economic participation.
This has been done through Post Settlement Governance Entities designed and shaped by Crown demands regarding the management of Treaty of Waitangi Settlement funds and assets.
Though Post Settlement Governance Entities like Iwi Holding companies and exploitative Māori have participated and profit from exploitation, as all capitalist structures do, the cultural obligations of iwi and hapu to their papakainga and turangawaewae limit the extent of their participation in unrepentant mining, farming, and with the consequences of the Cyclone Gabrielle, forestry.
The broad attack on Māori Wards at the local governance level is a continuation of these policies. Limiting Māori franchise and the influence of iwi and hapu representatives in council has the potential to further limit what little representation Māori have in incredibly unrepresentative bodies.
The New Zealand state, in pursuing the incorporation of Māori into the wider national economy, has ultimately created an avenue by which to attack Māori. Iwi and hapu maintain buy-in with the RMA process to ensure the sanctity of wāhi tapu, grave sites, ancestral food baskets, tipuna maunga and tipuna awa.
What few rights are allowed within a capitalist framework are all readily weaponised as obstacles to overcome for greater national prosperity, or rather, the wealth of this coalition’s backers.
Despite the intensity and speed with which these policies are being rolled out, it is important to recognise that these policy shifts are not new. They have a capitalist history. A capitalist context. A colonial history, and colonial consequences. In attacking Māori culture, we are all thrown off guard.
The cloak and dagger nature of this assault leaves us with a cloak that has been set on fire. The raft of anti-Māori policy, hides the neoliberal dagger as the ACT party pushes for the return of unaccountable charter schools, the National Party’s interests in privatising what is left of our social services, and New Zealand First’s interests in reactionary populism to cater to a nationalistic and ageing petit-bourgeois while raking in the foreign mining money.
We must recognise the confluence of all of these issues. The environment, tangata whenua, working peoples of all stripes and creeds are under the knife.
These policies are not a sudden extension of corporate interests into the governing sphere. John Key’s government eagerly ripped up local democracy last decade with the sacking of the elected Canterbury environmental board to the applause of farming interest groups.
They are not a sudden turn to racism when Māori statistics, despite improvements, broadly mesh with the issues of a class society mistreating the exploited class. The attacks have been tailored to our people to strike at the heart of our fears, the attacks tailored to us as people living in the shadow of the colonial machine.
They are not an accident born of simple racism. The character of the class war has taken shape, its battlegrounds fought outside of our choosing. Language, culture, speech, and thought are simply another feint, our rights a happy ambush as the assault on the wellbeing of Te Ao Marama continues.
The liberation of tangata whenua, the access to and proliferation of our language and culture, the carrying out our obligations must be fought for, hand in hand with the liberation of working class from these binds, the liberation of the Earth Mother from the bonds of capitalist exploitation.
Nā te Haorawa, te Kāwana, te Kāwana, te kino.
He niho tā te moni, te Kāwana, te Kawahaorawa.
Mā te kotahitanga ka makere atu.
Money, government, and capitalism all have teeth.
