John Robertson: Pharmac’s Treaty Theatre - Apartheid Rebranded as “Engagement”

For a split second, it looked like sanity had crept back into the public sector. Pharmac announced it was scrapping its Māori Directorate — and anyone with a working spine thought, “Finally. Maybe we’re done with the racial separatism.” But then came the inevitable bait-and-switch. The new acting CEO, Brendan Boyle, pipes up with the usual Orwellian mush: they’re not ending anything — they’re “creating a Māori engagement model that is more comprehensive, sustainable and effective.”

Translation? “We’re still doing apartheid — just with a better marketing team.”

Let’s stop sugar-coating this. The Māori Directorate was never about saving lives, improving health, or making medicine more accessible. It was a political tool — a racial wedge dressed up in flowery language and dumped on a health agency like some sacred offering. Now they’re tearing down the sign and building a bigger temple in its place. Same rot, different wrapping.

And let’s torch the biggest lie of them all while we’re here: the Treaty of Waitangi was not a partnership. That word doesn’t appear in the original text, in either language. It was a sovereignty transfer. One flag. One law. One nation. What it’s become is a racial weapon — a sacred cow for career activists, bureaucrats, and politicians who’ve learned that if you chant “Te Tiriti” three times in front of a mirror, taxpayer money magically appears.

The idea that some New Zealanders get government preference based on ancestry is apartheid. Don’t dress it up. Don’t call it “equity.” It’s racial discrimination, plain and simple. If South Africa had tried this today, we’d be slapping sanctions on them and calling them monsters. But when it’s done under the smiling guise of “Treaty obligations”? Suddenly, it’s holy.

Give me a break.

This isn’t 1840. Nobody in this country is a pure “this” or a pure “that.” Everyone is mixed. The entire notion of separate treatment for “Māori” assumes there’s a racial caste system — that if you check the right box, you deserve extra rights, extra money, and extra influence. It’s a lie. It’s junk science. Race is a social construct, and using it to govern people is both insane and dangerous.

Pharmac is supposed to keep people alive. That’s its job. Every dollar that goes into ethnic consulting panels and Treaty training sessions is a dollar not spent on cancer meds, insulin, or heart treatment. If you think people are dying because there isn’t enough cultural weaving in the drug-purchasing process, you need to be sectioned.

And the activist class knows it. That’s why they’re so angry. They’re not mourning the end of some life-saving strategy. They’re mourning the death of an ideological cash cow.

This was never about health. It was about power — and about embedding apartheid into the very bones of the public service. Now that it’s under threat, they’re screeching like banshees.

They’ll scream about “colonialism.” They’ll screech about “racism.” And they’ll demand more funding, more oversight, and more veto power — all in the name of a fabricated history that paints modern mixed-race citizens as a permanently aggrieved underclass.

Well, enough. The Treaty has become a monster. A tool for division. A political battering ram used to silence critics and rewrite law. It needs to be stripped of its mystical status and thrown back into the box where it belongs — as a historical document, not a holy scripture.

Pharmac doesn’t need to engage with race. It needs to engage with patients — as equals, not as census categories. We’re a modern country. A multi-ethnic society. And if we’re dumb enough to keep letting fake racial lines determine who gets what, we deserve the bureaucratic circus we’re getting.

Burn the apartheid playbook. Burn the obsession with ancestry. And for the love of reason, stop pretending that a health agency needs a spiritual race czar to hand out Panadol.

New Zealand deserves better. Start acting like it.

John Robertson is a patriotic New Zealander who frequently posts on Facebook.