Zoran Rakovic: Human Rights Commission to Public: Sit Down, Shut Up, and Pay for the Treaty

The New Zealand Human Rights Commission, in its well-meaning but dangerously misleading tone, declared on its website: “The Treaty does not, as is sometimes claimed, confer ‘special privileges’ on Māori, nor does it take rights away from other New Zealanders. Rather, it affirms particular rights and responsibilities for Māori as Māori to protect and preserve their lands, forests, waters and other treasures for future generations.”

This is the sort of platitude that passes for reconciliation in an age of performative equality. It soothes while it suffocates. It disguises while it displaces. And above all, it tells half the truth, which is often more dangerous than a lie.

Let us begin with the obvious. The Treaty of Waitangi is a compact between Māori hapū and the British Crown—not between Māori and non-Māori citizens. This distinction is not academic. It is constitutional. The Treaty is not a social contract to which all citizens are parties, nor is it a license for the Crown to delegate its fiduciary responsibilities to the private sector, homeowners, local councils, or regional planners. And yet, this is precisely what has been happening.

Across New Zealand, a quiet confiscation is taking place—not of land per se, but of responsibilities, costs, and moral burdens. These are being transferred, without consent or compensation, from the Crown to ordinary New Zealanders under the guise of honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

The mechanisms of this transfer are not the overt edicts of conquest or the blunt tools of legislation in name alone. Instead, they are embedded in the bureaucratic machinery of modern governance: the Resource Management Act (RMA), the Local Government Act (LGA), the Conservation Act, and countless planning instruments, policy statements, and “consultation” frameworks that present themselves as neutral but are anything but.

Consider the RMA. Section 6(e) requires that all persons exercising functions and powers under it must “recognise and provide for the relationship of Māori and their culture and traditions with their ancestral lands, water, sites, wāhi tapu, and other taonga.” At first glance, this sounds reasonable. But who exactly is exercising these powers? Not the Crown, but councils, developers, planners, and ultimately—private citizens seeking consents to improve, subdivide, or use their land.

The effect is perverse. The Crown, having signed the Treaty, and having failed for decades to uphold its promises, now compels landowners—who never signed any such compact—to make good on its obligations. You, the smallholder in Selwyn, the retiree in Rotorua, the builder in Kāpiti, are now the de facto stewards of biculturalism. Your property rights are suspended until you have paid penance on behalf of the Crown.

This is not justice. This is abdication masquerading as inclusion.

It is also economically ruinous. When the cost of obtaining a resource consent balloons because one must engage in protracted and often ambiguous engagement with iwi groups—groups who rightly assert their identity but who are now functionally gatekeepers to non-Māori land development—the costs are not borne by the Crown. They are borne by citizens. When a local plan change is held up because a hapū raises unresolved historical grievances, the cost is not absorbed by the Crown’s Treaty settlements office. It is loaded onto the backs of ratepayers and developers, inflating housing prices and creating perverse disincentives to economic growth.

In effect, the Crown has created a shadow taxation regime – both moral and pecuniary, paid in coin as well as in delay, complexity, and uncertainty.

It gets worse. Under the LGA, councils are required to “facilitate participation by Māori in local decision-making,” which again sounds laudable. But this requirement does not come with clear boundaries or fiscal support from central government. The result is predictable: ratepayers fund Māori liaison officers, iwi engagement teams, and co-governance bodies, even as the Crown retains all sovereignty and reserves the right to overrule or ignore local sentiment when it chooses.

The fiction that councils are “not the Crown” is trotted out whenever central government wishes to escape responsibility. But this same fiction collapses whenever councils are asked to enact Treaty-based initiatives on behalf of the state. The inconsistency is astonishing. When iwi submit to Parliament, they speak to the Crown. When iwi submit to councils, they are told they are engaging a “partner.” But what kind of partner is a homeowner who was never consulted? What kind of democracy shifts foundational obligations without public debate or electoral mandate?

This is the heart of the deceit. By inserting Treaty obligations into general legislation and applying them to all “decision-makers,” the Crown has moved from partnership to proxy. It has built a system where its obligations are devolved onto people who never agreed to bear them, cannot reasonably understand their historical complexity, and yet are held responsible for honouring them through planning compliance, consultation, and cultural assessment reports.

This framework does not build unity. It erodes it. It transforms what should be a targeted reconciliation process into a diffuse and unaccountable bureaucracy of guilt. And the more abstract and procedural the obligations become, the more they lose touch with the original injustice they were meant to remedy.

The legal theorist Lon Fuller warned that the internal morality of law is destroyed when laws are so complex or contradictory that the average person cannot follow them. What then should we say of a system where private individuals are expected to interpret and enact Treaty principles without constitutional training, legal guidance, or cultural fluency?

The transfer of Treaty duties from Crown to citizen is not only unjust—it may be unlawful. Under fiduciary principles, a party entrusted with responsibility (the fiduciary, in our case the Crown) may not delegate that responsibility in ways that burden uninvolved third parties. In Canada, where fiduciary duties between the Crown and Indigenous peoples have been more extensively litigated, the courts have repeatedly ruled that such duties cannot be transferred, diluted, or circumvented without violating the duty of loyalty and good faith. New Zealand courts have yet to take such a clear stand—but the logic remains.

A fiduciary cannot throw its burden onto bystanders and call it equity.

What we are witnessing, then, is not the fulfilment of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, but its bureaucratisation—and with it, the erosion of consent-based citizenship. In a healthy democracy, obligations are assumed knowingly, through transparent mechanisms. What we have now is the opposite: a regime of ambient obligation, where citizens stumble into Treaty duties by applying for a driveway or submitting a subdivision plan.

This is not a partnership. It is a quiet form of coercion.

Even more disturbing is the way public discourse is policed to maintain the illusion. Those who question this arrangement are accused of denying history or being anti-Māori. But this is a false binary. It is entirely possible—indeed necessary—to support just settlements for past wrongs, while also resisting the unjust imposition of those settlements on third parties. It is possible to believe that Māori deserve meaningful redress without accepting that your neighbour should foot the bill through diminished property rights or perpetual consultation fatigue.

And yet the Human Rights Commission, which ought to be the guardian of individual freedoms and due process, parrots a line that erases this distinction. In doing so, it undermines not just public trust, but the very cause it claims to defend.

There is a better way. The Crown must own its Treaty obligations fully and transparently. If it believes certain duties—such as environmental stewardship or cultural recognition—must be enforced, then it must carry those duties itself, fund them, and bear the political consequences. If it wishes to involve the public, it must do so through principled consent, not creeping compulsion.

This includes rewriting the RMA and LGA to clarify that while Māori engagement is encouraged and respected, it is not the responsibility of private individuals to operationalise Crown promises. It includes inserting clauses into all relevant legislation that prohibit the delegation of Treaty duties without explicit statutory authority and a framework for compensation.

More fundamentally, it requires honesty. Honesty about what the Treaty is and is not. Honesty about the difference between rights and privileges. And honesty about the limits of partnership in a liberal democracy.

For if this honesty is not restored, then the backlash will not come from racists or extremists—it will come from ordinary people who no longer recognise the rules under which they live. And it will not be loud, but quiet. Not a protest, but a withdrawal: from planning processes, from civic participation, from trust in the system itself.

This is already happening, the very project of reconciliation is being undermined—not by its enemies, but by the arrogance of those who thought they could impose it from above without consequence.

The Treaty may not take rights away from other New Zealanders in theory. But in practice, it is being weaponised—by the Crown, through law, against its own people.

It is time to name this for what it is: not partnership, but abdication. Not honour, but opportunism. And not justice, but quiet confiscation dressed up as moral clarity.

We deserve better.

Zoran Rakovic is a structural engineer with nearly 30 years of experience, who has helped design and strengthen buildings across New Zealand—particularly in Christchurch’s earthquake recovery - while balancing life as a dad, granddad, and outdoor enthusiast. He blogs HERE.