Tui Vaeau: Te Pati Maori's Ethnic Power Play - The Poison at Parliament's Heart

New Zealand will either stand for one law for all or it will fall, piece by piece, to the tyranny of tribalism.

Let us put an end to the national self-delusion: Te Pati Maori is not a political party in the conventional sense. It is an ethno-nationalist grievance syndicate, masquerading as a parliamentary movement while relentlessly undermining the very democratic institution it inhabits. Its modus operandi? Identity extortion, racial romanticism and ritualised victimhood, all while cloaked in cloacal cultural theatre.

Their recent antics in Parliament, from melodramatic walkouts to wailing protests and spontaneous haka outbreaks, are not the noble expressions of ancestral resistance they pretend to be. They are infantile tantrums designed to paralyse the legislature and emotionally blackmail the nation. In February alone, their coordinated disruption of the House over the Treaty Principles Bill incurred upwards of $700,000 in security and operational costs. That is not democracy, it is tribal thuggery at taxpayer expense.

Now comes their latest authoritarian brainwave: a compulsory Treaty indoctrination programme for all Members of Parliament. Not education, indoctrination. We are not talking about a sober constitutional seminar. This is ideological grooming under the guise of 'cultural competency'. Every MP, regardless of belief or mandate, must apparently be made to kneel at the altar of their invented orthodoxy: a mythical 'partnership' between Crown and iwi that exists nowhere in the Treaty's actual text.

The so-called 'partnership', the central lie of modern race politics in New Zealand, is a fabrication born of metaphor, not mandate. It emerged in a 1987 Court of Appeal ruling as a poetic flourish, not a legal foundation. And yet here we are, nearly four decades later, contorting our public institutions to reflect the hallucinations of a legal fiction, all in service of a racial aristocracy.

This is the great con. While Te Pati Maori howls about oppression, the taxpayer continues to fund extensive Maori-specific initiatives. In Budget 2025, the government allocated:

$40.2 million per year to the Maori Development Fund to support the Tonui Maori economic growth plan, despite a reduction of $20 million over the next four years

$54 million in operational funding and $50 million in capital funding to Maori education, including new classrooms, language and cultural training for 50,000 teachers, and a "Virtual Learning Network" for STEM education in kura kaupapa and Maori medium education

Funding for recruiting seven new curriculum advisors to assist teachers with the redesigned Te Marautanga o Aotearoa programme

Development of new curriculum resources for te reo matatini and STEM subjects for approximately 5,000 senior high school students

Development of a new Maori Studies subject for the English-medium high school curriculum

$14 million investment into Maori Wardens, Pasifika Wardens, and the Maori Women's Welfare League

Despite these substantial investments, Maori unemployment remains triple the national average. Maori students still underperform in every major educational metric. Maori make up over half of the prison population, and recidivism among 'restorative justice' recipients, those who avoid jail in favour of marae-based rehabilitation, remains indistinguishable from those sent to prison. The data is damning. The investment, substantial. The outcome, failure.

But do not dare point that out — you will be accused of 'racism', as though pointing to a burnt-out husk of policy failure were an act of bigotry rather than fiscal stewardship. This is the genius of Te Pati Maori's racket: racialise every debate, weaponise history, and you can turn even the most basic request for accountability into a hate crime.

What they want — and make no mistake, they have said so openly — is not inclusion, but supremacy. Separate health authorities. Iwi veto power over resource consent. Customary law alongside criminal law. An apartheid system of governance, administered under the euphemism of 'co-governance'. In any other developed democracy, such proposals would be met with horror. Here, they are treated as bold visions of cultural empowerment. It is laughable, were it not so ruinous.

This relentless racialisation of policy is not only toxic, it is deeply unpopular. Survey after survey confirms what the political class refuses to admit: New Zealanders do not want to be divided by bloodlines. In fact, a 2022 Newshub-Reid poll found that 58 percent of New Zealanders explicitly reject race-based policymaking. Another survey by Stuff and Massey University revealed that more than 70 percent of New Zealanders, Maori and non-Maori alike, believe our nation is becoming dangerously fractured along racial lines.

Of course it is. When one segment of the population is told that their ancestry grants them veto power over democratic processes, resentment is inevitable. When substantial funds are lavished on race-exclusive programmes with no evidence of success, anger is predictable. And when children are taught in schools that they are either oppressors or oppressed based on birth, division is guaranteed.

And this is the ultimate irony: in the name of 'healing', Te Pati Maori promotes a politics of perpetual scab-picking. No reconciliation. No unity. Just an endless demand for recognition, reparation and reverence, paid for, always, by someone else.

The solution is not more hand-wringing. It is not more policy designed to appease a radicalised minority of cultural racketeers. The solution is bold, unapologetic reform. Scrap compulsory Treaty re-education. Dismantle co-governance. End race-based funding models. Restore policy to the realm of citizenship, not ancestry.

Let them scream. Let them stomp, chant, protest and pout. That is their right in a free society. But they have no right, none, to weaponise that right into racial exceptionalism. Te Pati Maori is the poison at the heart of Parliament, and the only antidote is a spine stiffened by principle and sharpened by truth.

New Zealand will either stand for one law for all or it will fall, piece by piece, to the tyranny of tribalism.

Tui Vaeau is a digital marketer with a background in real estate and security. Unmoved by the fashionable absurdities of modern politics, he stands for national cohesion and the principle that all New Zealanders should be treated as equals. His views are forthright, unswayed by ideological theatrics, and firmly grounded in reality.  Tui blogs on his site The Sovereign Verdict - where this article was sourced.