The Taupō District Council has a “Joint Management Agreement” with The Tūwharetoa Māori Trust Board - the statutory board that represents the Ngāti Tūwharetoa Māori tribe. The Joint Management Agreement was entered into in 2009 and gave Ngāti Tūwharetoa unprecedented decision-making powers in resource consenting.
The 2009 JMA looks nothing like the final draft of a replacement JMA that the Taupō District Council and Tūwharetoa will almost certainly enter into before the end of July 2025. You can read the replacement JMA here:
Draft Tūwharetoa Māori Trust Board and Taupō District Council Joint Management Agreement
The starkest extensions in the replacement JMA are that Lake Taupō itself, together with the upper reaches of the Waikato River, are brought within Taupō Council/Tūwharetoa Co-governance.
The general public only got to know about the replacement JMA because of the brave efforts of Taupō District Councillor Duncan Campbell. Taupō Mayor David Trewavas and Council staff were looking to embed the replacement JMA behind closed doors, without any public notice or consultation.
On 4 July Trewavas wrote a letter asserting that criticism surrounding the replacement JMA stems from – oh, that Woke chestnut - “misinformation”. On the same day, in an interview with Newstalk ZB, Trewavas asserted that the replacement JMA has “Nothing to do with co-governance at all”. You can listen to that interview here:
Update to Taupō's joint management agreement unrelated to co-governance, Mayor confirms
Councillor Campbell responded to Trewavas’ twaddle as follows:
The starkest extensions in the replacement JMA are that Lake Taupō itself, together with the upper reaches of the Waikato River, are brought within Taupō Council/Tūwharetoa Co-governance.
The general public only got to know about the replacement JMA because of the brave efforts of Taupō District Councillor Duncan Campbell. Taupō Mayor David Trewavas and Council staff were looking to embed the replacement JMA behind closed doors, without any public notice or consultation.
On 4 July Trewavas wrote a letter asserting that criticism surrounding the replacement JMA stems from – oh, that Woke chestnut - “misinformation”. On the same day, in an interview with Newstalk ZB, Trewavas asserted that the replacement JMA has “Nothing to do with co-governance at all”. You can listen to that interview here:
Update to Taupō's joint management agreement unrelated to co-governance, Mayor confirms
Councillor Campbell responded to Trewavas’ twaddle as follows:
Click to View
Click to view
Trewavas’ contention that the replacement JMA has nothing to do with co-governance is remarkable given the JMA’s clear and unambiguous statement that:
The purpose of this agreement is to work in partnership to restore and protect the health and wellbeing of Taupō Moana and the Upper Waikato River to give effect to the shared vision. To achieve the purpose, this agreement shall…provide a respectful and effective foundation for the partners to…enhance their partnership at governance [emphasis added] and management levels
Co-governance on resource consenting is as plain as day, with the replacement JMA containing exhaustive provisions for joint decision making on resource consents, prefaced with this:
The Council agrees that…at all times throughout the resource consent process, the Trust Board must be given reasonable and sufficient time and support to participate in the process and provide information in relation to the impact of the application on Ngāti Tūwharetoa values; and …it is essential that resource consent applicants are appropriately informed of Ngāti Tūwharetoa values throughout the process, including as appropriate through the provision of a cultural impact assessment
As one would expect, the replacement JMA is replete with the superficially benign but sinister separatist “partnership” dogma. “Partners”/“partnership” is used 64 times.
The replacement JMA is chocker block with the Three Waters “Te Mana o te Wai” voodoo verbiage, all the mumbo jumbo that the current Government was elected to extinguish:
For Ngāti Tūwharetoa, water is far more than a physical resource - it is a living presence, a reflection of who we are, and a vital thread woven through the very fabric of life
In our Tūwharetoa worldview, water holds Mauri, the life force flowing from Te Waipuna Ariki, the sacred spring of Io
For Tūwharetoa, Te Awa o Waikato originates from one of Ranginui’s sacred tears, shed in compassion for the wounded land drawn up by Māui
Our relationship with water is grounded in ancestral knowledge and lived experience. It…anchors our identity. We cherish it not only for its life-giving properties, but for its role as a source of identity, vitality, and intergenerational connection that binds us to the past, present, and future
In trying to justify augmented Taupo Council/Tūwharetoa Co-governance to NewsTalk ZB, Trewavas said that co-governance is the price that must be paid for [his exact words] “the luxury of using a privately owned lake”. Which happens to be wildly at variance with the words in the replacement Joint Management Agreement… “In this [Tūwharetoa] worldview, water is not to be owned or controlled…”
But wait, it’s worse. The replacement JMA will entrench much more than “co-governance” of the Taupo region. It will bestow upon Tūwharetoa power to veto any activity in the Taupo region that requires a resource consent – a veto power that will allow Tūwharetoa to extort bucket loads of lucre for “cultural impact assessments”, blessings and all manner of other Race Hustle.
So what’s going on here, and what if anything can be done?
There’s a Hurricane blowing through New Zealand, which threatens to impoverish and racially divide us all…all aided and abetted by absurd nincompoop mayors like David Trewavas. How can the life of this fair land be in the palms of some fools’ hands?
To be fair to gormless gimp mayors like Trewavas, they’re often victims of the sly and sinister machinations of Council staff. In 2023, the Taupo Council appointed Julie Gardyne, a local government lifer, as its chief executive. There is no way in the world that Gardyne hasn’t been personally orchestrating the Council’s covert efforts to land the replacement JMA, under the public radar.
In the October 2025 local body elections, David Trewavas will be standing for his fifth consecutive term as Taupō Mayor. We can only hope he fails.
It’s strongly arguable that the Taupō District Council’s impending arrangement with Tūwharetoa is unlawful. What the Council is doing, in effect and for all practical purposes, is giving an unelected, unaccountable group of individuals – those on The Tūwharetoa Māori Trust Board – power over what private citizens can do in the Taupō region.
It’s strongly arguable that the Taupō District Council’s impending arrangement with Tūwharetoa is unlawful. What the Council is doing, in effect and for all practical purposes, is giving an unelected, unaccountable group of individuals – those on The Tūwharetoa Māori Trust Board – power over what private citizens can do in the Taupō region.
Click to view
But it’s too late for a Court challenge and, in any case, New Zealand’s Critical Race Theorist judiciary can’t be trusted to impartially apply the law.
So the replacement JMA will almost certainly be signed within the next fortnight and there are few potential solutions to local councils’ implementation of Three Waters by stealth.
Citizens could elect councils that reject race-based preference and grift. Or the current Government could pass laws prohibiting councils from racifying The Realm. Unfortunately, that would require the Prime Minister to comprehend what’s happening and lead a fightback against the New Zealand’s Two State Dissolution. Fat chance.
Or everyday Māori could wake up and realize that Māori tribal elites don’t much care about them, and rebel. Our family is lucky to lease a bach on Māori ancestral land, on the shores of Lake Taupō. The Māori landowners are currently looking to escape the Tūwharetoa hegemony. All power to them.
John McLean is a citizen typist and enthusiastic amateur who blogs at John's Substack where this article was sourced.
3 comments:
As with the Roman Empire, nations deteriorate, gradually, bit by bit, over a reasonable time frame, and then collapse suddenly, all at once. We are enjoying the gradual bit just now. The ‘all at once’ is coming, and may be much closer than we think.
That meme of New Zimbabwe should show every Prime Minister (foreign agents) since 1974 with a chin scribble and flicking the bird to we the people, because that’s the truth of the matter.
It is disturbing that so few councillors seem awake to the situation. Whilst in Wellington it has been clearly and repeatedly shown that persons of very poor judgement make it the mayoralty, one expects several term mayors to be moderately aware. It is incredible how, depite the demonstrated example of the Auckland Tupuna Maunga Authrorty, so many councils are still sufficiently gullible and willing to enter into co goverance arrangemnts which are in effect maori control.
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