Zoran Rakovic - A New Crown, The Same Sword: Power, Hypocrisy, and the Eviction of Selwyn Huts

Ngāi Tahu now owns the land—but the people in the huts must go. We ask: when power changes hands, does justice follow?

Opinion: The settlers of Greenpark Huts did not descend from mountaintops with deeds of conquest. They arrived with huts and hope, making lives on the muddy fringes of Lake Ellesmere / Te Waihora. Through decades, generations came to treat those huts not as property but as places of meaning—battered perhaps, but woven into the fabric of ordinary New Zealand life. And now, as ownership passes fully into the hands of Ngāi Tahu, the story is coming to a bitter end. Eviction notices. Legal wrangling. No renewal. No negotiation. Just the cold mechanics of removal.

This is not just a dispute over leases. It is a confrontation with the uncomfortable truth about power—what it does to people, and what it reveals about those who once demanded justice and now dispense it.

George Orwell, in his fable Animal Farm, wrote that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” That line was not about pigs or politics, but about how revolutionary ideals collapse when a new group gains control. Ngāi Tahu, long cast as the wronged party in colonial history, stood for years as a symbol of restitution. They spoke the language of partnership, dignity, and collective memory. But now, facing down working-class residents at Greenpark Huts, the tribe’s sword appears not restorative but merciless.

Where is the mana of those families who have lived on this land for generations, often longer than some tribal members have held any direct connection to it? The residents are not foreign occupiers, but ordinary New Zealanders. They are teachers, builders, pensioners—those who built their lives on leased ground with trust that their tenure was understood, even honoured. And now, with little fanfare or public dialogue, their time is up. It is all legal. That’s not the question. The question is: is it just?

Michel Foucault would remind us that power does not merely repress. It produces truths, realities, and legitimacies. Once a group gains institutional status, it speaks with the voice of reason, of necessity, of order. Ngāi Tahu, through corporate entities and state partnerships, now operate not as victims of colonialism but as administrators of it. The tribe’s representatives enforce rules and evictions in the same language the Crown once used: “the terms of the lease,” “resource management,” “ecological values.” The script has not changed—only the actors.

Reinhold Niebuhr saw it clearly: “Groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.” A tribe, like a nation-state, may posture as moral but act with cold calculation. The ethic of compassion that an individual might show—the conversation, the delay, the accommodation—is often erased once the group dons the uniform of legitimacy. The same Ngāi Tahu that advocates for recognition of ancestral lands and intergenerational trauma now appear unmoved by the same claims from those living in huts at Greenpark. No tikanga applies to them, apparently. No stories are collected. No manaakitanga. Just the bulldozer of procedural authority.

Frantz Fanon warned that the post-colonial elite often adopts the logic of the former colonisers. “The national bourgeoisie... reveals itself incapable of great ideas or of inventiveness. It chooses the most comfortable solution: the return to the status quo.” What are these evictions but a repetition of the colonial playbook, now in tribal hands? The state steps aside, content that it has “settled” historical grievances, and a new structure arises to do what the old one once did: declare who belongs and who does not.

Let us be blunt. If this is a preview of future bicultural governance, then it is a troubling one. Where are the compassionate resolutions? The shared stories? The willingness to reconcile co-existence, not just with law, but with memory? Ngāi Tahu’s silence on the matter is its own verdict. Their power has found its voice, and its voice speaks in terms the evicted residents recognise well. But they thought such things came only from Wellington, not from the iwi whose story had once paralleled their own.

Christopher Lasch wrote of the moral narcissism of elites—how those in power dress their interests in the garb of virtue. Ngāi Tahu, with its glossy annual reports and sustainability branding, plays a double game. It speaks the language of victimhood to the state, but to the weak—to the elderly man being evicted from his lakeside hut—it offers only cold logic. And in doing so, the tribe slips from its symbolic role as cultural custodian into something far more worldly: a landlord.

Jonathan Haidt would call it moral tribalism. We defend our own, justify our actions as righteous, and ignore contradiction. Groups rarely see their hypocrisy, because to see it would mean to undermine the very myth that unites them. The myth of justice. Of rebirth. Of moral elevation after suffering. But the people of Greenpark are not a threat to Ngāi Tahu’s identity or sovereignty. They are merely inconvenient. That may be the saddest truth of all.

Antonio Gramsci warned that hegemony is not maintained by force alone, but by consent—by moral leadership. A ruling group secures dominance not by coercion, but by presenting itself as the natural leader of a shared vision. Ngāi Tahu could have seized that moment. It could have brought the residents into dialogue. It could have honoured the huts, not just as structures, but as living traces of a shared colonial history, however uncomfortable. But instead, it tightens its grip and hides behind contracts. That is not hegemony. It is cowardice.

Václav Havel might ask: What becomes of the powerless, when even those who once stood with them become indistinguishable from the bureaucracy they fought? The residents of Greenpark Huts have not been invited into conversation. They have not been offered a future on the land. They are simply erased. And all the while, the state watches with indifference, relieved that the burden has shifted to someone else.

We must not let sentimentality obscure the facts: the huts are real, the residents are real, and their removal is not a footnote in a tidy narrative of indigenous resurgence. It is a rupture. A clash between two histories—one newly powerful, the other long vulnerable. And we are left to ask: who, in this moment, holds the moral weight?

Edward Said once wrote that imperialism doesn’t end when the empire retreats; it lingers in the mindset, in the categories of thought. When Ngāi Tahu exercises property rights with the same indifference as the colonial state once did, we are not witnessing decolonisation. We are witnessing mimicry.

None of this denies the legitimacy of Treaty settlements, nor the pain of Ngāi Tahu’s dispossession. But legitimacy is not license. Historical trauma does not grant moral immunity. And when today’s victims of eviction are ordinary citizens—not invaders, not corporations, but neighbours—the burden is on those with power to find a better way.

Alexis de Tocqueville feared that democratic groups would wrap coercion in the cloak of virtue. That a majority, or a moral elite, would claim the right to impose their will without acknowledging the humanity of those affected. That is the danger here. Not the law, but the spirit in which the law is used.

So where do we go from here? Perhaps this moment is a test. A test of whether power can ever be moral when passed to new hands. A test of whether biculturalism means shared stewardship or simply two governments, each capable of the same exclusions. A test of whether the language of mana, whakapapa, and tikanga can survive contact with corporate strategy and property rights.

If Ngāi Tahu is to be a model for indigenous empowerment in the 21st century, it must do better. It must show that justice means more than technical compliance. It must demonstrate that those who once demanded compassion can offer it, and that those who speak of mana can recognise it in others.

Otherwise, the eviction of Greenpark’s hut dwellers is not just a local dispute. It is a prophecy. A warning about what happens when the wheel turns, and the oppressed become the administrators, and power once again writes history with an iron pen.

For a moment, the eviction of the Greenpark Huts feels like the stage curtains drawing back—not just on a local dispute, but on a possible, bleak future. It is as if the machinery of tribal governance, cloaked until now in rhetoric of healing and partnership, has flickered into view in its stark operational form. Behind the polished Treaty settlements and cultural resurgence lies something colder: a system prepared to act with the same bureaucratic indifference and legalistic force as the colonial powers it once condemned. This moment, though small in scale, reveals the contours of a not-impossible future—one in which tribal authority, once borne from grievance and justice, evolves into an unyielding structure that speaks the language of mana but behaves with the levers of eviction. A future where the banner of cultural restoration conceals the workings of exclusion and economic control. It is not inevitable, but it is visible now, briefly, in this narrow spotlight—a dark silhouette cast upon the fragile idea of shared nationhood.

The huts may be cleared. The land may be silent. But the story will remain—etched not in lease documents, but in the public conscience. And the question it poses will haunt us: when power changes hands, do we maintain the same high moral principles—or reveal our real, not-so-nice self?

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.