INTRODUCTION
Blasphemy laws were supposedly abolished in 2019, when Section 123 of the Crimes Act 1961 (“blasphemous libel”) was repealed.
Yet in 2025, a new version has emerged across New Zealand — and nowhere more clearly than on Waiheke Island.
Yesterday’s blasphemy is today’s racism. Yesterday’s heresy is today’s harassment.
The rituals of a faux-indigenous eco-religion — often called Te Ao spirituality — are being normalised in state classrooms. To question them is to risk reprimand, official letters, and social-media denunciation.
THE NEW PRIESTS: EDUCATORS AS CONVERTS
Educators are no longer simply teachers. Once trained in literacy and numeracy, their preparation shifted when teachers’ colleges were absorbed into universities. Bachelor of Education programmes are now filled with Critical Race Theory and ideological frameworks rather than pedagogy.
The frontline enforcers are not kaumātua or tohunga, but almost exclusively white women. In communities such as Waiheke they are almost without exception blonde, blue-eyed, middle-class women who have absorbed the worldview of White Fragility and Critical Theory.
Earlier spiritual experiments — Buddha statues, yoga circles, prayer flags, talking trees — never paid the bills. But inside state schools, Te Ao spirituality offers career progression, social approval, and professional obligation.
This eco-religion fills the “god-hole.” It offers teachers and some parents a sense of purpose and meaning. Good for them. But one parent does not want this religion imposed on her child. She wants to be consulted. She wants to know the content of the curriculum. And she may well speak for a silent majority who are afraid to ask questions, afraid to speak.
THE PRINCIPAL’S STATEMENTS
For months, one parent itemised clear questions:
Where is the content of the curriculum?
How many hours of te reo Māori are taught?
Are children instructed in atua, tapu, mana, tūpuna, haka, karakia?
Where are the opt-in consent forms required under sections 56–60 of the Education and Training Act 2020?
After 18 communications in six months, three replies finally came.
18 May 2025: The principal referred the parent to SchoolDocs policies, acknowledging karakia with references to atua in the bilingual Ngā Purapura unit.
13 June 2025: She confirmed that Ngā Purapura is an immersion environment with karakia, waiata, haka, pūrākau, and pōwhiri — integral to the programme, with no selective opt-outs.
23 July 2025: For mainstream classes she wrote:
> “At Te Huruhi School, mainstream classes do not teach, invoke, or practice spiritual or religious concepts. Te reo Māori is taught for approximately three hours per week and may include kapa haka, pōwhiri practice, and instruction in Māori language and culture. These lessons are part of our standard cultural curriculum and are not religious in nature.”
Three hours per week. One hundred and twenty hours per year. With no curriculum, no timetable, no parental consent.
This evasiveness proves the point: the Emperor has no clothes.
SCHOOLDOCS: ENFORCING ONE SPIRITUALITY
The subscription policy library SchoolDocs, cited by the principal, states:
> “We honour Māori spirituality and integrate mātauranga Māori appropriately into school programmes.”
This is not neutrality. It is a commitment to teach spirituality to every child. There are no opt-outs, no alternatives. Even those with one-sixteenth Māori ancestry are assumed to require instruction in pre-European beliefs.
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION
On 22 July 2025, Senior Advisor Clinton Rowe wrote on behalf of the Ministry of Education:
> “Practices such as karakia, pōwhiri, wairua, mana, and tapu are consistent with the secular requirement of section 97 of the Education and Training Act.”
He cited section 127 of the Act, stressing boards must reflect tikanga Māori, mātauranga Māori, and te ao Māori.
BOARD CHAIRPERSON & TRUSTEES
On 6 August 2025 (sent 11 August), the Board of Trustees, chaired by Emma Musson, issued a cease‑and‑desist letter. It warned that if concerns continued, the Board could:
“Restrict your communication with school staff to a designated channel,”
“Ban you from school premises,” or
“Seek legal advice”
THE HYENAS
Raise concerns publicly, and the rules change. The subject is treated as sacred.
To question karakia? Racist. To ask about atua? Racist. To enquire about class hours? Racist. To share the concern online? Racist.
This is cancel culture in full cry: name-calling, dirt-digging, denunciation. Heretics once burned at the stake; today they are branded “racist” — marked for exclusion.
THE FREELANCE ENFORCER
Then comes the journalist.
On 20 August 2025, local freelance contributor Tessa King (Waiheke Weekender, Gulf News) posted publicly on Facebook:
> “The way you’ve been behaving towards our ECE and school staff is straight-up bullying. Combined with your thinly disguised and totally abhorrent racism — there is really no place for people who behave like this in our beautiful community.”
These are her exact words. Bullying. Abhorrent racism. And the suggestion that dissenters “have no place” here.
Inclusion becomes exclusion. Her message was unmistakable: heretics must question whether they even belong on the island.
The parent at the centre of this case has lived on Waiheke for 18 years. Her mokopuna have been in early childhood education there for seven years. She objects to children being compelled to yabba to spirits or the dead. And for this, she is told to leave.
WHOSE ANCESTORS?
Children are told to address tūpuna. But whose ancestors?
White children yabba-ing to someone else’s forebears? Māori children to Taiwanese ancestors? Te Rauparaha, Governor Grey, Bishop Selwyn? Or great-granddad with a candle under his photo?
The children may well be left wondering what they are thinking when they babble to the tūpuna. Are they thinking about great-granddad, or are they just in a trance, knowing they are not to ask questions?
No explanation is given. Instead children bow before carved figures — pōu, tekoteko, kōwhaiwhai — idols in wood. This is religion, not culture.
SCIENCE AND ORIGINS
When children are told to invoke ancestors stretching back into myth, what happens to science?
Anthropology traces the human journey from Africa, through Southeast Asia, across Polynesia, to Aotearoa. Genetics points to “mitochondrial Eve” 150,000 years ago. Migration, adaptation, and mixture explain our presence here — not spirits rising from the soil.
Yet schools demand mystical invocations of nameless ancestors. Evidence is replaced with ideology.
CRITICAL THEORY AND NEW ZEALOTRY
These ideas are not iwi-derived. They are imported frameworks.
CRT (Critical Race Theory): race as the central factor in all relationships.
DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion): dividing people into categories of privileged and oppressed.
Teachers, trained in universities where CRT and DEI dominate, pass on the same ideological frameworks to students. Like any converts, zeal becomes punitive.
ORWELL WAS RIGHT
George Orwell’s 1984 imagined a future where dissent was punished as “thought crime.”
Today:
Religion → “Culture”
Indoctrination → “Inclusion”
Censorship → “Respect”
Truth → “Harmful communication”
Point this out, and one is accused of harm for simply noticing reality.
We are now living inside Orwell’s warning.
FORGOTTEN RIGHTS
The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act protects freedom of thought, conscience, and belief.
The Education and Training Act protects students’ freedom around religion.
Secularism exists to keep state schools neutral. That shield must be restored.
THE LAW AS A WEAPON (FOR THE RECORD)
These threats lean on statutes originally intended for different purposes:
Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 (HDCA): meant to address cyberbullying, doxxing, intimate-image abuse, and serious online harms.
Harassment Act 1997: aimed at stalking and intimidation, requiring at least two specified acts within twelve months.
On Waiheke, these have been repurposed as blasphemy codes to police dissent about Te Ao spirituality.
CONCLUSION
This is not abstract. It involves real people: a kindergarten teacher, a principal, a board chair, and a freelance journalist. Together they enforce new blasphemy codes: letters written, threats implied, one parent silenced.
But this is not simply a Waiheke issue. The same dynamic is occurring in classrooms from Cape Reinga to Stewart Island: compulsory invocations of atua, enforced spirituality, and a parent threatened into silence. Waiheke is one visible example of a national blasphemy code that has crept back into New Zealand education.
Secularism was meant to protect children from imposed religion. It must do so again — for every child, in every school, across the country. One parent may well speak for a silent, suppressed, or fearful majority who dare not ask questions or speak.
Judy Gill BSc, DipTchg, is a parent, former teacher, and a staunch advocate for secular education.
3 comments:
If one hasn’t been brought up within Māori communities, it has been my experience that urban populations almost revere anything Māori. There is a definite naïveté as illustrated by Christopher Luxon. What was once seemingly the position to address genuine Crown/Maori injustices, has become a free for all for folks of mixed race who have been no more prejudiced than all NZ’ers today -NZ’ers who can’t, or are more principled, than to lower themselves and feed from the trough.
Critical Race Theory and like ideologies are racism incarnate.
Whenever race is at the base of any quest it is clearly racist.
Te ao Maori (et al) is a religion in as much that it is an organised set of beliefs, practices, and rituals shared by a 'community' and focuses on 'higher' beings.
Spirituality is a personal quest for meaning, purpose, and connection to something larger than oneself and is only ever pursued outside of a religious framework.
Thus, these people are indeed being everything they rail against like all hypocrits do. They are indeed breaking the laws of this land boldly and with a smug selfrighteous sanctimony you only find in those people and those environments.
These people are the reason children fail in our current education 'system' and oue public service is filled to the brim with cheerleaders to boot.
"... [invoking] ancestors stretching back into myth" sounds more like dabbling in the occult than bona fide religion to me!
NZ education embraces voodoo-like practices!
What's the matter with the parents of these kids?
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