That politician is none other than Tuariki Delamere, once the Immigration Minister himself. Having once wielded the powers of deportation, he now insists that the Crown has fatally erred because it didn’t sprinkle enough tikanga into its paperwork when deporting an overstayer. His case leans heavily on the Supreme Court’s Ellis v The King decision, which found that tikanga Māori is now considered part of New Zealand’s common law. Delamere interprets this as meaning government departments must apply tikanga at every turn, no matter the issue. Overstayer? Visa expired? Family ties irrelevant elsewhere in the world? Doesn’t matter. If a Māori whānau is involved, tikanga must override the statutes.
So we arrive at this remarkable situation: immigration officers are being told they can no longer simply apply the Immigration Act. Instead, they’re expected to consult tikanga principles, weigh up cultural values, and presumably divine whether their decisions are sufficiently in tune with Māori lore. One might forgive an officer for wondering if they need to carry a wānanga manual alongside the rulebook.
Delamere hasn’t stopped at arguing for tikanga. He’s also compared the Government’s deportation decision to the persecution of the Uyghurs in China. Because, of course, there’s no better way to win judicial sympathy than to equate Immigration New Zealand officials with a regime accused of running concentration camps. The Crown, understandably, has called his case “vexatious.” But Delamere insists this is a matter of public interest by which he seems to mean rewriting the law to privilege one group’s cultural worldview over the equal application of national statutes.
This is not an isolated oddity. The steady creep of tikanga into our legal system is no longer subtle. Courts cite it, statutes reference it, and government departments are told to “give effect” to it. Once, lore was cultural knowledge: values, stories, and guidance passed down through generations. Now, it is being treated as binding authority. One person’s oral tradition is becoming everyone else’s legal obligation. And because tikanga is often unwritten, variable between iwi, and open to interpretation, it leaves judges and bureaucrats fumbling in a fog of cultural relativism.
The problem isn’t recognising the importance of tikanga in Māori life. It’s elevating lore into law and pretending the two are the same thing. Law, by definition, is universal, clear, and enforceable by the state. Lore is local, spiritual, and shaped by community consensus. Blurring that line means we no longer have one law for all we have a patchwork of rules applied differently depending on ancestry and context. That’s not equality before the law. It’s the slow re-tribalisation of our legal system.
So what’s the message in 2025? Overstay your visa, marry into a Māori family, and you may just discover that deportation rules suddenly bend in your favour. Immigration officers? Put down the statute book, pick up a tikanga handbook, and prepare to defend yourself against accusations of cultural genocide the next time you apply the law. After all, in modern New Zealand, common sense comes second. Tikanga comes first.
Welcome to the world’s first legal system with footnotes in mythology.
Steven is an entrepreneur and an ex RNZN diver who likes travelling, renovating houses, Swiss Watches, history, chocolate art and art deco.
11 comments:
Laughable if it wasn’t so serious!
The new trend : state fiction as fact and see who challenges this?
Law, education, science, all professional codes of conduct......
The ethno-state is already operating.
"The steady creep of tikanga into our legal system is no longer subtle. Courts cite it, statutes reference it, and government departments are told to “give effect” to it." This is precisely why the coalition Government needs to move quickly and surely to remove all mention of tikanga from the statutes and remind the Courts that they are there to apply the law and not make it. Instead, Parliament is doing the complete ruddy opposite. Strewth - Give me strength.
But Goldsmith - in any of his key portfolios - takes this sort of pallid action which can be easily reversed by another Left govt. Is National in bed with Labour?
Same issues at NZ universities. Ideologues in charge of research funding and promotions, and if you are not an academic who has drunk the kool-aid little chance for advancement. You might have twice the number of students--and hence earn twice the revenue--but one needs purple lips from excessive kool-aid consumption to become One Who Is Favoured.
Tuariki Delamere, a brown ant, " white anting" immigration.
Named and shamed.
Luxon could fix this overnight but he hasn't the gonads to do anything to do with race.
I'll bet the farm that on Hosking's radio show on Monday he will do his usual high speed repetitive prattle on anything other than the task that he has been asked to do, and has an election mandate - restore democracy, and stop this saturation Maori crap.
We urgently need a referendum on whether Maori ceded sovereignty - to put this sort of nonsense to bed once and for all. The Crown makes the law of the land and it's not subject to the whim of some unelected part-Maori, somewhere with an unwritten book of protocols that vary like the weather.
Article third of the Maori language treaty has the word tikanga in it, but it does not translate into what today's grifters would have us believe tikanga means.
Ko te Tautou
Hei wakaritenga mai hoki tenei mo te wakaaetanga ki te Kawanatanga o te Kuini-Ka tiakina e te Kuini o Ingarani nga tangata maori katoa o Nu Tirani ka tukua ki a ratou nga TIKANGA katoa rite tahi ki ana mea ki nga tangata o Ingarani
Article third of the 1869 back translation reads.
This is an arrangement for the consent to the government of the Queen. The Queen of England will protect all the Maori of New Zealand. All the RIGHTS will be given to them the same as her doings to the people of England.
By signing the treaty, Maori gained the protection of the English Common Law Constitution which goes back to King Alfred the Great - (849-899)
In his profound wisdom, King Alfred the Great illuminated the path to enduring unity by eschewing religious imposition in favour of a shared common law, that emphasized individual sovereignty, private property, a balance of power, accessibility to the law for all, and collective defence, masterfully intertwining the disparate threads of Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Celtic, and other native peoples into a resilient societal fabric that, more than a millennium later, still binds the many adherents to the English civilization into a single whole.
If Time magazine is anything to go by, the left has redefined influence: make a show, check the ideology box, and suddenly the world bends to your narrative — reality, restraint, and parliamentary procedure need not apply.
Deb Haaland, former U.S. Interior Secretary and professional medal-winner in left-wing virtue-signalling, apparently appointed herself the world’s arbiter of Kiwi political influence. Her method? Crown Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, a Māori MP, a “rising star” in Time magazine’s 2025 list of the world’s most influential rising stars — on the sole basis of a haka performed in Parliament. A haka that, in reality, earned her a suspension.
Yes, Time magazine, that self-important temple of editorial gravitas, decided that stomping your feet and waving your arms in Wellington counts as global leadership. One can almost hear the editors swooning over a Hansard clip like teenagers watching a boy band, mistaking ceremonial protest for actual accomplishment. Meanwhile, the Speaker, MPs, and clerks are left blinking, wondering if Parliament has been replaced by a low-budget Broadway musical.
Picture it: Maipi-Clarke thunders across the chamber, chest heaving, arms flailing like a T-Rex on espresso, while Haaland, tears streaking her left-wing face from thousands of miles away, proclaims: “She shook the world!” Shook the world? The only shaking I saw was the Speaker’s patience vibrating violently down to the Auckland waterfront. Suspension notices are apparently medals now, and procedural disruption is celebrated as moral triumph.
Then there’s Kiwibank’s Person of the Year, Shaneel Lal, 2021. He who sparked violent protests against a women’s rally in Auckland featuring Posie Parker.
Maipi-Clarke gets the international Time glow for symbolic theatre, and Lal receives a domestic pat on the back for… well, whatever it was that triggered the PR team’s approval. Both cases prove the same point: influence is now measured by visibility plus ideological alignment, not deeds, competence, or Kiwi parliamentary norms. One gets a global spotlight for a haka; the other, a local nod for reasons that remain murky to the public.
Haaland’s editorial lens is pure ideological fireworks. Left-wing credentials, activist optics, and global amplification networks matter more than governance, policy outcomes, or Kiwi common sense. A minor procedural breach becomes a morality play. A suspension becomes a coronation. Influence is no longer earned; it is declared by virtue-signalling elites with a taste for symbolic theatre.
And imagine the absurdity: a parliament designed to make laws, a Speaker trying not to facepalm through the centuries of procedure, and a 21-year-old stomping her way to global fame — all narrated by a U.S. Democrat thousands of miles away, tears streaming, pronouncing “She shook the world!” as if Wellington had been bombarded by an existential meteor.
In short: Maipi-Clarke’s star rises on Haaland’s Time list, Shaneel Lal shines domestically through Kiwibank, and the rest of us are left eyebrows orbiting the stratosphere, watching virtue-signalling masquerade as influence. Left-wing credentials earn global applause; procedural discipline earns suspension at home.
Reality, inconvenient and unglamorous, is firmly off-script.
"Pick up a tikanga handbook"". If only we could. Maori far to shrewd to commit to that. Readers of Nicolas, Polak, Wakefield, Maning et al would likely rip it to shreds. And it would cheat the legal profession from millions. Much of maori tikanga was gross in the exteme.
What is the point of a referendum asking if Maori ceded sovereignty? Of course they did. Surely five hundred signatures agreeing to the the three articles of the Treaty are enough?
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