On its website The New Zealand Initiative claims, “We are the organisation to sketch pathways towards a better future”.
In October 2025, NZ Initiative sketched out its recommendations for reforms to New Zealand’s ‘mixed-member proportional’ (MMP) electoral system. NZ Initiative’s report, MMP AFTER 30 YEARS Time for Electoral Reform?, was authored by NZ Initiative’s Nick Clark. Insomniacs can read the report here:
One of the report’s recommendations is decidedly sketchy; NZ Initiative recommends retention of the Māori seats in Parliament. In doing so, NZ Initiative contorts itself into all the sorts of dotty knots that tend to characterize debates on the treatment of race in New Zealand. (In mild defence of NZ Initiative, intellectual rigour struggles to survive in The Realm of Race.)
Don’t get me wrong, the Māori seats were, on their creation and for a long time afterwards, super cool and a legitimate source of national pride:
NZ Initiative’s stated reasons for supporting retention of Māori seats are “their symbolic importance as an expression of Treaty partnership, their role in providing an independent Māori voice, and strong support from Māori communities”. It’s a flaccid but revealing statement. NZ Initiative clearly subscribes to the ahistorical notion that New Zealanders ought to be constitutionally divided between individuals with Māori ancestry, and those without, existing in some eternal, ethereal “partnership”. There’s also the stereotyping, racist-adjacent notion that there exists a unitary “Māori voice”, emanating from ghettoed “Maori communities”.
I’ve previously done my best to explain the mechanics of Māori seats:
NEW ZEALAND PARLIAMENT'S MĀORI SEATS
John McLean
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18 June 2024
Race-specific Māori representation in New Zealand’s Parliament began with the Māori Representation Act 1867. Non-Māori New Zealanders wanted to bring Māori into the national political fold.
Read full story
In the year of my birth, 1967, the requirement for candidates in Māori seats to have Māori ancestry was removed. Māori seats are a hotbed of historic quirks and ironies.
Martin Luther Peters… “I have a dream”
In its report, NZ Initiative highlights NZ First leader Winston Peters as a “prominent example” of a Māori person who, under New Zealand’s former electoral system (first past the post – “FPP”) was elected to Parliament in a general (non-Māori) seat.
In the lead-up to the 2017 election (which resulted in a Labour/NZ First coalition Government), Peters campaigned for a binding referendum on two issues: (1) Abolishing the Māori seats (2) Reducing the number of MPs in Parliament from 120 to 100. In doing so, Peters stated, “Māori don’t need the Māori seats – they don’t need any more tokenism.”
As it turned out, PM-in-waiting Jacinda Ardern flatly refused to entertain the prospect of such a referendum, so Peters’ aspiration for a referendum-sanctioned, racially blind Parliament died in Ardern’s womb.
This blast from the past is well worth a listen:
[youtube.com]
The Maori Party overhang
The Māori Party (Te Pati Māori) currently holds six of the seven Māori seats. This has resulted in the Māori Party holding 5% of the seats in Parliament, despite gaining only 3% of the votes cast by New Zealanders in the 2023 general election. This “overhang”, a direct result of the Māori seats, is exactly what the MMP electoral was supposed to avoid.
In order to address the Parliamentary disproportionality that the Māori seats can cause, the NZ Initiative proposes, in its report, increasing the number of seats in Parliament from 120 to 170. Yes, you read that right.
Now don’t get me wrong, NZ Initiative produces some excellent stuff. Unfortunately, on occasions NZ Initiative, after analyzing things half to death, comes to conclusions that defy common sense.
With two of the three Abrahamic religious belief systems (Christianity/Judaism) in decline in New Zealand, the Māori Race Religion – in unholy communion with rising Islam - is New Zealand’s newest religion.
ISLAMOPHRENIA IN AOTEAROA
John McLean 25 June 2023
This piece explores New Zealand’s cryptic – nigh on schizophrenic – attitude towards Islam and Muslim people.
Read full story
All religions come with their own idiosyncratic taboos, and in the weird world of Aotearoan Race Wokery, some topics are tapu. One of Māorislam’s taboos is criticism of Māori seats in Parliament. It’s a taboo that NZ Initiative seems, unfortunately, only too keen to follow.
NZ Initiative’s scared soft bigotry
It’s therefore as plain as day that NZ Initiative and Winston Peters hold diametrically opposing positions on Māori seats.
In championing Māori seats, NZ Initiative is exhibiting the classic soft bigotry of low expectations; that the noble, victimized natives of New Zealand still need their very own special seats in Parliament (despite Māori being currently over-represented in Parliament, on a per capita basis). On the other hand, Peters isn’t having a bar of that patronising, regressive narrative.
I suspect NZ Initiative is also a smidge scared of opposing Māori seats. My hunch is that NZ Initiative is fearful of being called “RACIST” and of the hikois, histrionics and general hysteria that would even result from a non-binding referendum on what New Zealanders think about Māori seats. The threat of civic disorder in defence of Māori seats is, dear friends, the Thugs/Blue Hair/White Liberal veto, in all its gory ingloriousness.
Non-binding referendum
Are the Māori seats really so sacred and hot-to-handle that the general public shouldn’t be asked what they think about them? It was a binding referendum on the Māori seats that Peters campaigned on, in the lead up to the 2017 election. But a referendum on the Māori seats need not be binding. A referendum on the Māori seats could be a non-binding way of simply finding out what New Zealanders overall, and Māori in particular, think of Māori seats. Wouldn’t that be a good idea?
The Māori Party aint goin away, anytime soon
The Māori Party has descended into internecine conflict. There’s even talk of Te Pati Māori imploding or splitting. But the unseemly inter-whanau TPM war being fought won’t much dampen support for TPM. Because TPM is much like the Greens party; the more they perform like petulant, deranged children, the more their devoted followers seem to adore them.
NZ Initiative’s report favours reducing the party vote threshold for getting into Parliament from the current 5% to 4 or 3.5%. It would be entirely legitimate for all political parties in the current coalition Government (National/NZ First/ACT) to campaign in the next election for a referendum on whether the Māori seats should be retained, and whether the party vote threshold should be reduced to 4 or 3.5%.
Purely because of the Māori seats, the Māori Party will survive in Parliament after the next election. But if, down the track, the Māori seats are abolished and the Māori Party can’t get over a reduced party vote threshold of, say, 4%, then the Māori Party wouldn’t deserve to be in Parliament. The vast majority of Māori in New Zealand are far too sane to vote for the Māori Party, in its new post-modernist, neo-Marxist incarnation (front right below - the marvelous Pita Sharples, from the halcyon days of the Māori Party).
John McLean is a citizen typist and enthusiastic amateur who blogs at John's Substack where this article was sourced.
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