John Robertson: Bullying A Nation

Walk through any New Zealand city now and you can feel it before you consciously register it. The signs. The buildings. The announcements. The slow, steady replacement of the familiar with something ideological, imposed, and untouchable. English shrinking, Māori rising, not through organic use or necessity, but through instruction. Through policy. Through pressure. Through an unspoken threat: accept this, or be branded.

This isn’t a celebration of language. It’s a declaration of power.

New Zealand has 5.3 million people. English is spoken by essentially everyone. It’s the language people use when they’re half-asleep at work, when they’re angry, when they’re in trouble, when they’re explaining something complicated, when seconds matter. It’s the operating system of the country. Courts don’t hesitate in English. Surgeons don’t pause mid-operation to translate. Emergency dispatch doesn’t fumble for inclusivity. English is how the country actually functions.

Te reo Māori, spoken fluently by a small minority, does not perform that role. It doesn’t need to. No one’s attacking it by stating the obvious. Languages don’t become dominant by moral decree — they become dominant by use. And in New Zealand, English is used by everyone, including Māori, every single day.

Yet everywhere you look now, the state is pretending otherwise.

Signs appear that don’t clarify anything, don’t help anyone navigate, don’t make public space safer or more efficient. Government agencies quietly drop English names altogether. Media outlets lead with Māori phrases regardless of audience comprehension. Councils rename streets and landmarks without asking the people who live there. Public servants are expected to recite words they don’t understand, perform rituals they don’t believe in, and affirm concepts they never consented to adopting.

This isn’t about communication. It’s about submission.

The defenders of this system love pointing overseas. “Japan does it.” Sure — because Japan actually needs it. English signage there helps foreigners survive in a country where most locals don’t speak English. It’s practical. It’s honest. It’s useful. New Zealand copying that model is like installing subtitles for a language everyone already speaks. It’s performative nonsense dressed up as progress.

And everyone knows it.

That’s why the argument never stays on facts. The moment you point out that everyone understands English, the conversation collapses into accusations. Racist. Coloniser. Problematic. That’s the script. It’s repeated endlessly because it works. It intimidates people into silence. It reframes disagreement as moral failure. It turns public policy into a loyalty test.

What’s happening now isn’t inclusion — it’s reordering. A quiet but unmistakable hierarchy where identity outranks citizenship and belief creeps into spaces that were once neutral. Concepts like mauri, wairua, tapu, and kaitiakitanga aren’t presented as cultural perspectives anymore; they’re embedded into frameworks, laws, and professional expectations. You don’t have to “believe” in them, you’re told — you just have to behave as though they’re real. That’s not tolerance. That’s enforced metaphysics.

And it changes how a country feels.

It changes the atmosphere of schools, where children repeat words they don’t understand but know they’re not allowed to question. It changes workplaces, where silence becomes safer than honesty. It changes public space, where signage no longer prioritises clarity but symbolism. It creates a low-grade tension, a sense that the ground rules are shifting and no one asked permission.

People feel it in their gut, even if they struggle to articulate it.

What makes this worse is the historical irony. The same activists who rail against empire seem perfectly comfortable replicating its structure: one worldview elevated, dissent morally punished, compliance framed as virtue. It’s not decolonisation — it’s substitution. Different language, same impulse.

Double signage is just the flag planted in the soil. It’s the visible marker of a deeper transformation — away from a secular, shared civic culture and toward an identity-managed state where practicality is secondary and objection is dangerous. People aren’t angry because they hate Māori culture. They’re angry because they’re being told, over and over, that reality itself is offensive.

That English — the language everyone uses — is somehow illegitimate.

That questioning policy is hatred.

That neutrality is violence.

At some point, people stop nodding and start pushing back.

This isn’t about refusing to learn a language. It’s about refusing to pretend that compulsory symbolism equals unity. A country doesn’t cohere through pressure. It coheres through consent, shared rules, and common ground. Strip that away and you don’t get harmony — you get resentment, silence, and eventually backlash.

New Zealand is standing at that edge now. You can feel it in conversations that trail off.

In posts that get deleted. In people who lower their voices before saying what they really think.

And the more aggressively this ideology is forced, the clearer one truth becomes: you cannot bully a nation into believing something is natural when it clearly isn’t.

John Robertson is a patriotic New Zealander who frequently posts on Facebook.