Geoff Parker: From shelter to sovereignty?

K Gurunathan’s recent Post column praises marae for their role during recent North Island storms and condemns critics of Māori governance arrangements. What it avoids, however, is the uncomfortable but necessary distinction between community charity and political authority.

No one disputes that many marae opened their doors during emergencies, offering shelter, food, and care — just as churches, schools, clubs, and private citizens routinely do in times of crisis. Decency in an emergency is not unique to any culture, nor does it confer constitutional status.

Yet Gurunathan uses emergency generosity as a rhetorical shield, implying that criticism of marae’s expanding political role is somehow illegitimate, even morally suspect. That is a category error. Community service does not entitle an institution to public power, taxpayer privilege, or exemption from scrutiny.

Over the past decade, very substantial sums — running into the hundreds of millions of dollars — have been channelled into marae through direct grants, infrastructure upgrades, Covid response funding, resilience programmes, and now emergency funds. This is not charity; it is sustained public investment.

With that level of funding comes a reasonable expectation of neutrality, accountability, and inclusiveness.

There are approximately 780 marae across New Zealand, forming a nationwide, publicly supported network that often functions as staging posts for Maori political mobilisation. Protest marches directed at the Government — and by extension the wider New Zealand public — are able to move from marae to marae, drawing on accommodation, food, transport coordination, media access and institutional legitimacy along the way. No comparable infrastructure exists for non-Māori New Zealanders. This creates an uneven political playing field, where one group enjoys a permanent, state-assisted protest network while others must rely on ad hoc, private arrangements. That imbalance matters when marae are presented as neutral civic partners rather than what they increasingly are: organised hubs of political activism in practice.

Marae are not neutral civic spaces. They are, by design, tribal institutions, grounded in whakapapa, hierarchy, and identity politics. Access, authority, and voice on a marae are not equal in the liberal-democratic sense; they are determined by ancestry, status, and tikanga. That is their right as private cultural institutions — but it makes them ill-suited as default venues for public governance.

Nor is it controversial to observe that many marae function as centres of anti-colonisation ideology and often pro-separatist political education, particularly for young Māori. Visitors — Māori and non-Māori alike — are often presented with a political narrative that portrays New Zealand as unjust at its foundation, permanently constrained by the Treaty, and morally divided along ethnic lines. Marae are entitled to promote such views. What does not follow is any automatic right to public endorsement or taxpayer funding without debate.

Gurunathan presents marae as embodiments of the “greater good” in contrast to Western individualism. But New Zealand is not a tribal society; it is a liberal democracy. Our public institutions exist to serve individuals equally under the law, not to “weld” citizens into inherited collective identities. When the state privileges one cultural framework over others, it undermines social cohesion rather than strengthening it.

The coalition government’s reluctance to further entrench race-based governance is not an “attack on Māori values,” as Gurunathan claims. It is a reassertion of democratic norms: equal citizenship, neutral institutions, and public decision-making free from ethnic capture. Praising marae for voluntary emergency assistance does not oblige the state to formalise them as governance partners, nor to seat them permanently “at the table.”

Emergency management requires competence, coordination, and accountability — not ancestry or cultural symbolism. If marae can meet those standards as service providers, they should be contracted like any other organisation, on equal terms, without political mystique or immunity from criticism.

New Zealanders can be grateful for help offered in a crisis while still asking hard questions about where public money goes, who holds power, and whether tribal institutions should shape national governance. Those questions are not racist, divisive, or harmful. They are the essence of democratic responsibility.

Charity deserves thanks. Power demands scrutiny.

Geoff Parker is a long-standing advocate for truth, equal rights, and equality before the law.