Peter Bassett: Where Water Has a Life Force, Whales Are People — and the Sewage Escapes

In New Zealand, an unelected list MP from the Green Party is drafting legislation — a Member’s Bill — to make whales legal persons.

Not protected species.

Not culturally significant symbols.

People — in law — with rights, standing, and representation.

That is not activist theatre or academic whimsy.

The bill is being prepared by Teanau Tuiono, and it sits squarely within a broader shift toward belief-based governance that is likely attracting puzzled, and increasingly incredulous, looks overseas.

In more sensibly governed countries — Singapore, Japan, Germany, even Australia — policymakers remain preoccupied with dull but essential matters: infrastructure, productivity, energy security, democratic accountability.

Watching New Zealand legislate cetacean personhood, they would be forgiven for wondering whether we have mistaken environmental protection for theological experimentation

The answer lies closer to home.

According to Waatea News, water is not merely a resource but “a living entity with its own life force”, imbued with deep cultural, ecological, and social significance. The outlet — closely aligned with Maori political activism and figures such as John Tamihere and Willie Jackson — attributes these assertions to unnamed “Maori leaders”.

These leaders insist governance must move beyond economic management and embed Maori decision-making “at all levels”. Water is framed as taonga. Existing legal frameworks are criticised for treating it as a commodity.

Co-governance is presented not as one option among many, but as a moral necessity.

This is no longer metaphor. It is an assertion of authority.

Clean water — an uncontroversial goal — is reclassified as a cultural jurisdiction. From there it becomes a governance claim. Once that move is complete, disagreement is no longer technical or democratic; it is moral failure. You are not wrong — you are unkind, ignorant, or worse.

From this worldview, the leap to whales is almost inevitable.

In a parliamentary career notable for perhaps one niche flourish, Teanau Tuiono has chosen this moment to try welding cosmology directly onto statute.

“Our whales are sacred ancestors for many communities across the Pacific,” he explains, noting threats from fishing, pollution, and climate change.

On this basis, he proposes a “transformation” in marine protection through the legal recognition of whale mana.

Why whales?

This is where the Tuiono’s rationale begins to sway like a drunk at the end of a wharf.

Why not dolphins, which are at least as intelligent?

Why not octopus, which demonstrably solve puzzles?

Why not paua, crayfish, pipi, sharks, seals, snapper, coral reefs, or plankton — all ecologically essential, all under threat?

Tuiono never explains. The Green Party simply anoints whales and moves on, as if the choice were self-evident rather than arbitrary — much like certain press conferences conducted by co-leaders Marama Davidson and Chloe Swarbrick.

The mysticism thickens.

Tuiono outlines five “fundamental principles” of whale mana: freedom of movement and migration, protection of natural behaviours, protection of social and cultural structures, the right to a healthy environment, and the right to restoration and regeneration of habitats and ecosystems.

These are not conservation tools. They are human rights frameworks air-dropped into the ocean.

Freedom of movement — through shipping lanes.

Protection of social structures — as defined by whom?

Restoration and regeneration — paid for by who, enforced how?

The rights arrive immaculate. The consequences are left to drift.

Then comes the quiet power grab.

“Indigenous peoples are the enduring kaitiaki of our oceans. When we follow their lead, we can protect our precious species.”

Follow their lead.

Not debate.

Not balance.

Not consent.

Follow.

There is no discussion of what happens when iwi disagree with one another.

No mechanism for accountability. No explanation of how authority is earned, tested, or withdrawn. Guardianship is asserted as permanent and superior — which is to say, insulated from voters.

And then the sentence that matters, the one that turns incense into instruction:

“The Bill will require decision-makers under a range of environmental laws to recognise and provide for the rights of whales.”

Require.

Not consider.

Not weigh.

Not test.

Once mana is written into statute, courts — not Parliament — decide what it means. Policy migrates from elected representatives to whoever claims the loudest interpretive authority. This is not conservation. It is governance by proxy.

But the most revealing stress test of this belief system is not a whale, or a river, or a mountain, or a kauri tree described as whale kin.

It is sewage.

Pipes burst in Auckland, Wellington, and elsewhere. Overflows have become routine. Raw sewage flows into harbours and streams. None of this was sudden. None of it unforeseeable. It is the predictable outcome of decades spent prioritising visible virtue over invisible maintenance.

Here, quasi-religious abstraction collides with physical reality — and loses.

If water is a living entity, why is untreated effluent allowed to pour into it?

If tikanga is a governing framework, why no restriction placed on sewage-contaminated beaches?

If cultural stewardship is paramount, why does it evaporate when pollution turns out to be brown, municipal, and traceable to deferred budgets?

At this point, one half-expects the ceremonial response. A haka at the rupture. A hui at the outfall. A karakia over the effluent. Perhaps a rahui, even.

But nothing of the sort occurs. Because when the problem is literal — when it involves pipes, pumps, asset registers, and competence — symbolism retreats.

Tikanga expands when it grants authority, and vanishes when it demands responsibility.

That selectivity is the tell.

It is the same logic that allows Waatea News to describe water as a living being, Tuiono to attempt writing whales into law as people, trees to be spoken of as relatives, and claims of healing harmonics in waiata and karakia to circulate unchallenged — while the physical systems that keep a modern city habitable quietly decay.

Throughout, New Zealand’s media reports all this with soft lighting and reverent tone.

No sceptical voice intrudes. No one asks how many pipes were replaced, how much maintenance deferred, or why a capital city so rich in values ended up so poor in plumbing.

This country, it seems, has become a place where whales can be written into law as people, water has a life force, trees have relatives, cats have paperwork — and voters are expected to applaud politely while the sewage backs up.

Here is the uncomfortable truth for Maori elites and the Greens alike:

If your worldview cannot cope with sewage — if it collapses in the face of broken pipes and floating turds — then it is not a governing framework. It is theatre.

Belief does not fix infrastructure.

Metaphor does not seal leaks.

And to the rest of a bemused world , this looks less like leadership and more like a country that has swapped statecraft for vibes and symbolism.

The pipes, stubbornly literal things that they are, either work — or they don’t.

Wellington’s don’t.

Finally, Tuiono never bothers to explain the cost of turning whales into citizens either — whether taxpayers will be funding cetacean passports, legal aid for distressed humpbacks, citizenship ceremonies in the Southern Ocean, translators for sperm-whale dialects, social housing for displaced orcas, or ACC cover when a blue whale collides with a container ship while exercising its right to freedom of movement.

In New Zealand today, whales are on the path to citizenship, water has a life force, and sewage still escapes into the harbour — which suggests the only thing without rights is common sense.

Peter Bassett is an observer of media, politics and public institutions, writing on how narrative replaces scrutiny.