Mike Butler: March to communism, Maori control

NZCPR has published a number of articles on New Zealand’s “the long march through the institutions", the non-violent path to achieve Marxist revolution. This article, which is a bit of a long read, looks at the nuts and bolts of how the strategy has been applied here and gives an evaluation of where we are at.

The long march is a political strategy that seeks to create radical social change by infiltrating and subverting the core organizations of a society rather than using violent revolution. The strategy is accomplished by:

• Entering key fields like universities, media, and schools.
• Gaining positions of influence and authority over time.
• Changing cultural norms and values from within.

The phrase was coined around 1967 by Rudi Dutschke, a prominent socialist student activist in West Germany. It borrows the term "long march" from the famous 1934–1935 military retreat of the Chinese Communist Army led by Mao Zedong, applying it metaphorically to a slow, steady cultural struggle.

The violent path was established in 1919 by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. The Communist International (Comintern) enforced centralized, top-down control from Moscow, demanding rapid, aggressive, and often violent attempts to seize state power through workers' strikes and armed insurrections.

A long march has been going on in the United States since the 1960s. Other such long marches are probably evident in all free world nations.

Cultural hegemony
The idea of "cultural hegemony", the view that the ruling class maintains power by controlling the social institutions that shape people's thoughts and beliefs, was heavily influenced by Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci.

"Cultural hegemony" refers to the ways a ruling class dominates a culturally diverse society by manipulating everyday ideology so that their specific worldview becomes the accepted, "common sense" norm.

• The media normalizes narratives—like meritocracy—where people gain success, power, or rewards based on their individual ability, effort, and talent, rather than through wealth, social class, or family connections.
• Education systems embed curricula that condition students to accept existing economic and social hierarchies as natural.
• Religious and cultural habits position the status quo as moral, timeless, and beneficial for everyone, even if it only serves the elite.

Simple strategy
The long march get-paid-as-you-go strategy is accomplished by:

• Activists taking jobs inside universities, public schools, publishing houses, churches, labour unions, and media outlets.
• Over decades, these individuals work their way up into leadership, tenured faculty positions, editorial boards, and administrative offices.
• Once in power, they rewrite curricula, alter institutional policies, and redefine acceptable public discourse, gradually shifting the wider culture's worldview toward their own ideological goals.

The New Zealand long march unites the twin goals of attaining:

1. World-wide communism (abolish private property, eliminate social classes, dissolve the nation-state, end human exploitation, and distribute abundant wealth), and
2. Maori sovereignty (establishing dual government as detailed in the He Puapua blueprint, regaining confiscated land, resource co-management, separate Maori economic development, re-imposing Maori matauranga and tikanga, Maori-led social services, and Maori data sovereignty).

On November 19, 2024, when more than 40,000 people stood at the steps of Parliament protesting against the government’s Treaty Principles Bill, we could probably see the current Wellington perpetrators of New Zealand's 50-year long march.

The NZ long march
The New Zealand long march has been accomplished in three primary domains:

1. Education: Activists and academics successfully reshaped the national curriculum via agencies like the Ministry of Education. Changes under the NCEA framework increasingly prioritised structural frameworks over traditional knowledge systems. Key universities, such as the University of Auckland, shifted from strict institutional neutrality into active vehicles for progressive social advocacy and policy reform.

2. State bureaucracy: A class of technocrats re-wrote the Treaty of Waitangi and imposed it across public sector ministries as “bicultural policy Integration”. Over decades, entry-level policy analysts advanced into senior civil service roles, establishing systematic requirements for equity, diversity, and specific historical framing in all major crown documentation.

3. Media and journalism: Funding pools for public broadcasting required media companies to promote specific cultural and political viewpoints to qualify for capital. Cultural norms within state-funded institutions, including Radio New Zealand and mainstream television, normalised activist language and effectively altered public discourse by presenting activism as a mainstream view.

Policy changes
Several pivotal policy mechanisms legally anchored this "march" through the country's public structures:

1. Legislation: The original State Sector Act 1988 and its modern replacement, the Public Service Act 2020, mandated that government departments actively embed "Treaty principles" into daily policy planning. This required a massive influx of specialized policy advisors, diversity managers, and legal experts to filter all Crown legislation through a bicultural lens, institutionalizing the re-written treaty.

2. The Public Interest Journalism Fund: Introduced by the government with a budget of $55 million, the Public Interest Journalism Fund Guidelines explicitly required media organizations seeking state money to sign up to specific ideological commitments. To qualify for funding, media outlets were required to "actively promote the principles of partnership, participation and active protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi". This commercialized and institutionalized activist language across mainstream media (including RNZ and major print networks), as failure to comply meant missing out on critical financial support.

3. The curriculum: Passed into law and implemented in 2023, the Ministry of Education mandated the Aotearoa New Zealand's Histories curriculum. This shifted away from broad global history to focus on critical power dynamics, colonization, and institutional racism. By embedding these specific critical-theory frameworks into the syllabus, the policy legally locked in the ideological worldviews taught to future generations.

4. University amendments: The Performance-Based Research Fund, which dictates how hundreds of millions of dollars are distributed to New Zealand universities, increasingly altered its assessment criteria to reward research that demonstrates institutional commitment to equity and indigenous knowledge (Matauranga Māori). Because funding is tied to these metrics, universities alighed their internal charters accordingly. This disincentivized traditional institutional neutrality, pushing academic staff to align their research and teaching fields with state-sanctioned progressive goals.

Coalition govt pushes back
The National-ACT-NZ First Coalition Government has introduced legislative rollbacks designed to dismantle what it describes as "race-based policies", co-governance, and ideological capture across the public sector.

1. Reversals: The government initiated a review (albeit watered-down) of treaty principles clauses across 23 pieces of existing legislation. The parallel Maori Health Authority (Te Aka Whai Ora) was disestablished to return the healthcare system to a singular, mainstream administrative framework. The government removed bonuses linked to Maori language proficiency within the public service and defunded specialized teacher training programs, reallocating those millions to the core mathematics curriculum.

2. Local govt and resource management reform: The government announced the scrapping of Mana Whakahono a Rohe agreements, which legally required local councils to share resource-planning authority with local Maori tribes. Major steps were underway as of writing to introduce two new laws to replace the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA). Concurrently, a controversial Fast-Track Approvals Bill allows Ministers to override traditional environmental protections to greenlight infrastructure projects. The government also passed legislation forcing councils to hold binding local referendums if they want to retain Maori wards, aiming to roll back race-based representation at the local level.

3. Education and institutional standards: Legislation was passed to revive charter schools, purposely bypassing the standard state-run education system and the Ministry of Education's progressive curriculum updates. The passage of the Regulatory Standards Act established a new Regulatory Standards Board. This body directly reviews state legislation against basic property rights and free-market principles to dilute progressive regulations.

Counter-movements
Counter-movements in New Zealand have surged to push back against what they view as institutional capture, co-governance, and ideological bias. These movements operate across politics, academia, and independent media to actively challenge established institutional norms.

1. ACT and NZ First: The ACT Party, led by David Seymour, has championed the Treaty Principles Bill, seeking to redefine the Treaty of Waitangi through a referendum to strip out specialized judicial interpretations. New Zealand First, led by Winston Peters, focused its campaign on removing identity politics, abolishing race-based government agencies, and enforcing state neutrality.

2. Academic resistance: The Free Speech Union emerged as a powerful advocacy group defending academics, teachers, and public servants facing cancellation or disciplinary action for challenging progressive orthodoxies. The Listener Seven, a group of prominent university professors, published a controversial letter in the NZ Listener defending universal science against the institutional conflation of traditional science with Matauranga Maori (indigenous knowledge), sparking a national debate on academic freedom.

3. Alternative media and think tanks: Independent platforms like The Platform (founded by Sean Plunket) and Reality Check Radio (RCR) grew rapidly by deliberately positioning themselves outside state-funded journalism frameworks to critique mainstream media bias. The New Zealand Initiative, a free-market think tank, consistently publishes research critiquing the lowering of standards in the national curriculum and the over-regulation of the public service, providing the intellectual framework for current government rollbacks. And, of course, there is the New Zealand Centre for Political Research. Founded in 2005, it is an independent, web-based public policy think tank to provide research, political analysis, and free weekly commentary newsletters.

Conclusion
Many NZCPR readers would have directly experienced stages of the long march through New Zealand institutions, either at school, at university, in the workplace, or within our families. Two generations have grown up having normalised obeisance to embedded high-taxation re-distributive socialism and a “bicultural Aotearoa”, having had no experience whatsoever of anything else. In that sense, the long march has been totally effective. But our population of 5.3-million that includes around 900,000 voters over the age of 65, and 1.3-million born overseas means the march must go on. To migrants, the socialism goal is more normal than the Maori sovereignty goal so there is substantial potential pushback from them against Maorification, especially those from India and South Africa. Fear that progress would stop looked like the driver of over-the-top outrage over the Treaty Principles Bill two years ago, and to the watered-down reversals on Maorification. The coming election is critical. There are 1.2-million aged 17 and under who are being moulded into malleable Maori sovereignty supporters. The choice is yours. Use your two votes wisely.