English is now, in statute, an official language of New Zealand.
The English Language Act 2026 received Royal assent on 6 August and came into force the following day. Its purpose is deliberately narrow: to provide legislative recognition of English as an official language. Section 5 simply states: “English is an official language of New Zealand.” The legislation does not diminish the existing status of te reo Māori or New Zealand Sign Language, nor does it direct schools or early childhood centres to abandon existing practices overnight.
That qualification matters. It would be unreasonable to argue that every curriculum document, licensing criterion and teaching resource should have been rewritten within weeks of the Act becoming law.
But that is not the argument.
The question is whether the Ministry of Education has shown any public indication that it intends to reconsider the mixed te reo-English language culture it has spent years embedding throughout early childhood education, schools, professional guidance and its own communications.
As at 30 August, there is no visible public reversal.
Indeed, Ministry material published after the English Language Act came into force continues the same practice. Its Early Learning Bulletin of 20 August uses terms such as tamariki, kaiako, whānau and kura throughout predominantly English material and pairs English headings with Māori equivalents. Its School Leaders Bulletin of 25 August similarly uses constructions including “parents and whānau” and “guidance for kaiako”.
The Ministry’s language practice has therefore not visibly changed with the law.
No publicly announced policy has been identified that reverses the established mixed register. Current Ministry guidance still states that te reo Māori should be “valued and used in all early childhood settings” and that fostering its learning and use is the responsibility of all kaiako in the education system. Its parent guidance continues to explain that children will learn te reo Māori words, phrases and waiata as part of everyday learning.
The issue is consequently much larger than one early childhood centre.
It concerns the Ministry itself.
ONE FATHER SAYS NO
This question came into sharp focus recently when the parents of a two-year-old girl asked a large national early childhood education provider for an English-language learning environment.
The family’s names have been changed. The father is referred to here as Michael and his daughter as Mia. The provider is deliberately not identified because it is not being accused of inventing the national approach. Its response is useful precisely because there is little reason to believe its position is exceptional.
Mia has New Zealand European and Filipino heritage. English and Tagalog already form part of her family environment. At two years old she is still developing spoken language, and her parents want her firmly grounded in standard international English before additional languages are introduced in a more structured way.
They do not object in principle to their daughter learning te reo Māori. They object to English speech being continually mixed with isolated Māori vocabulary and presented as though this constituted bilingual education.
Michael therefore asked for an English-language focus.
The provider replied that it could not assure the parents their daughter would be exposed exclusively to English and could not restrict the use of te reo Māori around her or within the wider learning environment. It explained that te reo Māori was woven through ordinary interactions, routines, songs, stories, learning experiences and relationships.
That answer is understandable when current Ministry guidance says te reo Māori should be valued and used in all early childhood settings.
THEORETICAL CHOICE IS NOT PRACTICAL CHOICE
One apparently simple response to a parent who objects to an ECE centre is: choose another one. That sounds reasonable only if early childhood places are plentiful, interchangeable and available when a family needs them. They are not.
Parents do not choose from every centre in a town or city. They choose from the small number of places that are actually usable in daily life: a service with a vacancy for a child of the right age, on the days required, for the hours required, and within a journey that can be fitted around work and family responsibilities. An available place well outside the family’s normal daily route is not a practical alternative. Nor is a preferred centre that has no vacancy.
The Ministry itself tells parents that early learning services may have waiting lists because they are full and that this can affect their choice. Its 2025 ECE Census also records waiting lists across the sector. In other words, the official system recognises the obvious point: the existence of a centre on a map does not mean a family can obtain a place there.
For many working parents, particularly those with babies and younger preschool children, the immediate practical function of an education-and-care centre is childcare: somewhere a young child can safely spend the working day. From age three, the Government’s 20 Hours ECE scheme subsidises up to 20 hours a week for eligible three-, four- and five-year-olds, regardless of whether a parent is working. That broadens access, but it does not create unlimited vacancies or turn every centre into a realistic option for every family.
Parents may therefore be fortunate to have two feasible offers. They may have one. The real decision is often not which educational philosophy they prefer, but which available centre they can live with. When the underlying language and cultural expectations come from a national framework, that choice becomes largely a question of tolerance: which centre does more of it, which does less, and how much is the family prepared to accept?
THE FAMILY DID LOOK ELSEWHERE
In this case the family did not simply take the first available centre and then complain. Before enrolling Mia at the present service, they investigated another nearby kindergarten. Michael says the use of te reo Māori there was even more pronounced: the family was greeted with “mōrena”, and he heard instructions being given to young children in te reo Māori.
That does not prove that every ECE service in New Zealand operates identically. It does demonstrate why “go somewhere else” is not a sufficient answer to this family. They did look elsewhere and encountered the same underlying approach.
Nor is that surprising. Individual services differ in degree, but state-funded and licensed ECE providers operate within the same national curriculum and regulatory environment. Parents may be able to find a centre that uses less mixed te reo-English and less associated cultural material. They cannot assume that another accessible centre with an actual vacancy will offer a fundamentally different policy environment.
THE PROBLEM WAS ALREADY VISIBLE IN 2025
The present dispute is also not the first time this problem has been encountered by the author. The practical limits of ECE choice were already apparent in 2025, while navigating early childhood education as a parent.
In September 2025, Breaking Views published “Learning Lost in Facebook Reo-Lish Gobbledygook”. The article described the centre then being used as “the best ECE on the island”, but added that “when it comes to ReoLish, it’s the same old nonsense as everywhere else.” The point was not that every centre was identical. It was that even the best available local option still operated inside the same wider language culture.
A second article that month, “Te Reo - A Parent’s Journey”, made the distinction even clearer. The stated hope was that a child would “learn a genuine second language”. The much stronger concern in 2025, however, was the spiritual and ritual material intertwined with language teaching - karakia, atua and a broader Te Ao Māori worldview. The article concluded that the child would be learning Te Ao rather than simply a language, and consent was withheld.
That history matters. The mixed-language issue was visible in 2025, but it was overshadowed by what appeared to be the more serious question of compulsory spiritual and religious content. Michael’s 2026 dispute has brought the language question back into sharper focus.
Taken together, the two experiences show why the issue cannot sensibly be reduced to one parent disliking one provider. Families face restricted local availability, and the providers they can realistically access operate within a common national framework. The policy question therefore belongs with the Ministry of Education.
Now that Parliament has formally recognised English as an official language, the Ministry should review the language practices it has spent years encouraging throughout the system.
REO-LISH: A MIXED REGISTER
The practice being challenged is not the teaching of te reo Māori as a second language.
It is the habitual substitution of selected Māori words into otherwise English speech and writing.
Teacher becomes kaiako. Children become tamariki. Students become ākonga. Family becomes whānau. School becomes kura. Food becomes kai. Song becomes waiata. A meeting becomes a hui.
The sentence structure remains English. Most of the vocabulary remains English. The grammar remains English.
For convenience, this article uses the term “Reo-lish” for English sentences interspersed with selected te reo Māori vocabulary.
The expression is not intended as a technical linguistic classification. It is simply a description of something New Zealanders now encounter constantly in education communications.
There is an important distinction between this practice and genuine bilingualism.
A child who learns to speak English and te reo Māori is bilingual.
A child who learns English, te reo Māori and Tagalog is multilingual.
A child who knows that kai means food, waiata means song and tamariki means children has acquired some Māori vocabulary. That may be useful knowledge, but it does not mean that child can construct Māori sentences, understand Māori grammar, conduct a conversation in te reo Māori or read the language fluently.
The distinction should matter especially to people who genuinely care about the survival and development of te reo Māori.
Reducing a language to a repertoire of substituted nouns risks doing very little for fluency while simultaneously altering standard English.
Both languages deserve to be taught properly.
THIS DID NOT BEGIN WITH JAN TINETTI
The present language culture did not suddenly appear in 2018, and it would be historically inaccurate to attribute its creation to Jan Tinetti or even to the Sixth Labour Government.
Its origins extend much further back.
Te Whāriki was developed during the early 1990s. A draft early childhood curriculum was circulated by the Ministry in 1993, followed by the first final national version in 1996. The Ministry’s own history describes Te Whāriki as being grounded in both Māori and Western perspectives and says it was developed to support a bicultural and holistic view of learning.
This did not initially amount to the wholesale language practice now seen in Ministry emails and newsletters. But it established an important conceptual framework.
A second major milestone arrived in 2013 with Tau Mai Te Reo — The Māori Language in Education Strategy 2013–2017.
This is particularly significant because Tau Mai Te Reo was not confined to kōhanga reo or Māori-medium schools. The Ministry explicitly defined Māori language in education as including both Māori-medium education and Māori language in English-medium education. Its priorities applied across early learning, primary, secondary and tertiary education.
By 2013, therefore, expanding te reo Māori within English-medium education was no longer merely a local preference exercised by individual schools. It sat inside an organised Ministry and education-sector strategy.
In 2018, the Ministry undertook a series of Māori education discussions involving more than 2,000 learners, whānau and educators. The Ministry states that information collected through those consultations was used to refresh both Ka Hikitia and Tau Mai Te Reo and to inform the wider Education Work Programme.
That makes 2018 important, but not because the policy began then.
It was part of a period in which the existing direction became broader and increasingly institutionalised.
By 2020, the approach had become explicit in national education priorities.
The Statement of National Education and Learning Priorities, or NELP, directed licensed early childhood services and schools to “meaningfully incorporate te reo Māori and tikanga Māori into the everyday life of the place of learning”. The same document itself routinely used constructions such as learner/ākonga, whānau and teachers/kaiako within English-language policy material.
There is therefore a traceable policy lineage.
Te Whāriki established a bicultural early-childhood framework in the 1990s. Tau Mai Te Reo formalised a cross-sector Māori-language strategy that expressly included English-medium education in 2013. The strategy was refreshed following the 2018 consultations. By 2020 national education priorities were explicitly directing providers to incorporate te reo Māori and tikanga Māori into everyday educational life.
The mixed register now appearing in newsletters, Ministry bulletins and ordinary institutional correspondence did not materialise spontaneously.
There was a policy environment behind it.
JAN TINETTI AND THE “NUMBER ONE LANGUAGE”
It is against that background that Jan Tinetti’s comments in 2018 become important.
Andy Wilson recently drew attention to a Labour Māori Caucus video published on 15 September 2018. At approximately 1 minute 35 seconds, Tinetti is asked:
“What do you hope for the future of te reo?”
She replies:
“My dream is that we truly are a bilingual country and the bilingualism is with te reo as our number one language...”
She then adds:
“I want to see our children growing up speaking it interchangeably with English and sign language.”
At the time, Tinetti was a first-term Labour MP and Deputy Chairperson of Parliament’s Education and Workforce Committee, a position she held from November 2017 until September 2020. She became Associate Minister of Education in November 2020 and Minister of Education in February 2023.
Her interest in integrating Māori-medium principles into mainstream education long predated ministerial office. A Ministry curriculum archive from 2009 records Tinetti at Merivale School discussing the use of both The New Zealand Curriculum and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa. The transcript describes integrating Māori-medium principles across the mainstream school, beginning staff meetings with karakia, embedding Māori values and protocols in school culture, employing a kaiārahi i te reo, and changing school language. Tinetti herself described changing from “Mrs Tinetti” to “Whaea Jan”.
None of this establishes that Jan Tinetti personally devised the Ministry’s present language style.
She did not.
The policy history predates her parliamentary career.
But her 2018 remarks reveal something useful about the ambition operating within that period of policy development.
Wilson characterises it as a language hierarchy.
The phrase “number one language” is not linguistically neutral. Two languages can coexist. Three languages can coexist. Individuals can become fluent in several languages.
But “number one” denotes rank.
Tinetti did not merely say that she wanted te reo Māori protected, available, respected or widely taught. She described a future in which it would be the country’s number one language, alongside a vision of children using te reo Māori interchangeably with English and New Zealand Sign Language.
That did not happen.
New Zealand has not become a nation of children fluently switching between three complete languages.
What has happened instead is much more peculiar.
Institutional English has increasingly acquired a preferred Māori vocabulary.
This is the point Wilson makes particularly well.
The visible outcome is not mass bilingualism.
It is lexical replacement.
THE LANGUAGE HIERARCHY IS VISIBLE IN THE INBOX
Anyone who receives regular communication from a school, ECE provider, university, government department or education organisation will recognise the register.
A message written overwhelmingly in English begins Kia ora whānau.
The teacher is a kaiako. The students are ākonga. Young children are tamariki. The school is a kura. The meeting is a hui. The food is kai. The songs are waiata.
Languages naturally borrow words from one another. New Zealand English has incorporated Māori words for generations. Nobody needs to regard every Māori-derived word in English as evidence of a political programme.
The issue is deliberate and systematic substitution.
When an institution repeatedly chooses a Māori word where an ordinary English word exists, the cumulative effect becomes something different from ordinary linguistic borrowing.
It establishes a preferred vocabulary.
The Ministry’s own post-Act material demonstrates that this remains current practice.
On 20 August, nearly two weeks after English became an official language in statute, the Ministry’s Early Learning Bulletin was still using mixed constructions throughout its English material. On 25 August its School Leaders Bulletin continued exactly the same style.
This does not prove that nobody inside the Ministry is considering change.
It does prove that there has been no visible public change in practice.
If the Ministry has begun reviewing this language policy, it should say so.
If it has not, it should explain why not.
TE WHĀRIKI STILL EXPECTS THE PRACTICE
The problem becomes particularly acute in early childhood education because the mixed register is supported by current curriculum expectations.
The Ministry’s present licensing guidance says:
“In Aotearoa New Zealand, it is important that te reo Māori is valued and used in all early childhood settings.”
It further says fostering the learning and use of te reo Māori is the responsibility of all kaiako in the education system.
Another current criterion says programmes should support te reo and tikanga Māori and concludes:
“All children should have an opportunity to experience Māori language and culture.”
The word opportunity matters.
An opportunity normally describes something that may be accepted or declined.
Michael’s family attempted to decline the mixed-language environment for their daughter and were told that it could not be removed.
That is the central contradiction.
If the exposure cannot reasonably be declined, is it still an opportunity?
Or has it become a curriculum requirement being described in softer language?
PARENTS HAVE RIGHTS IN THE SAME REGULATORY FRAMEWORK
There is another part of the regulatory framework that deserves equal attention.
Regulation 43 of the Education (Early Childhood Services) Regulations requires providers to acknowledge the unique place of Māori as tangata whenua.
But the same regulation also requires the curriculum to:
“respect and acknowledge the aspirations of parents, family, and whānau”
and requires providers to make reasonable efforts to collaborate with parents regarding their children’s learning, development and decision-making.
Those obligations sit together in the same regulation.
One does not simply erase the other.
The family in this case has made its aspiration unusually clear.
They want their daughter grounded in standard international English.
They do not object to her learning te reo Māori later or learning it properly. They object to what they regard as a mixed te reo-English speech environment during an important period of first-language development.
At what point does respecting parental aspiration require more than politely acknowledging the parent before continuing exactly as before?
That is a question for the Ministry, not merely for one provider.
GENUINE BILINGUALISM IS NOT THE SAME AS LANGUAGE MIXING
Criticism of Reo-lish is frequently interpreted as hostility towards bilingual education.
It is almost the opposite.
Experienced multilingual teachers have raised concerns precisely because they value coherent language acquisition.
Teacher Sandy Pike has described mixing Māori and English words within a sentence as creating a “third language”.
Irene van Egten has argued that true bilingualism is structured and develops from strong language foundations rather than casual mixing in early instruction. She has also described the current practice as a situation in which random te reo Māori words are inserted into spoken and written English while few people actually learn the language effectively.
The educational question should be straightforward.
If the objective is bilingualism, where is the evidence that this particular method is producing bilingual speakers?
How many children who have spent years hearing kaiako, tamariki, whānau, waiata, hui, kai and kura scattered through English can actually conduct a conversation in te reo Māori?
Vocabulary exposure is not worthless.
But vocabulary exposure should not be confused with fluency.
“NEUROSCIENCE SAYS BILINGUALISM IS GOOD”
A related defence invokes neuroscience.
Nathan Wallis is one of New Zealand’s most prominent popular educators on early brain development, and bilingualism is frequently described as beneficial for young children.
The proposition that children can benefit from learning more than one language is not the point in dispute.
The question is whether the evidence supporting bilingualism also supports this particular instructional method.
There is a large conceptual difference between a child learning two coherent languages and a child hearing one language with selected nouns and greetings from another inserted through it.
Invoking “the neuroscience of bilingualism” cannot bridge that gap by itself.
If the Ministry considers mixed-language instruction an evidence-based method of producing bilingual children, it should identify the evidence demonstrating that outcome.
That would be a useful contribution to the debate.
NEW ZEALAND SIGN LANGUAGE EXPOSES THE LOGICAL PROBLEM
Te reo Māori is an official language.
So is New Zealand Sign Language.
English is now the third language whose official status is explicitly recognised by Parliament.
Yet New Zealand Sign Language is not threaded throughout the ordinary day of every two-year-old child in every ECE centre.
Teachers are not required to sign every routine interaction merely because NZSL has official status.
Official status therefore cannot, by itself, justify universal compulsory exposure.
That distinction also places Tinetti’s 2018 comment in perspective. Her personal dream was for children to grow up using te reo Māori interchangeably with English and sign language.
That was an aspiration, not legislation.
The education system should distinguish between a politician’s aspiration for a multilingual country and a parent’s right to make reasonable choices about the language environment of an individual child.
TAMATHA PAUL AND THE “BASTARD LANGUAGE”
The politics surrounding language were made unusually explicit during the third reading of the English Language Bill on 30 July.
Green MP Tamatha Paul told Parliament:
“English is a bastard language.”
She then described it as:
“a bastardisation of Greek, Old Norse, Latin”.
English certainly contains vocabulary and structures derived from multiple linguistic sources. That is uncontroversial.
But historical linguistic evolution is not the same phenomenon as modern institutional language planning.
Languages borrow organically because people use them.
What is at issue in education is a deliberate policy environment in which selected Māori vocabulary is repeatedly substituted into English-medium institutional communication.
Paul’s terminology therefore raises an unintended question.
If “bastardisation” is considered an appropriate description of English because of its history of borrowing, why deliberately construct another mixed register?
If te reo Māori deserves protection as a complete language, why reduce it to token vocabulary inside English sentences?
And if English is now an official language, why should standard English be treated as though its ordinary vocabulary routinely requires cultural replacement?
Teaching each language properly seems a more respectful approach to both.
CULTURAL CONTENT AND THE QUESTION OF CONSENT
The language dispute was not the only concern raised by Michael.
The ECE centre also arranged a haka performance during ordinary centre time. His daughter happened to be absent, but he objected to the assumption that this cultural activity required no prior parental decision.
A preschool haka is not the central issue in this article.
The principle is.
Education providers increasingly describe Māori language and cultural practices as “opportunities”.
But an opportunity has an element of choice.
Parents who want their children involved in haka should be free to choose it.
Parents who want Māori-medium early childhood education have kōhanga reo and other Māori-medium pathways available.
Parents who want structured te reo Māori education should be able to choose that too.
The same principle should apply to families who prefer standard English for a young child.
Choice cannot be meaningful if it only operates in one direction.
THE MINISTRY, NOT THE PROVIDER, IS THE PROPER TARGET
This is the point on which the argument needs to be clearest.
It would be unfair to accuse one ECE provider of creating a practice that reflects national Ministry guidance.
The provider did not write Te Whāriki.
It did not write the licensing criteria.
It did not create Tau Mai Te Reo.
It did not issue the 2020 National Education and Learning Priorities.
And it did not establish the communications style now used throughout much of the education bureaucracy.
The provider is the place where one parent encountered the policy.
That makes the experience evidence.
It does not make the provider the architect.
The responsibility for reviewing the policy lies with the Ministry of Education and ultimately with the Government that directs it.
THE LAW HAS CHANGED, BUT THE PUBLIC PRACTICE HAS NOT
The English Language Act does not itself command the Ministry to rewrite Te Whāriki.
It does not prohibit Māori words in English.
It does not give a parent an automatic statutory right to demand an English-only ECE environment.
It does not reduce the status of te reo Māori or New Zealand Sign Language.
But it does change the constitutional and policy context.
For the first time, Parliament has expressly placed English alongside New Zealand’s other official languages in legislation.
That should at least trigger a review of how the education system treats those languages.
Instead, the Ministry’s public-facing material after 7 August continues to look much as it did beforehand. Current ECE guidance continues to state that te reo Māori is to be valued and used in all early childhood settings. Current parent information continues to promise Māori words, phrases and songs as part of everyday learning. Post-Act Ministry bulletins continue to use mixed te reo-English terminology.
There is no visible public indication that the Ministry has reconsidered this practice in light of the new Act.
It should.
Nobody expects an education bureaucracy to rewrite decades of policy in three weeks.
But asking whether a review has begun is entirely reasonable.
The law may have changed only recently.
The policy being questioned is not recent at all.
Its foundations extend back to Te Whāriki in the 1990s. Its Māori-language strategy expanded explicitly into English-medium education in 2013. It was refreshed following the 2018 education consultations. In 2020 the incorporation of te reo Māori into everyday educational life was stated explicitly as a national priority.
There has been plenty of time to build the policy.
There should now be sufficient willingness to examine its consequences.
IT SHOULD NOT TAKE ONE FATHER
Ultimately this article began with one father making an ordinary request about his two-year-old daughter.
He wanted her spoken to in standard English.
The answer led directly back through the provider, the curriculum, the Ministry guidance and decades of language policy.
That is why his experience matters.
Not because his family is unique.
Because it almost certainly is not.
The difference is that he said no.
It should not take one father challenging one ECE provider to ask whether the Ministry of Education’s treatment of English is consistent with the linguistic choices parents reasonably expect to make for their children.
It should not take one father to point out that teaching te reo Māori properly is not the same thing as replacing English nouns one at a time.
And it should not take one father to prompt the Ministry to consider what the English Language Act means for an education system whose public language has become increasingly hybridised.
New Zealand does not have to choose between English and te reo Māori.
It does not have to diminish one language to respect another.
It can teach English properly.
It can teach te reo Māori properly.
It can teach New Zealand Sign Language properly to those who choose or need it.
It can give children genuine opportunities to become bilingual and multilingual.
But it should stop confusing vocabulary substitution with bilingualism.
And if an “opportunity” cannot reasonably be declined, the Ministry should stop pretending that the word opportunity settles the argument.
English now has explicit statutory recognition.
The Ministry of Education should acknowledge that change by examining the language culture it has spent decades constructing.
The first step is simple.
Review the policy.
Judy Gill BSc, DipTchg, is a parent, former teacher, and a staunch advocate for secular education.
SELECTED REFERENCES AND SOURCE LINKS
English Language Act 2026 — New Zealand Legislation
Official text of the Act, including section 5 and commencement provisions.
https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2026/49/en/latest/
English Language Bill — Explanatory note
Confirms that legislative recognition of English was not intended to alter the status of te reo Māori or New Zealand Sign Language.
https://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2026/0198/latest/d2870405e2.html
Education (Early Childhood Services) Regulations 2008 — Regulation 43
Includes obligations to acknowledge Māori as tangata whenua, respect the aspirations of parents, family and whānau, and collaborate with parents regarding children’s learning and development.
https://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/2008/0204/51.0/DLM1412506.html
Ministry of Education — C108 Language-rich environment
Current Ministry guidance stating that te reo Māori should be valued and used in all early childhood settings.
Ministry of Education — C105 Acknowledgement of tangata whenua
Includes the statement that all children should have an opportunity to experience Māori language and culture.
Ministry of Education — What your child learns at early learning services
Current parent guidance describing Te Whāriki as bicultural and saying children learn te reo Māori words, phrases and waiata as part of everyday learning.
Ministry of Education — Early Learning Bulletin, 20 August 2026
Post-English Language Act Ministry communication demonstrating continued mixed te reo-English terminology.
https://www.education.govt.nz/bulletins/early-learning/20-08-26
Ministry of Education — School Leaders Bulletin, 25 August 2026
Further post-Act Ministry material continuing the mixed register.
https://www.education.govt.nz/bulletins/school-leaders/25-08-26
Te Whāriki — official Ministry history
Records the 1993 draft, the 1996 publication and the curriculum’s bicultural origins.
https://tewhariki.tahurangi.education.govt.nz/te-whakapapa-te-wh-riki/5637158828.p
Tau Mai Te Reo — Māori Language in Education Strategy 2013–2017
Ministry history confirming that the strategy applied to Māori language in both Māori-medium and English-medium education and across education sectors.
Tau Mai Te Reo — current Ministry overview
Records the 2018 consultation involving more than 2,000 learners, whānau and educators and the subsequent refresh of Tau Mai Te Reo and Ka Hikitia.
Statement of National Education and Learning Priorities 2020
Includes the priority to meaningfully incorporate te reo Māori and tikanga Māori into everyday educational life.
Jan Tinetti — New Zealand Parliament
Official record of her roles, including Deputy Chairperson of the Education and Workforce Committee, Associate Minister of Education and Minister of Education.
https://www3.parliament.nz/en/mps-and-electorates/members-of-parliament/tinetti-jan/
Ministry curriculum archive — Jan Tinetti at Merivale School, 2009
Records Tinetti discussing the integration of Te Marautanga o Aotearoa principles, tikanga and language into mainstream school practice.
https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Archives/Media-gallery-archive/2009/Exploring-parallel-documents
Labour Māori Caucus video — 15 September 2018
Jan Tinetti discusses her hope for te reo Māori to become the country’s “number one language”; relevant passage begins at approximately 1:35.
New Zealand Parliament Hansard — English Language Bill, 30 July 2026
Tamatha Paul’s third-reading speech, including her description of English as a “bastard language”.
https://hansard.parliament.nz/hansard-transcript/2026-07-30/english-language-bill
Andy Wilson — “The Scripted Reality of the Te Reo Takeover”
Commentary drawing attention to Jan Tinetti’s 2018 remarks and describing the subsequent institutional use of Māori substitutions in English as evidence of a developing language hierarchy.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1FURKMbtFP/
Ministry of Education - Choosing an early learning service
Parent guidance noting that services may be full and have waiting lists, which can affect a family’s choice.
Education Counts - Annual ECE Census 2025: Fact Sheets
Official sector statistics covering licensed services, occupancy and the proportion of services reporting waiting lists.
Ministry of Education - 20 Hours ECE funding
Explains eligibility for children aged 3, 4 and 5 and the maximum of 20 subsidised hours a week, up to 6 hours a day.
https://www.education.govt.nz/early-childhood/funding-and-data/20-hours-ece-for-ece-services
Judy Gill - “Te Reo - A Parent’s Journey”, Breaking Views, 8 September 2025
Earlier account distinguishing genuine second-language learning from the spiritual and ritual content encountered in education.
https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2025/09/judy-gill-te-reo-parents-journey.html
Judy Gill - “Learning Lost in Facebook Reo-Lish Gobbledygook”, Breaking Views, 15 September 2025
Earlier first-hand ECE account describing mixed te reo-English usage at what the author regarded as the best available local centre.
https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2025/09/judy-gill-learning-lost-in-facebook-reo.html
14 comments:
Judy, thank you for such an informative piece. Our education system should strive to see graduates achieve a world class education. It does appear that is not happening, it is influenced far too much by ideology.
Couldnt agree more with the following and hope the ministry of education work quickly to improve
"The education system should distinguish between a politician’s aspiration for a multilingual country and a parent’s right to make reasonable choices about the language environment of an individual child".
A few years ago a much sought after rural play centre near Palmerston North (and which attracted many distant city children) came close to deregistration because of its lack of emphasis on maori twaddle.
This country has lost the plot
There is an awful lot of words here defending English and trying to pretend that maori is important as well. Remember, maori today has a much larger vocabulary than when it existed pre-European contact. Missionaries heard the words, grasped the phonetics, transliterated them into the Roman alphabet (this word itself a mix of Greek alphabet letters) and came up with an artificial orthography and grammar that would not have existed, without European effort. As a written language it was created and did not evolve within a Neolithic culture using written/drawn symbols. Today the language is even further 'bastardised' to use Tamatha Paul's unconscious ignorance because it has been twisted and tweaked to incorporate words and concepts Neolithic maori could never have envisaged or used. So, if a maori language in any form is to be important or survive, then those who value the language need to keep using it, and those of us who find untranslated randomly scattered maori words and phrases in TV, radio and newspapers irritating should not be exposed to them. Or, if they continue in use, and further obfuscate communication, then all that can be done is to ignore any such writings and move on to less virtue-signalling articles. Surely not in the best interests of those who think New Zealanders should both preserve and be exposed to a language without utility outside a maori gathering. It won't be long, if not already the case, before people of Asian origin with their mix of languages far outnumber other ethnic groups. Will there then be a drive to incorporate these tongues into New Zealand's cultural fabric?
There are a lot of 'bastard languages' around. For instance, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese developed from 'vulgar Latin' that was spoken by the masses in the days of the Roman Empire. Japanese is regarded by some linguists as a 'bastard language' (although they don't like using the term).
There is no such thing as a 'pure' language in the sense of not having been influenced by imports. On a 'purity' scale English doesn't fare too badly as, despite having absorbed a lot of vocab from outside, its fundamental structure remains clearly derived from Old German.
We could go on like this all day but I'm perplexed as to why this line of thought is relevant to the issue of the language of instruction in NZ schools. English is the sole or principal tongue used by the overwhelming majority of NZers in their everyday affairs. It is also the language in which most scientific and technological information is disseminated, and the most common second language studied worldwide. English will enable you to communicate in foreign countries more than any other - it is rapidly becoming a global lingua franca.
I am myself a speaker of English as a second language and spent nearly my entire academic career teaching university students whose mother tongue was not English (in descending order, Arabic, Setswana and Melanesian languages and dialects). It was only when I retired back in NZ that I became aware of language of instruction issues based on political considerations about "official languages".
Can we just PLEASE get on with ensuring that our young people become fluent and articulate in English and leave Maori to those who wish to study it as a second language. Pretending that the two are on a par in terms of preparing kids for this globalised world is delusional.
Of some interest might be my experience at Nae nae college which I first attended in 1954, one year after its foundation. In 1955 the school magazine began, with a maori title. The school motto was in maori and the badge had a maori design. There was also a school haka, as well as a nascent Polynesian society. In all, among the 500-600 or so students in 1955 I recall only 2 with maori names and a similar number who could, in appearance, be taken as maori. In summary, the social engineering rot had set in very early, at least in the Hutt Valley. This early experience and exposure has done nothing to alter my views on the importance and utility of English and the general pointlessness of maori language outside of rugby games. As another aside, the late Bob Jones was foundation pupil and we all know what his views were on maorification.
“whether the Ministry of Education has shown any public indication that it intends to reconsider the mixed te reo-English language culture”
Of course it doesn’t intend to reconsider that and nor should it. What a ridiculous thing to suggest.
We must support our wonderful unique cultural heritage. We must continue to promote it and never allow it to die.
Legislative dog-whistling can remain just that. Racists might heed the call, but we won’t.
The account is that at one point the family was greeted with “mōrena”.
If this is a problem, it is not clear how this affects anyone in any way. How sensitive must this family be, that one appropriately selected word in a beautiful language that is part of New Zealand’s identity is perceived to be something to complain about? Is there really nothing happening in the world that needs a father’s attention more than complaining of some irrelevant non-problem? We used to be about getting things done in this country!
Apart from anything else the bastard language is so imprecise.Seldom know if whanau, rangatahi, mokapuna, tamariki, mahi, etc refer primarily to maori and the maori way, or to all. Loss of precison is a downgrade. Incidentally Bigg's English to maori dictionary 1981 does not lead to many of the above, suggesting these recent concoctions.Personally I find reference to my family as whanau as an insult; they follow a quite different code brought here from advanced society. Incidenatlly is there available a dictionary with origin and dates of words or are maori too artful to publish?
Barend as a teacher should certainly know a few things. He should know that kids absorb language much more quickly and easily than older people. He also knows that children are very capable human beings, and are capable of both walking and chewing gum. Therefore all of his reality-based objections have fallen away. Whew!
If he is concerned at how a English is being taught (which it still is, and no one claims that it isn’t), why is he complaining about a different subject?
Barend also knows about ways to extinguish culture. And he knows that snuffing out teaching of Maori is one of many effective levers in achieving that.
Barend walks like a duck and makes noises like a duck. I’m starting to think he’s a duck.
I am a parent of two children in a state primary school - I have no rights or say in the education of my children whereas the local iwi are consulted on nearly everything.
I have complained to the school and to the board - I have vociferously voiced my opinions and wishes that my children are not to be subjected to karakia in the classroom.
I am met with a wall of idiots who simply don’t realise what they’re doing - or how stupid they all sound.
Even better is when some young woke white woman with less Maori blood in her than my little finger starts insisting the kids call her whaea Imogen! The woman literally doesn’t comprehend how stupid it makes her look in the kids and parents eyes.
Like I said - objections are sHut down.
Our school board will no longer communicate with me.
They also believe that the schools policies as dictated to them by “the Rici’s” (aka fake taxpayer funded education activists masquerading as consultants) have 4 articles in the TOW and that none of those articles are parliament, property or equal rights.
You cannot make this crap up.
I am looking forward to the day my children finish the state primary so they can go to a decent private school and be slightly less indoctrinated- and once they hit university age we are outta here!
It started in education- it’s taken over MSM, and the public service- and trying to take over everything else now too…it’s time for this country to wake up, grow up & fight back, because you’re losing it - fast!
Some years back, I studied Linguistics at uni level. With regard to the insertion into English of Maori-language words, what's happening in Education generally is baffling. What on earth is the policy supposed to bring about?
If the aim of advocates is revival and protection of Maori language, this isn't how it should be done. The literature clearly shows that for any language to survive and thrive, native speakers - people whose first and only language is Maori, for the first few years of their lives - are critical. The loss of native speakers means the language is dead. Not extinct: it'll doubtless totter on for a while, but it's dead. Latin is dead, but it's still studied, for its utility in the field of ancient writings.
Bilingualism is ok, if a language isn't critically endangered, but it isn't enough to save the Maori language.
In addition, those native speakers need to be surrounded by other Maori speakers, preferably fluent, in their community, as well as at home: a very difficult environment to construct.The Irish had this more or less sorted with the Gaeltacht areas, where the language of daily life is Irish. Regarding language revival, sending Maori children to kohanga reo is a well-intentioned waste of time. By the time they're enrolled, their native language is, more likely than not, English. So they'll be acquiring Maori as s second language.
The Education sector needs to abandon this current wrongheaded policy, and return to English as the language of instruction. Let Maori-medium schools get on with the job of teaching and interacting in Maori. The rest of the sector should return to an English-only language environment.
Anon 1118: Supporting our cultural heritage is one thing. Giving a largely fabricated Pidgin based on a mesolithic Austronesian tongue parity with the global lingua franca English and forcing everyone to use it is quite another.
Anon 1201: It becomes a problem when it is forced on people who do not identify with that language. You would probably not mind if I gave you a cheery "Goedemorgen!" but you would if I ordered you to use the same salutation 'or else'.
Anon 1226: "Reality-based objections"??? The two observations that precede this non sequitur have no bearing on what I wrote.
I am distinguishing between the language of instruction and a language subject. Perhaps that's too subtle for Anon but it is rather important so let me spell it out for anyone else who did not pick up on this: the language of instruction is the language we teach in. This applies as much to maths and science and geography and history (etc) as to language-related subjects such as literature. The subject English is one of various subjects that students can take at school, others being French, German, Japanese, Latin......... and Maori. Go ahead and take it. If I was a secondary school pupil today I might take it too, although I'd probably go with Chinese or Bahasa if available.
>"Barend also knows about ways to extinguish culture. And he knows that snuffing out teaching of Maori is one of many effective levers in achieving that."
I don't know where this came from. I don't like being told what I 'know' by commentors who exhibit simple little minds...... shrug and move on. What I do 'know' is that Maori is not my ethnic or cultural heritage. I'll concern myself with my Dutch heritage and you, if [part] Maori you be, concern yourself with your Maori heritage. You mind your business and I'll mind mine.
>"Barend walks like a duck and makes noises like a duck. I’m starting to think he’s a duck." Quack quack to you too, mate....... no, we'll make that "kwak kwak, kwaak kwaak".
In my mid-life I got much enjoyment out of resuming my study of the French language that came to an abrupt end when I left school. After a few years all our classes were exclusively in French, and we could converse for hours in that language, but as soon as we were exposed to a French movie, TV news bulletin or social banter, it went right over our heads. What that taught me is that you are never going to learn a language unless you immerse yourself in it for a long time, and speak nothing but. So the chances of Te Reo ever becoming an effective means of communication in NZ for any but the 2% (probably less) who take a genuine academic interest in it, are zilch. Can you imagine Maori kids, who are increasingly gaming or hanging around the malls rather than going to school, embracing Te Reo with mass enthusiasm? What a completely fatuous, virtue-signalling waste of time and money we are indulging in, paying a privileged group of elites millions of dollars to adorn all of our public facilities with signage and oral instructions in a language that is completely indecipherable to not only our tourists but almost all of our citizens.
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