A “new DOC Treaty Operating Model.”
Type those words into the department’s own website. Nothing. Search the last annual report. Still “Treaty Relationships.” Scoop, Beehive, Cabinet papers in the public domain: blank.
What you get instead is a hiring wave. Role descriptions dated 7 April 2026. Kaihautū. Principal Advisors. Business Partners into Biodiversity, Heritage and Visitors. Relationships and Engagement managers. All of them told to lead, steward, implement, or “give effect to” the Treaty Operating Model.
So the model is real enough to recruit against. It is not real enough for the public to read.
That is not an accident of filing. That is design.
The owner is named. Sheridan Smith, Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu, Deputy Director-General Iwi Strategy and Partnerships since August 2025. DOC’s own blurb: she leads Treaty strategy, relationships, and Treaty system performance and oversight. She arrived from Justice as Deputy Secretary Strategy, with Te Arawhiti Partnerships and the Public Service Commission behind her. Crown–Māori system performance, not trapping stoats.
Under her watch the ads arrived. Under her watch the invisible model got a brand.
What do the role papers say the model does, when they bother to talk?
Integrate Treaty settlement commitments. Integrate Section 4 of the Conservation Act. Integrate “iwi aspirations.” Integrate “partnership expectations.” Give effect to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. Embed te ao Māori, mātauranga and tikanga. Coach leaders. Assure performance. Align the whole organisation.
Settlements are statute. Section 4 is statute. You can argue about how far either reaches. You cannot pretend they are secret.
“Iwi aspirations” are not statute. “Partnership expectations” are not statute. “Principles” are the fog Parliament spent a year fighting over, and lost.
An operating model that bundles the lawful with the invented, then hides the bundle, is not settlement administration. It is policy by intranet.
If the model were only “keep the Treaty deeds,” DOC would publish a checklist and go home. Instead it builds Tier 3 kaihautū, enterprise business partners, capability oversight, monitoring and assurance, and a vocabulary of mana-enhancing engagement. That is a permanent parallel management system for how the Crown behaves toward Māori inside conservation, written for officials, sold in job ads, withheld from voters.
Ministers still talk as if co-governance and undefined principles are being wound back. DOC still hires as if the opposite is the work programme. The bridge between those two stories is a document the public is not allowed to see.
Ask the simple question.
Where is the DOC Treaty Operating Model?
If it is harmless, put it online. If it is only settlements and Section 4, say so in plain English. If it embeds aspirations and principles the coalition told the country it was ending, then the election campaign just found its next exhibit.
A democracy can live with hard arguments. It cannot live with operating models that rewrite the relationship between Crown and citizen in the dark.
So the model is real enough to recruit against. It is not real enough for the public to read.
That is not an accident of filing. That is design.
The owner is named. Sheridan Smith, Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu, Deputy Director-General Iwi Strategy and Partnerships since August 2025. DOC’s own blurb: she leads Treaty strategy, relationships, and Treaty system performance and oversight. She arrived from Justice as Deputy Secretary Strategy, with Te Arawhiti Partnerships and the Public Service Commission behind her. Crown–Māori system performance, not trapping stoats.
Under her watch the ads arrived. Under her watch the invisible model got a brand.
What do the role papers say the model does, when they bother to talk?
Integrate Treaty settlement commitments. Integrate Section 4 of the Conservation Act. Integrate “iwi aspirations.” Integrate “partnership expectations.” Give effect to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. Embed te ao Māori, mātauranga and tikanga. Coach leaders. Assure performance. Align the whole organisation.
Settlements are statute. Section 4 is statute. You can argue about how far either reaches. You cannot pretend they are secret.
“Iwi aspirations” are not statute. “Partnership expectations” are not statute. “Principles” are the fog Parliament spent a year fighting over, and lost.
An operating model that bundles the lawful with the invented, then hides the bundle, is not settlement administration. It is policy by intranet.
If the model were only “keep the Treaty deeds,” DOC would publish a checklist and go home. Instead it builds Tier 3 kaihautū, enterprise business partners, capability oversight, monitoring and assurance, and a vocabulary of mana-enhancing engagement. That is a permanent parallel management system for how the Crown behaves toward Māori inside conservation, written for officials, sold in job ads, withheld from voters.
Ministers still talk as if co-governance and undefined principles are being wound back. DOC still hires as if the opposite is the work programme. The bridge between those two stories is a document the public is not allowed to see.
Ask the simple question.
Where is the DOC Treaty Operating Model?
If it is harmless, put it online. If it is only settlements and Section 4, say so in plain English. If it embeds aspirations and principles the coalition told the country it was ending, then the election campaign just found its next exhibit.
A democracy can live with hard arguments. It cannot live with operating models that rewrite the relationship between Crown and citizen in the dark.
Rodney Hide is former ACT Party leader, and Minister in the National-ACT Government from 2008 to 2011. This article was first published HERE
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