JC: Ngāi Tahu in Breach of the Law?

This article covers concerning behaviour by Ngāi Tahu. I would like to make it clear that the comments made below are not directed at all Māori in Ngāi Tahu but rather the tribal leaders.

A message from Elliot Ikilei of Hobson’s Pledge appeared in my inbox. It concerned tactics being used against farmers by Ngāi Tahu. As of the moment this outrageous behaviour only affects farmers in Gore under rules imposed by the the tribe. Need I say that if this is allowed to proceed it will spread like the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, elsewhere in the South Island and around the country. What is happening in Gore must be stopped in its tracks. This is yet another instance of race-based pandering and cannot be allowed to stand.

Steven Gaskell: The Day the River Lawyered Up

Treaty settlement negotiations where iwi argue a place is an ancestor. The Legal Personhood Status Con Exposed.

New Zealand has always been a practical country. We built bridges across rivers, dams across valleys and farms across… well, everything else. Then one day the river hired a lawyer.

Insights From Social Media: The He Puapua road map

PB adds to Geoff Parker’s post (bolding emphasis added):

What Waatea News is producing here is not analysis of 2025. It is a maintenance narrative — a story designed to protect institutional arrangements at the point they are being democratically wound back.

The structure is familiar and closely follows the He Puapua road map, as articulated by Claire Charters and advanced in practice by Lady Tureiti Moxon.

Geoff Parker: A Narrative of Perpetual Betrayal Isn’t Evidence

Waatea News’ end-of-year lament paints 2025 as a dark age for Māori/Crown relations. But strip away the rhetoric and what remains is not evidence of oppression, it is the frustration of activist elites seeing their policy influence reduced.

The claim that Māori rights are “under serious threat” relies almost entirely on two assertions: that Māori-specific institutions and funding streams are inherently protective of Māori wellbeing, and that scaling them back constitutes discrimination. Neither claim withstands scrutiny.

Geoff Parker: New Zealanders Aren’t “Leaving the Government Behind” - They’re Pushing Back

Jack McDonald says voters are “looking forwards, not backwards.” He’s partly right. New Zealanders are looking forward — but what they’re leaving behind is a decade of cultural and ideological overreach that crept into public policy with little public consent.

Tui Vaeau: Why the Regulatory Standards Bill Terrifies the Wellington Priesthood.......

The Bureaucrats Who Cried Wolf: Why the Regulatory Standards Bill Terrifies the Wellington Priesthood

There is a peculiar scent that lingers whenever the Wellington set begin howling in unison: the stench of self-preservation. One whiff of accountability and the entire public health-industrial complex recoils like a possum in torchlight. The latest outburst of institutional hysteria? The Regulatory Standards Bill (RSB) - a modest, methodical attempt to reintroduce sanity, transparency, and adult judgment into New Zealand's lawmaking process.

JD: All of Us Are Equal

Guest post on The Good Oil by JD

The challenge now is for the silent majority to stand up and display their support for proper equality in NZ.

Not being Māori myself but having married into NZ society I find the great majority of my closest relatives are. A diverse bunch, they lay claim to varying degrees of ethnicity, ranging from my partner who traces unadulterated Māori ancestry back for several generations to those at the other end of the spectrum whose claim seems based on little more than their grandmother having once passed a Māori in the street.