Bob Edlin: The professorial push for local authorities to get rid of their rules on translating Te Reo

Only a tiny fraction of this country’s Māori people — estimated at around 9,000 individuals, or roughly 0.5% of the Māori population — speak exclusively in te reo Māori without speaking English.

This casts significant doubts on talk of “linguistic oppression” at local authority meetings.

Pee Kay: Or is that just STUPID!

“Agile, adaptive and lethal.” Those are the qualities New Zealand needs to become combat-ready, says Chief of Army Major General Rose King.

To meet those requirements our New Zealand Army leader has devised a new blueprint that she believes will “create a fighting-fit force for the future!”

Judy Gill: Te reo Māori, taonga and the question of responsibility

Te reo Māori is frequently described as a taonga—sacred, tapu, precious—and the Treaty of Waitangi is often invoked to argue that the state therefore bears an obligation to protect it.

Increasingly, a further claim is added: that difficulty learning te reo Māori today is driven by “intergenerational trauma”. This article questions whether that trauma framework is being used with conceptual precision and evidential discipline, and whether it explains contemporary language outcomes better than simpler factors such as age, literacy, educational quality, and language use in the home.

Lindsay Mitchell: Same-old, same-old

The Social Investment Agency is a creation of the National government. It kicked off in July 2024 and is headed by the former police commissioner Andrew Coster.

According to Nicola Willis, “Despite the Government currently investing more than $70 billion every year into social services, we are not seeing the outcomes we want for all New Zealanders... So we’re taking a different approach. We want to look beyond good intentions in our policy-making and use hard evidence to invest in what works. Our new approach builds on better social science evidence and advances in technology."

That sounds promising. A break with the old.

George Thomson: Teachers to strike again, demand higher pay and more te reo Māori support

About 40,000 primary school teachers, principals, and support staff will strike on October 23rd to urge the Government to address students and educators’ issues in education.

The decision comes amid rolling strikes for secondary school teachers this week.

Matua Kahurangi: Te reo Māori or just te reoish?

Bastardised English with a fancy spin

We are constantly told that te reo Māori is some kinda sacred language that must be preserved at all costs. Billions of dollars are being spent on government programmes, schools, and advertising campaigns to force the language into everyday life. When you actually look closely at modern te reo, a lot of it is not uniquely Māori at all. It is what you might call te reoish – English words simply rebranded to sound Māori.

Judy Gill: Learning Lost in Facebook Reo-Lish Gobbledygook

Doggy Daycare Rights for Children

In New Zealand, “preschool” is Early Childhood Education (ECE). It isn’t babysitting — since 1996, when Te Whāriki (the national ECE curriculum) was introduced, the purpose has been education. Parents are supposed to get “learning stories” that record a child’s development. Secure apps like “Educa” and “Storypark” exist for that reason: private, child-specific updates for families.

Steven Gaskell: Straight Talking

Reinventing Tradition: The Art of Making Yesterday Up Today

Welcome to New Zealand, where “tradition” is less about preserving the past and more about rewriting it on the fly with taxpayers footing the bill. Only in Māori culture can something be both a “revival” and a brand-new invention, all while being enforced as if it were chiselled in stone since time began. Point this out and you’re instantly branded a cultural heretic. Because nothing screams “authentic” like rituals cooked up in a committee room sometime around 1987.

A.E. Thompson: Encouraging the Survival of Te Reo

Even assuming a case can be defended for taxpayer-funded efforts to revive or to maintain te reo, what we are seeing seems a stupid way to go about achieving that.

Throwing in Maori substitutes for an arbitrary range of words in English narratives (e.g. 'mahi', 'whanau' and 'motu') will at best lead to many people recognising and perhaps using those few words but remaining completely unable to participate in a Maori language conversation either as a listener or speaker. There will always be a constraint on how many Maori terms can be inserted into an English utterance before it becomes so burdened with te reo it will no longer be intelligible to most of the English-speaking world. We are probably close to that limit already.

Ani O'Brien: What is in a name? Te Puna Aonui

Without Googling, do you know what the agency does?

Minister Karen Chhour has made the decision to rename Te Puna Aonui. The name translates to "spring of enlightenment" or a "source of wisdom and collective action" and the minister says it is not clear enough to New Zealanders what the venture is and who it serves.

Tui Vaeau: Fluency for the Few, Cost for the Many

Why You’re Paying for a Language Almost No One Uses - or Understands

“We’re all forced to echo small words that make big noise and mean nothing to most of us.”

Indeed. Small words, big noise. That, in essence, is what te reo Māori has become in modern New Zealand: a disproportionately celebrated state hobby enforced by bureaucrats, virtue-signallers, and treaty-industrialists under the pretext of national identity. Te reo is not our national language. It is not widely spoken, understood, or requested. It is being rammed down our collective throat by Wellington’s bureaucratic caste and the Māori elite, a partnership more obsessed with symbolism than with service.

Professor Ananish Chaudhuri: Inability to understand te reo Māori does not prevent people from asking questions about race relations in New Zealand

Dame Anne Salmond recently wrote a column on Newsroom berating people for having views on the Treaty of Waitangi when they cannot even read the Māori version of the treaty.

So, what she is saying is that even when customs, laws or treaties impinge on your daily life, you cannot hold any views on these matters if you are unable to read the relevant documents in their original form.