Pee Kay: Do you smell fish?

Do you think these houses were ever going to be temporary?

Were these houses always going to be gifted to local Maori and do you think this was the agenda all along?

Geoff Parker: How Treaty Requirements Quietly Spread Through New Zealand’s Institutions

If most New Zealanders were asked when Treaty obligations began influencing professional life, many would assume it happened recently. The reality is quite different. What we are seeing today is the result of a gradual institutional expansion that has been unfolding for nearly forty years.

These developments are documented in statutes, court decisions, and the public charters of professional and educational bodies across New Zealand.

The starting point was the 1987 Court of Appeal decision in New Zealand Māori Council v Attorney-General (1987), commonly known as the Lands case. In that decision the court ruled that the Crown must act consistently with the “principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.” That phrase – “Treaty principles” – became the mechanism through which Treaty considerations began to play a larger role in New Zealand law and public administration.

Zoran Rakovic: When the Crown Stands Alone

What if Treaty obligations returned to the Crown—where they belong? Explore why iwi may soon rush to settle, not because of impatience, but insolvency.

There is an unwritten maxim among distressed creditors: settle while the pot still has something in it. This principle, though rarely invoked by name in Treaty politics, may prove to be the most important yet unspoken factor in determining the pace and finality of Crown–iwi settlements in the years ahead. Māori iwi, long accustomed to protracted negotiations with the Crown, may discover that when the burden of Treaty obligations is reloaded back onto the Crown—where it legally belongs—rather than endlessly diffused among councils, businesses, and ordinary citizens, their incentive structure to hold out indefinitely will collapse. For as long as the Crown is permitted to socialise its fiduciary debts—to pay them not from its own coffers but through the energies, rates, and regulatory concessions of citizens—Treaty settlements risk becoming a perpetuity, not a closure. But if that circuit is broken, then economic logic, not cultural metaphysics, will shape the settlement timeline.

Guest Post: Social justice takes precedence over law in census investigation

A guest post by a reader on Kiwiblog:

David Seymour obliquely referred to the pervasion of a social justice agenda in New Zealand in his first interview of 2025 on The Country, with words to the effect, Government officials (and universities) have gone rogue implementing identity ideology (with private enterprise following suit!)

Suze: Let Iwi Foot the Bill

I’m not a supporter of David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, but, as that’s all that is currently on offer, I’ll take it. My preference is to remove all reference to the Treaty principles embedded in NZ law and practice, to avoid the probability of redefining the Treaty principles further down the track. My reasons are best illustrated by the following tale.

David Farrar: Universities and the Treaty

Grant Duncan writes:

University management should take note of that, as there have been unrealistic efforts to force poorly defined “Treaty obligations” into teaching and research. For example, one university is now telling its academic staff that all curricula should, as a high priority, be “designed, developed and delivered in authentic partnerships with Māori [and] uphold provisions of Te Tiriti o Waitangi”.