The Budget Translator: What they say vs What they mean.

This is the first in a group of essays that will focus on the budget, to be announced this week. Together, we are going to look into colonial budget-tactics, demystify a few key terms, make a few predictions, talk about what they should be funding and how they can fund it, and consider what a real decolonised budget might look like.

Full transparency: I’m not an economist, but I know that colonialism is, at its heart, an economic project – so decolonising means we need a few economic tools in our kete, so I thought I’d just share a few things I look at when I check the budget. Today, some 101 terms, what they mean, a few of the common colonial budget tactics, and what we can do about it.

Every year around May, the government announces a Budget.

Every year, most of us hear the word “Budget” and immediately feel our eyes glaze over.

Economists and politicians hold up numbers and graphs talking about “appropriation” this and “fiscal update” and it all sounds very important but feels very far away.

Remember when the Regulatory Standards Act was a Bill and we all learnt how the government makes important things boring so you won’t look closer? Yeah, this is one of those things.

The Budget is one of the most powerful documents produced in this country. It decides who gets what. It decides who lives longer. It decides whose lives get easier, and whose get harder. It decides whether your local kaupapa Māori health clinic stays open, whether your neighbour’s benefit gets cut, whether a family in emergency housing get a roof over their head or whether they get told to try harder.

And it is written, deliberately, in language that most people can’t penetrate. Of course it is, because the budget is the most explicit exposure of the primary goal of this government: transferring wealth.

A photograph of a school lunch meal service. Several children are queuing along a self-serve buffet table, holding plates and selecting food from large trays of salad, grated cheese, chopped vegetables, and a tomato-based sauce. A woman wearing a hairnet and blue gloves serves food at the far end of the table. The setting appears to be a school hall with white chairs and tables visible in the background, filled with other seated children.

Now, it doesn’t have to be that way – the budget could be about redistributing wealth so that, for instance, children are properly fed in school and folks can afford to drive to work (and there is quite a bit of evidence to support that in the longrun, a distributive economy actually saves tax dollars). Despite what they say, the wealthy can afford to stay wealthy, whilst also contributing enough for others to have the necessities of life. As Max Harris points out, the way that our tax dollars are spent tell us a lot about who and what our government really cares about, and what’s very clear is that this government cares about making a few folks very wealthy, whilst still retaining as many votes as possible. Hence why they try to make it sound boring and complicated.

So let’s fix that. Here is your Budget 101 — what the key terms mean, what to look for, and how to read a colonial wealth transfer when it’s dressed up in budget language – because what we also learnt over the RSB (and Treaty Principles Bill) is that a bunch of yous can pick this stuff up just fine 😊.

Operating Allowance and Capital Allowance

First, the two big numbers

Every Budget has two main pools of money.

The operating allowance is the money for running things day to day. Paying nurses. Funding your local health provider. Keeping the school counsellor employed. Paying benefits. This is the money that actually touches people’s lives on the ground. When politicians say they’re being ‘fiscally responsible’ and keeping a ‘tight’ budget, what they are usually saying is: this number will be small.

The capital allowance is the money for building and buying things (eg roads, prisons, ferries, hospital buildings, military equipment etc). This number can be very large, and it is often used to make a budget look generous when the operating side is quietly being gutted.

So one of the very simple points to remember when you look at a budget: capital doesn’t pay salaries. You can build a brand new hospital building with capital money, but if the operating allowance doesn’t fund the nurses and health navigators inside it, the building is just an expensive shell. The next boot to drop from a colonising government faced with this dilemma is (drumroll!): PRIVATISATION, BABY. If they cannot afford the operating costs, the general pattern from the 80s to now has been to outsource it, and the public service or asset becomes a private corporation, prioritising profit. We have seen this happen with prisons, schools, and increasingly our health services are being corporatised too. So when we see a significant gap between the capital package and the operating allowance, the likely outcome of privatisation is another wealth transfer.

Nicola Willis has already previewed that the budget has a capital package of $5.7billion dollars – that’s nearly three times its operating allowance of $2.1billion. That’s in spite of budget 2025 saying that capital allowance would be capped at $3.5 billion for the next three budgets.

A text box from a government budget document with the heading "Capital allowances" in blue bold text, followed by "(from Budget 2025)" in large red bold text. Full text: "Capital allowances (from Budget 2025) At the BPS, the Government discontinued the multi-year capital allowance framework and replaced it with capital allowances for each Budget in the forecast period. Compared to the BPS, the capital allowance for Budget 2025 has been raised from $3.625 billion to $4 billion. This increase has been offset in future Budgets by setting the capital allowances for each of the next three Budgets at $3.5 billion, representing a similar level of new capital investment over the forecast period as in the BPS. As capital investment requirements can be large, uneven and sometimes unexpected, the Government retains the flexibility to vary these capital allowances, within the constraints provided by its fiscal strategy."

The capital allowance builds things. The operating allowance runs them. You can build a prison with capital. You need operating money to pay the health worker who might have kept someone out of it.

In everyday language, capital just means anything that makes you money without you having to work for it. A rental house. Shares in a company. A business you employ other people to run. Capital earns income for its owner while they sleep. It can even increase in value while they sleep. In most other OECD countries (out of 38 OECD countries, 36 have a capital gains tax), that increase in value is taxed – that’s called a capital gains tax. It’s a very effective form of wealth distribution, and in New Zealand, we don’t have it. What that means on the ground is that while Julie the nurse goes to work a ten hour shift and every cent is taxed, William the landlord makes a bunch of money in his sleep, and only a part of it is taxed.

So when you hear the government say “Oh we have to limit our operational budget because we don’t have enough money to fund more health services or feed more children or house more families” – that’s a damned lie. They don’t have to, they chose to have less money in the operational budget by NOT taxing the wealthy.

New Zealand does not have a capital gains tax. That means if your house increases in value by $300,000, you pay no tax on that gain. If a nurse earns $80,000 a year, she pays tens of thousands in income tax. The person who worked earned money. The person who owned an asset earned money. The nurse gets taxed. The landlord doesn’t.

A conceptual illustration showing four model houses in ascending size from left to right — all with red roofs and cream walls — set against a white grid graph background. A bold red line graph rises sharply upward from left to right, passing through or above each house, symbolising rising house prices or property value growth over time.

Of course, wealthy asset owners are most effected by capital gains tax. The likes of, say real estate speculators such as the Gibbs family, or Rank Group owner and building industry magnate Graeme Hart, or FMI Building Innovations owner Warren Lewis. All of whom happen to be amongst the top donors to ACT, National and New Zealand First.

The colonial dimension of this is direct: the colonisation of New Zealand has always been about economic extraction. When land was taken from hapū Māori, the primary capital asset of Māori, and the basis of their economic wellbeing was transferred — overwhelmingly — into Pākehā hands. Three or four generations later, that advantage compounds. The wealth gap between Māori and Pākehā households is not about effort or talent. It is about who was allowed to accumulate capital across generations, off the back of stolen goods, without even having to share the increase in value (let alone returning what was stolen).

What difference would a capital gains tax make? Well, if we take the average capital gains tax rate of 19% that would provide an extra $5.1billion that could go into the operating allowance budget. That would be a complete game changer, and that’s with a modest/average capital gains tax. But instead, public services have to remain strapped, children have to remain underfed, and jobs have to be cut, so that the wealthy can remain even wealthier.

A hand-drawn style illustration showing a red shopping basket filled with groceries — including a wine bottle, a baguette, a blue carton, and a green apple — alongside a rising bar chart in orange-red tones with an upward arrow, symbolising increasing food or grocery prices/costs.

Income, Inflation and CPI

Look at benefit rates and minimum wage rates. But don’t just look at whether they went up — look at whether they went up enough. A 2% increase sounds like something, but if inflation is running at 3.1% (as it was in March 2026), that 1.1% winds up being paid out of the pockets of beneficiaries. Sometimes inflation is discussed using the term “Capital Price Index” (CPI) – which is just a fancy way of saying “how much the price of everyday goods (food, petrol, rent, electricity etc) has gone up. So 3.1% means the price of everyday goods is now 3.1% more than it was at this time, last year. It’s important to remember that for low-income areas, real inflation is often higher and more impactful than the CPI (because they have less options on things to “cut back on” when prices go up, because it takes up a bigger proportion of their wage, and because in general, being poor is expensive, you cannot afford to buy high-quality items that last long). So if we are to take a class-conscious, antiracist approach income and benefit raises should be even higher for communities worst impacted by cost-of-living crises. Inflation for low-income household is typically 0.5–1.5% higher than CPI. So if the CPI is 3.1%, benefit and minimum wage levels should increase by a minimum of 3.6-5.1%.

Service Budgets

When they wap on about “service budgets”, what they mean is the accumulated amount an agency or programme receives to operate year to year, which was established in previous budgets and continues automatically unless changed. So like, parenting programmes for Mamas have a particular budgeted amount within health. But when looking at this, you have to take into account that our population grows by approximately 2% per year, which means any service budget that doesn’t increase by at least 2% is being diluted across more people. Specifically for the health sector, there are added cost pressures due to technology and wage costs, so you would want to add at least another 2-3% onto the CPI, otherwise it’s effectively a cut, and even meeting that rate would only keep things where they are, not improve them.

So those are some of the bare-bones approaches to looking at a budget. Just know that it’s the colonial project, presented IN the colonial language of dollars and cents. It’s the fruit of the seeds planted by right-wing election donors.

One last point before I sign off: a budget is not just economics. It is an expression of who holds power, and what they think that power is for.

The budget is where that injustice shows up in dollars. Every year. Until the constitutional settings change. Extracting from our lands, from our waters and from our bodies has been the colonial purpose since day one of colonial project. All that has changed, is that now it is at its most explicit – whilst still trying to cloak its continued theft.

So good on you for getting into the budget and demystifying it. But there’s more we can do:

1. Let them know you see them and call them on their bullsh*t. Austerity is a lie, I’d all it wealth transfer in drag, but it’s nowhere near as fabulous as drag.

2. Vote – and vote for constitutional change. Every extractive budget this government has produced has been extractive (as have many before them), and this is made possible because of our constitutional settings. The Crown controls the size of the purse AND the purse strings, and ultimately this will not change until we change how we do government.

3. Don’t wait for constitutional change, build economic safety nets in your community. That starts with relationships. Introduce yourself to new folks on the street. Check on your neighbours, consider how you might support each other either by trading skills and services, or working bees, or sharing excess from your own maara, or dropping off some kai to an elder on the way home.

4. If you are in a space of relative privilege, and have less economic/labour burden exhausting your energy and time, use that to speak out for those that are hit hardest by these types of budgets.

Understanding Lateral Racism in Aotearoa

The recent rise in anti-Indian racism across Aotearoa is not new, patterns of racism tend to cycle through different non-white migrants every few years, one year targeting Chinese communities, the next Indian, the next from the African continent. Consistently throughout that time, Māori are also targeted, often along the same lines but with subtle differences. And every time, there are large portions of the targeted groups who participate in the targeting of others.

This isn’t a new thing. Inter-ethnic discrimination has been observed, and thought about, and commented on for a long time. If we look back to the history of modern racism, we can see that Europeans saw “difference” (like skin colour and beliefs) and coded it as being “lesser than”. Their construction of the “other” (ie non-European, non-Christian groups) was therefore always going to be “lesser than” themselves.

Liberational thinkers like Frantz Fanon wrote at length on the “colonial binary” in which the coloniser represents civilization, humanity, and value, and the colonised represents the opposite. He further noted that when people absorb this idea of a hierarchy where groups have the “right to oppress”, they can often act out their aggression on each other, because punching down, and across is so much easier than punching up. When you attack someone who is also seen as an enemy by the colonial oppressor, you are able to leverage all of that systemic colonial hate against your target. When we understand this dynamic, we can see it for what it truly is: the wound inflicted from the coloniser, discharged sideways towards the mutually colonised. The “sideways” aspect is how it gets its name: Lateral Racism.

While the script and context might vary, this is just as true when we are looking at an Indian politician being racist towards Māori, and is also true when we see Māori being racist towards non-white migrants – particularly those who come from colonised nations.

Stories between the mutually colonised are not often spoken of, for a number of reasons: the coloniser prefers to centre themselves; the coloniser fears solidarity amongst the colonised; and the colonial machine extracts a lot of energy from the colonised – which means the limited energy reserves tend towards uplifting our own or critiquing the coloniser rather than learning about, and building community with the mutually colonised.

But as I wrote about in my previous blog, in spite of many beautiful and inspiring stories of when we have come together in love and solidarity, we also have a long history of standing alongside white supremacists against non-white migrant New Zealanders.

One of the dominant racist narratives is the suggestion that migrants are “taking over” – and interestingly, this reliable racist trope goes back even further than the migrant communities themselves do. The first anti-Chinese league formed in Nelson in 1857, nine years before the first recorded Chinese settlers even arrived (it was really about white miners wanting to block Chinese miners from arriving in the goldfields as they had in Australia); it was swiftly joined by the Anti-Asiatic League and the White Race League. By the time the White New Zealand league started in Pukekohe, European race theory was already well-entrenched in the country, and even though little over 600 Indians were in the country at the time, it was still considered “too many”. Although it was framed in the language of a “takeover”, in Pukekohe in 1926, where the White New Zealand League started, there were only seventeen Indians and thirty Chinese in a population exceeding thirteen thousand.

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In 1898 politician and historian William Pember Reeves wrote:

“The average colonist regards a Mongolian with revulsion, a Negro with contempt, and looks on an Australian black as very near to a wild beast; but he likes the Maoris, and is sorry that they are dying out.”

The White New Zealand League leveraged off these ideas to recruit Māori into their project of a racially pure New Zealand.

The practice of recruiting Indigenous people into white supremacy is not new, or distinct to our history. Throughout history, and around the world, Indigenous peoples have been manipulated by colonisers into adopting their racist viewpoints. In so-called United States, Indigenous peoples were told that if they adopted European agricultural practices – including enslaved African labour – they would be granted the same rights as white settlers (which never eventuated).  The Belgians notoriously used divide and rule in Rwanda and Burundi to favour the minority Tutsi community, coding them as akin to Europeans racially superior to the majority Hutu, which eventually led to the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Likewise, Māori were spoken of as the “Aryans of the Pacific” and recruited into solidarity with the “White New Zealand” project.

Understanding how this tactic works requires us to understand the distinctiveness of how colonial racism is directed towards Indigenous people as opposed to migrant groups. Racism is rarely about imposing a racial hierarchy for its own sake, it is more often than not a tool for economic power. Migrants are racialised to restrict economic participation or to keep them at the bottom for the purposes of labour extraction. Indigenous peoples (including Māori) are racialised to absorb, assimilate, or eradicate as a distinct people who pose a standing challenge to the legitimacy of settler-colonial political authority and land-ownership.

Recruiting Māori into white supremacist hierarchies against other racialised groups reinforces the European racial order, indirectly justifying the ongoing acquisition of Māori land on the grounds that we were being improved by contact with European civilisation rather than harmed by it. It also undermined the basis for tino rangatiratanga by treating Māori as individuals capable of private property ownership rather than as collective peoples with territorial rights.

In effect, for over 150 years, Māori have been manipulated into European racism, as a distinct form of colonial assimilation, supporting a project that can only ever result in our own dispossession and eradication.

Of course, at no time is this more obvious than during election years, where the White New Zealand project is again advanced through triggering racist fear:

This year has already seen New Zealand First triggering fear over a “Butter Chicken Tsunami”, and ACT have now released their racist immigration policy, which includes compulsory English language requirements for work visas.

  • The 2023 elections were run on anti-Māori campaigns, including a New Zealand First candidate labelling Māori a “disease” that the party will “cut out” and framing Māori co-governance as “apartheid”, meanwhile Winston Peters ran on an anti-Māori wards campaign.


  • The 2020 General elections included a policy to “curb immigration” until Māori housing demand was met, incorrectly inferring that migrants were to blame for the housing crisis (as opposed to speculative housing markets, AirBnB conversions, and the gutting of social housing) and pitting Māori interests against migrant interests.


  • The 2017 elections involved aggressive anti-immigration campaigns by New Zealand First, positioning migrants as a competing threat to employment, housing, and infrastructure, whilst also attacking Māori as beneficiaries and economic drains.


  • The 2014 elections saw Winston peters again throwing migrants (this time, Chinese) under the bus as a threat to national identity and housing prices, alongside the regular narratives of Māori as criminal threats.

Looking across the elections, the most consistently racist party has been New Zealand First, of which the two most senior politicians are Māori – which makes lateral racism one of the strongest features of New Zealand electoral politics. It should come as no surprise that they are again relying on racist narratives this electoral year. It works well for them, and we certainly aren’t giving them a reason to stop.

If you want a deeper look at the crystal ball, Dr Harpreet Singh has provided the following table to outline how race-baiting narratives work in relation to migrant groups:

So Māori are recruited into the White New Zealand Project through racist ideas about migrants getting in the way of jobs, houses and access to services.

Meanwhile, migrants are being recruited into the White New Zealand Project through racist ideas about Māori being criminals and violent thugs.

And BOTH groups are being recruited into the White New Zealand Project through the likes of New Zealand First who, like clockwork, frame both migrants and Māori as threats to a White New Zealand national identity.

If there is any light in this tunnel, it is signalled by the fact that we also have a long history of standing in solidarity with each other. Māori in solidarity with Muslim communities after the Christchurch Mosque terrorist attacks; Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga showing up consistently for Māori and te Tiriti over the years; the MultiCultural Society support for Te Tiriti and Matike Mai; intergenerational Māori support for Palestine; Singh support for rural Māori communities in Tairāwhiti and South Aucklanders in need; the Springbok tour protests; Māori, Chinese and Indian solidarity through market garden communities; Māori solidarity with Pacific communities during the Dawn Raids; Māori solidarity with targeted Dalmatian and Chinese migrants going back to the 1800s. There is much to be proud of, and to build upon, but in order for us to reach our fullest potential, and stand in true solidarity with each other, we must remove the weapon of lateral race-baiting from the hands of power, and doing that requires us to face up to it, acknowledge its existence, and understand it.

If we fail to do so, we risk maintaining the project of White New Zealand, even on behalf of our own colonisers. That can never be called tino rangatiratanga.

Māori and India: A Shared Colonial History

Warning: This article contains extreme racist hate speech and acts.

Over the years I’ve been writing, much of my time on this blog has been spent talking about colonial racism against Māori and Indigenous peoples. Today I want to talk about anti-Indian racism, operating through all of us.

The haka happened, yes, but that was not all:

We can’t deny that these are all connected. The news did not really report on the incidents collectively (and even their individual reports did not get strong uptake in mainstream media) – and that in itself seems to speak to the normalising of anti-Indian hate in Aotearoa. When the haka and “butter chicken tsunami” was discussed in Māori spaces, though, what we saw was an outpouring of racism and gaslighting of the Indian community. In one moment, they were being told the haka was not about them (even though it clearly referenced their culture). In the next moment, they were being told that they were responsible for the words and actions of Parmjeet Parmar, that they should be doing more to shut her down, that there *are* too many of them over here, that they don’t “assimilate” enough into “New Zealand” culture, that they threaten our jobs, our access to housing, our national identity, that they needed to “toughen up” and take it, that this is their “FAFO” (f**k around, find out) moment. They were called an “imported problem”. And throughout it all, there were hundreds of likes, laughs, and loves of these extremely racist sentiments, from our own.

Even though many may assume that the harm begins and ends with the act or speech itself, for the affected communities, the ripples of harm keep hitting them as they watch the public comment over and over again with more racism against them.

A screenshot of Facebook comments responding to an incident involving a haka and a "butter chicken comment." Comments range from dismissive and mocking of Indian New Zealanders to one voice stating "You can care about these things without being a racist bigot." One comment argues the Indian community deserved the haka because they failed to condemn one of their own.

Coincidentally, it was also ANZAC week, which is already a week of complex feelings for so many of us. Many of our tīpuna returned from the war completely jaded about the experience, regretted going, upon return were maltreated by the very country they believed they were putting their lives on the line for (and this remains the case even for today’s soldiers). For quite a few, it seems cruel that the price of citizenship is still demanded, even though the Crown itself does not uphold te Tiriti in the slightest. I have immense respect for the fact that many of our Pāpās were committed to the idea of going overseas to fight against violent racism and great sadness that in spite of that sacrifice, it is still all around us, today.

But even back then, anti-Indian racism was rampant in Aotearoa, and Indian soldiers were also maltreated by the nation they laid their lives down for. One of the earliest hate crimes against non-Māori was in 1920, when a group of Indian scrubcutters were surrounded by torch-wielding pākehā in Greytown, Wairarapa. That same year, the RSA had passed a resolution that the  ‘influx of Hindus and Chinese’ posed a threat to New Zealand, in spite of the fact that Indian soldiers fought for New Zealand alongside the Māori Pioneer Battalion.

A vintage black-and-white portrait photograph of an Indian man wearing a white turban, suit jacket, and tie, with a moustache. His name, "Jagt Singh," is handwritten in red ink at the top.
Photograph of Jagt Singh ਜਗਤ ਸਿੰਘ also known as Soldier Singh, New Zealand World War 1 soldier of Indian heritage.
Archives NZ: R7817714. No known copyright restrictions.
A newspaper clipping headlined "RACIAL HATRED. EVINCED AT CARTERTON — HINDUS HAD TO QUIT CARTERTON, This Day." The article describes seven Hindu scrub-cutters being threatened by 60–70 European men who demanded they leave their lodgings.
Northern Advocate, 8 July 1920. Image: Papers Past

As a Doctrine of Discovery researcher, it’s hard to miss the fact that the term “Hindus” was used as a racial slur against Indians. It’s a classic mark of the Doctrine of Discovery, that being non-Christian is what targets you as an enemy-of-Christ. It’s present in the very papal bulls which set the colonial project in motion:

“we grant to you by these present documents, with our Apostolic Authority, full and free permission to invade, search out, capture and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be” (Dum Diversas 1452)

The Saracens were the Muslim. The pagans were anyone with a belief system tied to nature (ie Indigenous peoples). Indians became the intersection of these two categories of enemies of Christ. While 19th century racist scholars such as Max Müller referred to Hinduism as “nature worship” and placed it on a chain of existence below monotheistic (“single God”) religions, there was also a melding of Indians with the Middle East, in-part influenced through political developments such as the British partitioning of Pakistan and India, and in part also because the colonial gaze tends to meld all brown people together. Along this journey, the turban also grew to become a “Muslim” marker, regardless of the actual faith of the person wearing it. And so when Wayne Brown saw an Indian RNZ staff member wearing a turban and said “Security can’t be very tight if we’re being escorted by a Muslim terrorist”, he was speaking directly to a colonial fusion of Muslim and Indian people that goes back generations.

By 1926, with the support of Prime Minister Gordon Coates, the “White New Zealand League” was established to protect New Zealand from Chinese and Indian migrants, who apparently posed a threat to the racial integrity and economic prosperity of “White New Zealand”, and it found support among grower associations, labour organisations, local bodies, and the Returned Soldiers’ Association. Like many aspects of colonialism, these ideas were absorbed by Māori, and even though they were called the “White New Zealand League”, many Māori were co-opted into the “White New Zealand” movement.

A pamphlet cover from the White N.Z. League (Incorporated), featuring silhouettes of children playing, with the text "Citizens of the Future are the Children of Today." The motto reads: "Your obligations to posterity are great; Your inheritance was a White New Zealand. Keep it so for your childrens' children, And the Empire."
“Your obligations to posterity are great; Your inheritance was a White New Zealand. Keep it so for your childrens’ children, And the Empire.”

Crucially, the White New Zealand League suggested that Indian and Chinese immigrants posed an existential threat to Māori communities, and in particular posed a sexual threat to wāhine Māori. This eventually led to the government establishing  a special committee to investigate and condemn intermingling of Māori with Chinese and Indian people.

By this time British officers and civil servants who had previously served in India, had already named New Zealand places Khyber Pass, Khandallah, Berhampore, Cashmere. A kind of memorium for the lands they just finished colonially plundering.

The coloniser would love you to believe that your colonisation was an isolated event, and that Indians are to blame for it. What the coloniser doesn’t want you to see is that colonialism is a single integrated global system in which the colonisation of one people was directly connected to the colonisation of others, including in India, what it doesn’t want you to know is that colonial domination is what drives migration – and what the coloniser is absolutely terrified of you doing, is standing together in unity against him.

A roadside welcome sign reading "Welcome to Khandallah," a suburb of Wellington, New Zealand — a place name of Indian/Urdu origin.

This history of naming places after Indian sites of colonial plunder is in turn, is layered over another pertinent history – that the predecessor to the New Zealand Company, responsible for so much colonial land theft, is the British East India Company, both joint-stock-trading companies whose commercial purpose was colonial land-theft, and both receiving royal charters to do so (the East India Company in 1600, the New Zealand Company in 1841).

A table listing British colonial trading companies from 1600 to 1886 (including the East India Company, New Zealand Company, Royal African Company, and others), alongside a vintage German world map showing the extent of British imperial trade networks.

Chartered joint-stock companies such as the British East India Company became the blueprint for “corporate empire”: state-backed private entities exercising sovereign-like powers to organise extraction across territories. That’s exactly why corporations have more power than voting citizens these days. Prior to British colonialism, India was a textile trade-giant. Through colonialism, this model restructured a sophisticated Indian textile economy into a colonial supply chain in service of Britain, shifting production from high-value manufacturing to raw material extraction, and relocating profits to imperial centres.

A colour photograph of a young South Asian boy, appearing to be around 10–12 years old, seated at a black and gold sewing machine in a dimly lit garment factory. He is wearing a patterned shirt and looks directly at the camera with a neutral expression. In the background, other workers — including what appear to be additional children and young people — are visible at sewing stations amid piles of dark fabric. The setting suggests a small, informal workshop or sweatshop.

This pattern became foundational to the global political economy. Whereas the Doctrine of Discovery created the concept of slave-destinies for particular races, its application in India became the basis of slave-labour which would be normalised in service of the global textile trade. This continues to shape contemporary textile industries, where production is outsourced to India or Bangladesh, value is centralised, and exploitation is a foundation stone of the entire economy. Many of your own favourite Māori clothing brands source their textiles from India, and while some (shoutout Aho Creative) openly speak to their commitment to work with ethical Indian suppliers, many do not. Shout out also to Misty Scurr for raising this awareness amongst our own.

So when we speak about India as “whenua pōhara”, we must understand that term within the context a land that has been plundered by our own coloniser, a colonial brutality that includes the British Crown enforcing some 30 famines upon Indian people, to the point where it permanently changed Indian bodies for all of their uri.

We need to understand that colonial plunder of India and South Asia is ongoing, through a system that we, too, are complicit in. The global fashion industry is economically propped up by everyone’s silent support for Indian enslavement.  Nor is this confined to the textile industry. When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, plantation economies across the Caribbean and Pacific suddenly faced a labour shortage. Instead of ending exploitation, the system replaced enslaved Africans with “indentured” labourers from India (this ran concurrently with the practice of blackbirding across the Pacific, which saw large numbers of Pacific islanders illegally abducted, and trafficked into the plantation economy to replace liberated Black people). The indenture system carried Indians to Fiji, and one example of this history is The Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR Sugar) who needed labour for sugar plantations after enslavement of Africans was abolished, and initially they used blackbirded workers, but then the British-Fiji colonial government later shifted toward Indian indentured labour as a more “regulated” supply.

A black-and-white archival panoramic photograph captioned: "A Group of Indian Labourers Employed on the Vancouver-Fiji Sugar Company's Navua Estate." A large crowd of indentured Indian workers stands in front of plantation buildings.
“A Group of Indian Labourers Employed on the Vancouver-Fiji Sugar Company’s Navua Estate.”
THE INDIANS IN FIJI (To the Editor.) Sir, — Your correspondent "From the East" has missed the main point mentioned by Mr. Fraser and criticised by me, and that was about the Indians' treatment in Fiji. It is clear from Mr. Fraser's letter that he is of opinion that the Indian is well treated there, while I still hold that he is a poor ill-used creature. Let us go back to the strike period of 1919. Whilst articles had risen 200 and 300 per cent in price, my countrymen had been receiving only 2/ as a daily wage, which was entirely insufficient to keep body and soul together. And this at a time when all growers of cane were doing unusually well. Three years after the war had begun, while prices had been rising in every direction, the indentured labourer himself was obtaining exactly the same wage as before the war. The average savings sent to India by indentured labourers, according to the Rev. Andrews, did not amount to more than 6/ per head per annum. As Dr. Manilal said in writing of the unfortunate position of these people "Hundreds of Indians are yearning or panting to see a ship to go back to India and leave this Hell on earth created by the greed and avarice of the English planters and their Fiji Government." — I am, etc., JELAL KALYANJI NATALI. [This correspondence is closed. — Ed.]
Letter from Jelal Kalyanji Natali 3 July 1922 to the editor of the Auckland Star

The “indentured” labour model, where they were promised pay, housing, and a return ticket home, but wound up more often than not being forced, underpaid or unpaid, confined to the plantation, violently abusive and their return home denied, came to underpin the model of labour utilised throughout the Pacific, and is still a common story told by Pacific workers in the horticultural industry in Aotearoa, today. Of course, as the global political economy took shape in the 20th century, and New Zealand, leveraging off its colonial alliances, asserted itself as a regional bully in the Pacific region, extraction and exploitation came to characterise its approach to trade and politics across the Pacific region.

A horizontal bar chart titled "Would you say your feelings are positive or negative towards immigrants from…?" showing New Zealanders' attitudes toward immigrants from various countries. Australia, UK, and Japan rank highest in positive sentiment; India, China, and UAE rank lowest, with notably higher negative ratings.

So when I look at the fact that today, research indicates that Indian, Asian and UAE people are the “least welcome” migrants here in Aotearoa, I can’t help but look at the intersections of anti-Blackness, anti-Asian racism and Islamophobia. I can’t help, as a Doctrine of Discovery researcher, but be aware of how being dark-skinned has operated as a signifier for slave-destinies, and it’s only through that fact that “dark-skinned” qualifies as an insult. I can’t help but be aware of how that intersection of anti-Black and anti-Asian racism has transmuted into our voluntary blindness for enslavement of Indian people in service of our fashion choices. I can’t help but see how this profoundly shaped our Pacific economies and labour practices.

I can’t help but look at the graffiti of “Kill all Indians” in Royal Oak and connect it to Destiny Church, who last year tore and stomped on religious flags belonging to the Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and Palestinian communities. I can’t help but connect it to Islamophobia, to genocide in Gaza, and to the slaughter of Muslim prayer communities here in Otautahi (which we swore would never happen again, but are now charting a pathway to). I cannot help but see all of that within the fact that Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim are the “least welcome” religions in Aotearoa New Zealand.

A horizontal bar chart titled "Is your personal attitude positive, negative, or neutral towards…?" showing New Zealanders' attitudes toward different religious groups. Christians receive the most positive ratings; Muslims receive the highest negative ratings, followed by Sikhs and Hindus.

I can’t NOT connect these two images

A closer crop of the Papatoetoe Central School graffiti photo from Image 1, showing the red spray-painted hate message on concrete pavement with the first word obscured.

I cannot help but look at this same message painted in front of a school for five to eleven year olds just last week and think of those poor babies seeing that on the ground, and the fear it struck into their hearts. I can’t help but see this, and consider the work of Ara Alam-Simmons and other researchers who have tracked and documented the extreme racism that children from these communities experience every day in New Zealand schools.

I cannot help but view this in light of the fact that we know, not think but know that hate crime stems from hate speech. That it does not occur all by itself, but is a culmination of people degraded and abused for political and personal point-scoring, and dehumanised until their very lives become expendable.

I cannot help but connect that to the fact that the Doctrine of Discovery is based upon destroying everything that is most sacred to non-European, non-Christian communities, and always has been. Their ceremonies, dance, prayer, markings, and even their children.

I see all of this, and I cannot help but stand against it – because I understand, absolutely and completely, that the story of their oppression, is the story of my oppression too.

And to finish, I leave us with this beautiful composition from two of my favourite Māori poets, Abby Hauraki and Rangimārie Sophie Jolley

Poem by Rangimarie Sophie Jolley क्षमा मांगना Kshama maangana I read that it means downcast, heartsick, dispirited and I reach for our words to meet you nā mātou te hē doesn't quite seem enough and yet it was still too much to say when a supposed kaumātua drowned his dignity in comments about tsunami and then when a respected advisor lead a performance of blatant lateral racism that should never have been composed and still, not once - have we been able to meet the tenderness of क्षमा मांगना kshama maangana

Beware the Colonial Sleight

I actually started writing this five years ago, and just came across it in my drafts. It must have been waiting for a better moment! I’ve made some adjustments, added some friends voices, and here we have my electoral reflections:

Beware the sleight of colonial hands.

“The coloniser has become so sophisticated” said Tupac, and he was so right.

They will have you believing your kin is your ultimate enemy. They will redefine the parameters of justness. They will sell your confinement as freedom. And if you are confined long enough, you will believe them. If you are refused justice long enough, you’ll forget what your mokopuna are due. If you are denied self-determination long enough, it will become completely unfamiliar to you.

Which is exactly when the colonizer will step in and tell you: “But you are already there!”

“Look, here, we can convict you in your own language now!”

“Look, we have created this role/department/agency/committee for you!”

“What do you mean, self-determination? You are already there!”

“This, my friend, is justice!”

And if you accept their suggestion that you are already at the finish-line, you will stop reaching for it, you will stop your march to justice, and instead set yourself upon another pathway, where part-measures consume all of your time, and energy, and resource, and heartbeats. Every now and then you might wonder “but if we are free why are we still dying so young?”

“Hush” the coloniser will say “just give it more time ”.

While he jingles time in his pockets like money he forgot was there. Time is the last thing we have. We barely have enough time to meet our mokopuna, let alone be accountable to them. Because while there is always value in reducing harm, It could just as easily be a distraction from their tino rangatiratanga than a step towards it.

So we have to stop calling things what they are not. Settlements are not justice. Optional advice is not partnership. A seat at the colonial table is not mana motuhake. The oft overlooked truth is:

the removal of Maori political authority from this land is the parental injustice, from which all other injustices flow. Ki tō taiao. Ki tō kai. Ki tō rae. And the only redress to that injustice is Matike Mai.

That injustice that is maintained by each successive government. Red, (white) and blue (white). So addicted to its own privilege, and so sold on its own inherent superiority, that it cannot reconcile its righteousness with its own white supremacy.

And us, the perceived children of a so-called Common-wealth Empire (where, as Karlo reminds us, the wealth is not that common). Stolen from our parental embrace of tikanga, to be placed under the so-called “care” of a Westminster house.

We will never find justice or care while the Crown still assumes final authority. Without either of those we can never deem ourselves free. Any step forward will be at their ultimate discretion, and can be reversed by them at any time.

Only when we, Māori, hold the ultimate authority over our lands, our waters, our families, our futures. Only then are we free on our own land.

5 Very Common Arguments Against Honouring Te Tiriti (and how to respond)

So I’ve been invited as a Tiriti advocate to many different forums – boardrooms, court hearings, mediations, workshops, research projects, lectures… across both public and private sectors, in philanthropy, education, media, I.T., science – suffice to say I’ve seen and heard te Tiriti spoken about in many different ways and settings. After a while, you hear very similar arguments coming up about why people “shouldn’t” or “don’t feel it’s necessary to” honour te Tiriti.

As common as some of these arguments are, I also often hear people fudging their responses, getting flustered, or not quite nailing it as neatly as they could. It has struck me sometimes, that we are much more powerful at talking about why te Tiriti should be honoured, than we are deconstructing arguments against it. So here, I thought I’d compile a list of the top 5 arguments I hear, along with some options for how you respond.

Arthur doesn’t believe he has a responsibility to honour Te Tiriti, because the government doesn’t tell him to – but also, Arthur doesn’t want the government to tell him what to do especially if it means honouring Te Tiriti.
  1. “We don’t have a legislated responsibility to honour Te Tiriti”

I’ve heard this one come from universities, polytechnics, schools and even councils. It’s generally arising from the fact that the Act which they have to operate under (eg the Education Act or the Local Government Act). In some spaces it’s called “the statutory silence” argument (our legislation is silent on it so we have no responsibility).

Legally, it’s wrong. Te Tiriti is the constitutional backdrop of all legislation, whether it is mentioned explicitly in their specific act or not, and in part this is because parliament draws its existence from te Tiriti (even though its current form of existence is in violation of te Tiriti). So the legislation, and institutions created through that legislation, arguably wouldn’t exist were it not for te Tiriti.

The legal reality in Aotearoa is that all public institutions who draw funding from the Crown and operate under Crown legislation, carry enduring Tiriti responsibilities unless it is explicitly stated that they do not.

This has been reaffirmed through the courts multiple times, including:

  • NZ Māori Council v Attorney-General (1987)
  • Huakina Development Trust v Waikato Valley Authority (1987)
  • NZ Māori Council v Attorney-General (Broadcasting Assets) (1994)
  • Attorney-General v Ngāti Apa (2003)

There is an enduring discussion on whether te Tiriti should be made more enforceable, sure, but that doesn’t depend on whether it is explicitly mentioned in legislation or not. More importantly the question on whether it is constitutionally relevant to ALL legislation has been thoroughly dealt with in law.

Finally, if your moral standard is determined by the bare legal minimum, you’re underserving yourself, and the greater population.

Gary has been selling fertiliser for 45 years, some of his best employees are Māori, and he’s 80% they’re perfectly happy (he’s never asked them), so he doesn’t see why all this treaty nonsense applies to him
  1. “We aren’t a government agency, so te Tiriti doesn’t apply to us”

Usually heard from NGOs, charities, and the private sector. It sounds legally tidy, or at least more legally tidy than the earlier argument, but it rests on a very narrow reading of Te Tiriti and of how power actually works.

It helps to be very succinct and clear here:

Te Tiriti obligations don’t come from being a government agency.

They come from operating within a Treaty-based society and benefiting from Crown authority.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi is a constitutional reality, not a legal technicality. The organisation in question may not be the Crown — but it’s inarguable that they operate because of the Crown’s authority, within a system created through Te Tiriti, and often using powers, assets, or legitimacy that flow from it.

Are responsibilities different for the public sector? Somewhat – the public sector have direct legal duties, but Tiriti expectations and responsibilities exist for everyone in the “nation-state” of New Zealand, because te Tiriti is the basis of the “nation-state” of New Zealand.

Let’s also not forget that the Crown regularly out-sources their work to NGOs and the private sector, and often rely upon private companies for carrying out governmental duties. If none of these groups had any Tiriti responsibilities, the Crown could evade all of its own Tiriti obligations by simply outsourcing everything. Unsurprisingly, the Courts have also repeatedly dismissed this argument, and the arguments in point 2 absolutely apply here.

But even if your business is not dealing with duties that were delegated by the Crown, te Tiriti is a social contract, it is the foundation of our nation, and it is absolutely intended to guide how power operates in Aotearoa.

Judith doesn’t believe in special privileges, she just thinks history ended yesterday and every morning is a clean slate, so talofa.
  1. “We treat everyone the same”

And similar variations such as “Māori are a stakeholder, alongside many others” or “We believe in equality” or “We don’t single out any one group” or “We apply the same rules to everyone” or “We don’t do identity politics”.

This argument is a big old red-flag that you’re probably dealing with someone who harbours anti-Māori hostility. Don’t get angry, that will just reaffirm to them their own biases. Instead, you’re going to unpick their argument to expose it for what it is, by pointing out the following:  

  1. This argument is based on the assumption that te Tiriti is about special benefits to Māori – that is a commonly held assumption (and is often why we see “Treaty matters” placed in the corner under “Māori issues”) – and it is wrong. Te Tiriti is not a “Māori” issue – it is the basis of this entire country. The only people who received new benefits from te Tiriti was (and still is) Non-Māori. Te Tiriti is what allowed non-Māori to call this place home, and it outlined the conditions for their ability to do that.
  1. New Zealand, as a nation-state, has been built off of the economic and political dispossession of Māori, and not only does that drive enduring reality today, but it is also not a historical artifact – much of what was taken illegitimately, still remains taken. New Zealand systems, by default, provide much less opportunity for Māori to thrive in the same way as Non-Māori (and particularly pākehā) do. Equality as a moral principle and human rights standard is never meant to mean “keep treating oppressed people the same as unoppressed people, to maintain the oppression” – in fact Human Rights authorities say exactly the opposite: in instances where a history (or enduring reality) of oppression exists, you must treat groups differently, in order to attain equality.
  1. Te Tiriti is also not a moral argument to be pitted against human rights standards such as equality. It is a constitutional document which provides the basis of non-Māori existence in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Te Tiriti was put in place precisely to protect the human rights of Māori from the harms of colonial greed and imperial expansion. The story of human rights abuses against Māori can be told very accurately through the story of Tiriti violations, which is available to read through the Waitangi Tribunal reports. For these reasons and more, numerous human rights bodies and organisations acknowledge te Tiriti o Waitangi as a human rights document, and the United Nations Human Rights Council has repeatedly called for it to be understood and honoured throughout Aotearoa. If you are interested in human rights such as equality, you would enthusiastically embrace the honouring of te Tiriti.
Andy doesn’t understandy why he has to honour Te Tiriti in his labby where he studies diabetes
  1. “We don’t deal with Māori”

Heard this one from a lab one time: “But we deal with specimens and bacteria we don’t deal with Māori, we don’t even deal with humans”. Ok but apart from the fact that this was a Crown funded lab (so straight to point 1) – that science will inevitably be used in a way that impacts upon Māori, if it is in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Whether it’s science for curing cancer (and who do you think is the most likely group to have cancer), or measuring water samples (taken from which awa?) – questions of where you got the sample from, and how, and for what purpose, and whose benefit, will inevitably lead you back to your Treaty responsibilities. But that’s just one context. Other versions of this colonial logic include:

  • “Our work isn’t Māori-facing.”
  • “We don’t deliver services to iwi/hapū.”
  • “We work with the whole population.”

In which case, I recommend you refer them back to point 3a, as this is clearly a case of people misunderstanding who Te Tiriti is for. Te Tiriti is not just about delivering Māori programs and services – it is about how power is managed in Aotearoa. It is about governance, decision-making, participation in power, and protection of taonga. It doesn’t matter if its in a lab, or with animals, or with “all of New Zealand, or even specifically with non-Māori groups, it doesn’t matter if it’s publicly or privately funded – To be crystal clear:  If your work is in Aotearoa-New Zealand, or for Aotearoa-New Zealand, you have Tiriti responsibilities.

Randy doesn’t think te Tiriti is necessary because “have you SEEEEEEN our commitment to manarkeetan-gah?“
  1. “But look we have these other “tanga” principles”

A common practice, particularly in the private sector, is to contract Māori consultants to develop principle documents, usually laden with tikanga-based terms like “manaakitanga”; “aroha” etc etc, and then present that as a supplement for a Tiriti statement, or real analysis and response towards their Tiriti responsibilities. It’s like they feel that they can use tikanga and good intentions to make te Tiriti redundant. Yeah, nah.

Look, nobody is going to argue against being tikanga-led, but that doesn’t not replace your Tiriti responsibilities. One of the issues with replacing Tiriti responsibilities with tikanga statements is that tikanga can be very amorphous and interpretive, and there is no system for accountability in how it is interpreted or applied. People can, and do, often make it up their own broad interpretation that operates as a costume, while they go about violating Tiriti-affirmed rights such self-determination, protection of taonga, or equity. Te Tiriti o Waitangi is a promise – if you are at all interested in honouring tikanga, start with honouring te Tiriti. Honouring promises is a very basic tikanga that applies to everyone, and ignoring that promise violates most, if not all tikanga Māori. Start with honouring te Tiriti, and that will frame all other tikanga that you may wish to also honour. Ignore and violate te Tiriti, and your other tikanga become at best superficial, and at worst, forms of exploitation of te reo and Mātauranga Maōri.

There are more arguments, but these are a handy top 5. Feel free to drop me a line on Patreon if you have other fictitious anti-Tiriti arguments you’d like deconstructed.