Matike Mai Aotearoa reading group discussion notes, Part 1 – The Nature of Constitutions, with thanks to my friend and ally Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa for recording, transcribing and fact-checking.

Tina Ngata returned to her reading nook for the first substantive session on Matike Mai Aotearoa, the 2016 report of the Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation. Part one of the report asks what a constitution is and traces how two very different ideas of power met, and clashed, in Aotearoa. Three more sessions will follow, one for each remaining part.

The rules about how we make rules

Ngata rejected the idea of a constitution as something esoteric and lawyerly. Colonisers, she argued, like to make matters more complicated than they are. A constitution is an agreed set of rules or, going a little deeper, the rules about how a people make rules: who makes them, which values guide them, and when, where and how the making happens. Read that way, Māori always had constitutions. Tikanga kept order well before any colonial power arrived, and it applied within defined places. Constitutions were not a colonial gift.

She pegged the timeliness of the kōrero to a recent Whakaata Māori poll of Māori voters, run by Curia Market Research, which she said found around 65% of respondents considered constitutional transformation an important issue, with a similar share wanting it discussed openly. The subject, she noted, has featured more in this election campaign than in any before it.

A viewer had sent her a question ahead of the session: how do you talk about constitutional transformation with people who find it too complex, or who simply glaze over? The question drew on a recent interview that framed the subject as lacking material relevance for whānau more worried about putting food on the table. Ngata called this a false dichotomy. Māori have worried about food on the table ever since colonisers arrived, she argued, because food came from the land, the Crown took the land, and the Crown then assumed the right to make laws about land, food and the economy itself. So long as class, profit and domination drive rule-making, whānau will keep worrying about jobs, housing and food. The constitution determines the economy. It does not distract from it.

Her answer to the viewer came in three parts. The polls suggest most Māori do want this conversation, so the premise may not hold. Revolutions, historically, have come from precisely those most materially dispossessed; empires fall when underclasses decide they have had enough, and Ngata suggested we may sit close to such a peak now. And nobody needs to carry the whole burden of persuasion, because the report itself holds the voices of ordinary people rather than scholars: workers, migrant communities and Māori who attended the Matike Mai hui around the motu between 2012 and 2015. One participant, whom Ngata quoted, observed that Māori always have to justify why they should have karakia, or te reo, or even a constitutional conversation, while the Crown never has to justify anything it does. Another insisted that the New Zealand Settlements Act and the raupatu it enabled concerned power, not land alone. Nor should anyone assume it falls to them to convince everybody. That way lies exhaustion. Kua tae ki te wā, she said, and the spread of the very phrase “constitutional transformation” suggests the time has indeed arrived.

Superanus and the great chain

Ngata traced Western ideas of power to a Christianised hierarchy of domination, the Great Chain of Being, in which the right to dominate followed proximity to a European Christian image of God. At the top sat God, pictured as a bearded white man enthroned in the clouds, then archangels and angels. Below them came the Pope as God’s representative on earth, the clergy, monarchs, the aristocracy and commoners, followed by two-legged and four-legged mammals, birds, fish, shellfish, reptiles, trees and insects, the elements, and at the very bottom the realm of demons. For centuries, she noted, the scheme placed Indigenous peoples somewhere between the demons and the two-legged mammals.

The Enlightenment rebranded this order rather than dismantling it. The scientific revolution and the emerging social sciences took the entitlements that religion had justified and gave them a scientific, or pseudo-scientific, gloss. Rationality, intellect and fitness to govern on behalf of the multitudes all descended from the chain of being, and much of the philosophy that came to define who could make laws, Ngata argued, emerged from a period busy justifying chattel slavery and Indigenous land theft. She singled out René Descartes, still taught as the father of rationalism, whose philosophy cast humankind as locked in a struggle between the primal beast of emotion and the civilised intellect, with legitimate political power reserved for those who had conquered their passions. Europeans saw Indigenous peoples as extensions of nature, and so on the wrong side of that line. Māori did see themselves as extensions of nature. The difference lay in what followed. In te ao Māori, descent from Ranginui and Papatūānuku was the source of tapu and mana. In the Western scheme, it made Māori something to conquer.

Power in this tradition flowed downwards: from God to the Pope, from the Pope to monarchs ruling by divine right, and in time from the monarch to the sovereign in Parliament, represented here by the Governor-General. Ngata paid particular attention to the word “sovereignty”, which she urged Māori to stop using as a stand-in for tino rangatiratanga or mana motuhake. The two come from entirely different lineages of thought. The report traces sovereignty to Jean Bodin, the sixteenth-century French jurist, and to a hierarchy of progress in which Western societies mark the destination towards which Indigenous societies must travel. Its Latin root, superanus, denotes power over. Ngata called it the concept of a top dog: concentrated, supreme, unbalanced.

Why ministers reach for parliamentary sovereignty

That history, she argued, explains the current Government’s fondness for “parliamentary sovereignty”. She invited viewers to search the phrase alongside the names of Christopher Luxon, Paul Goldsmith and David Seymour, and suggested that ministers reach for it whenever they want power unanswerable to law. Democracy supposedly rests on a balance between Parliament and the courts, each mediating the other. Parliamentary sovereignty lays waste to that balance. When the courts have tried to pull the Government into line, she said, ministers have invoked parliamentary sovereignty and cast the judiciary as radical and leftist, and the same claim surfaces whenever the Government sidesteps select committees or pushes laws through under urgency.

Mana from the taiao

Māori ideas of power, by contrast, flowed from relationship with the taiao. Ngata described a lineage in which mana tangata stems from mana whenua, which in turn stems from mana atua, and the atua are the natural world. She dismissed a suggestion, put to her the night before, that recognising the personhood of the moana amounts to anthropomorphism. Needing to turn nature into a person before one can respect it, she said, betrays an anthropocentric and egocentric worldview. Anyone who has been out on a waka hourua in the middle of the moana during a storm, or in the maunga in bad weather, as she has, learns quickly who is the teina and who the tuakana.

Tikanga grew out of the same relationship. It encoded the right way of doing things, often learnt through hard lessons (the quickest way to discover a mistake in nature, she noted drily, is to die of it), and it kept balance between people, their neighbours and the taiao. That relationship also stretched across time. Māori made law surrounded by their tūpuna, whose values lived in the whakairo, tukutuku, kōwhaiwhai, raranga and other mahi toi of the whare. Ngata reads those works as a written language: messages from tūpuna, repeated on every wall, about the values that should guide decisions so that mokopuna might flourish.

The report’s discussion of rangatiratanga gave her several voices to draw on. John Rangihau described rangatiratanga as something the people bestowed, which a leader could exercise only in ways the people considered tika; a rangatira who failed the people, Ngata added, did not stay a rangatira for long. Bishop Manuhuia Bennett tied good leadership to how well leaders responded to their people, and Ngata drew on the whakataukī “Ko te kai a te rangatira he kōrero, ko te tohu o te rangatira he manaaki, ko te mahi a te rangatira he whakatira i te iwi.” Kōrero, the capacity to listen and to articulate, feeds a leader; manaaki, caring for others and upholding their mana, marks one; and bringing people together is a leader’s work. Dame Mira Szászy’s framing of self-determination as the eternal right to be, to live, to exist and to occupy the land brought to mind Steve Newcomb’s definition of rematriation, which speaks of restoring Indigenous peoples to a sacred, self-determining relationship with ancestral lands, free of external interference. Newcomb will speak at the Dismantling the Doctrine gathering in mid-October.

Power held in trust for mokopuna

Two conditions, the report argues, governed Māori power. Tikanga bound it, so mana could operate only in ways consistent with tikanga and the maintenance of whakapapa relationships and responsibilities. And mana was a taonga, handed down by tūpuna for the living to exercise for the benefit of mokopuna. He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti, in the report’s reading, were adaptive expressions of that same mana motuhake.

Ngata pressed the contemporary relevance of this intergenerational logic hard. Western decision-making, anchored in the individual and the present, has failed to address problems such as plastics and the climate crisis, which consumption today creates for generations yet to come. Its answer to climate change was to monetise it through carbon markets and tradeable credits, turning good behaviour into a commodity. Thirty years on, emissions keep rising. It is almost, she remarked, as though commodification was never the answer. Indigenous concepts such as the First Nations principle of seven generations offer a different foundation for law.

Polities, a confederation and a failure of imagination

A polity, Ngata explained, is simply an area of political authority. Just as Europe’s single landmass holds many polities, each with its own borders and laws, hapū were polities long before the Crown claimed the whole of Aotearoa. Pepeha describe them (“Ko Hikurangi te maunga, ko Waiapu te awa” names one), and so do tohu whenua. The features of a constitution – how, where and when laws are made and administered, and the boundaries within which they apply – appear in He Whakaputanga, and many appear in pātere and mōteatea too. Māori were making constitutional statements all along.

This bears on the objection she hears most often: that honouring Te Tiriti in a constitution would mean chaos, with many hapū exercising different political authorities side by side. Ngata diagnosed a lack of imagination. Te Whakaminenga, the gathering of hapū leaders who decided together how to make laws, set rules of trade, keep the peace and care for one another, shows that hapū already did exactly this. Europe does it too: member states legislate for themselves and meet in a common European Parliament. Aotearoa already tolerates more than one legal system, since the military operates its own. Constitutional change on this scale is hardly exotic. Ngata put the number of major constitutional rewrites worldwide at around 1,500, amendments aside, and drew on her maternal whakapapa in what is now the Czech Republic. When Czechoslovakia divided, both new states needed new constitutions, and commissions oversaw the process to keep society stable. That happened within her lifetime.

A language of empire

Coming straight off Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, language occupied a good part of the session. Ngata, a self-described etymology geek, argued that English and Latin carry the marks of empire, warfare and domination. Sovereignty descends from superanus. Words of praise betray violent roots: an “incendiary” leader is, literally, one who sets things alight, and people offer “military precision” as a compliment. Even “settler” raises a question. Who, exactly, needed settling? The word, she suggested, quietly reaffirms the idea of the savage native.

A workshop facilitator for the October gathering added from the comments that pronouns in te reo Māori, ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi and Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) do more than build sentences; they establish social dynamics, relational proximity and collective identity, and they place speakers in relation to land, sea, sky and the elements. Ngata agreed, and observed that te reo often uses passive constructions to decentre the speaker and put the act, and the people it affects, at the centre.

Sites of power

Moana Jackson often spoke of sites of power, and the report takes up the idea. Western sites include the Vatican and the church, the throne, Parliament, councils and local government: places that decide who holds power, its limits, and when and how it applies. Māori sites of power include wānanga, marae, whare tūpuna, papakāinga and rūnanga. By rūnanga Ngata meant the rūnanga of old, not post-settlement governance entities or bodies the Crown created through legislation. Records show those rūnanga making and enforcing law. A man who beat his wife would answer to the rūnanga, which would also ask what was happening in his life and might move the tamariki to another household while kaumātua worked with the family. That practice explains why te reo draws no line between mother and aunt, with whaea and kōkā serving for both: a kāinga, not a household, raised its children, and whānau meant a collective far wider than a nuclear family. Colonisation suppressed these institutions, not least through the Tohunga Suppression Act, and wānanga suffered especially. They survive nonetheless. Mana never went away, and neither did the right to exercise it.

What she answered from the chat

Asked about democratic confederalism as the truest form of democracy, Ngata pointed instead to the Haudenosaunee Two Row Wampum belt, which she credits with shaping modern democracy, and told the viewer to look it up. She added that the West has borrowed many social concepts from Indigenous peoples, citing the debt Maslow’s hierarchy of needs owes to Blackfoot thinking.

A question about where the Kīngitanga fits in relation to mana motuhake and Māori policy-making drew her most careful answer of the night. She respects the whakapapa and mana of the Kīngitanga, and the fact that many Māori have placed their hearts there, and she would not break or disrespect that. Her own position, though, rests on Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which hapū signed. Any construct that centralises power away from hapū, she argued, does not reflect Te Tiriti, because Māori power flows from relationship with the whenua and so must stay decentralised. She warned against creating avatars of power, figureheads expected to save everyone, which leave power vulnerable to corruption, to error and to easy toppling. She did not accuse the Kīngitanga of attempting that. She acknowledged its origins as a response to colonisation and to Western monarchy, said she does not count herself a member, and preferred to leave it to the Kīngitanga to describe how it now sees itself.

On whether Pākehā need to engage with Matike Mai, her answer was yes, and that plenty already do. She pointed to Tauiwi collectives organised around Matike Mai and to groups such as Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga, all producing resources on Te Tiriti and constitutional justice for non-Māori who want to take part.

Radical, then mainstream

Ngata recalled that constitutional transformation met a cool reception at Tūrangawaewae a couple of years ago, which she put down to how much work remained to normalise the kōrero. Older generations in particular may find it radical, partly because they have had little chance to engage with it. She asked for empathy, and for a sense of history. In the 1960s few people talked about Te Tiriti at all. Talking about even the Treaty of Waitangi in the 1970s marked you as an activist, and the prevailing view held that the Queen was sovereign and the matter closed. Decades of research, deliberation and Waitangi Tribunal hearings established what many now take for granted: that Te Tiriti, not Hobson’s English draft, is the treaty, and that rangatira never ceded sovereignty.

She paid tribute to those who carried Te Tiriti into the light, among them the composer Tuini Ngāwai, whose waiata lifted people’s belief in their inherent rights and who, Ngata said, at times had to sing from the car park because her own marae considered her too radical. Her conclusion was blunt. Te Tiriti itself once seemed radical. Nobody, David Seymour included, will put the Treaty genie back in the bottle.

A journey, not an event

Ngata closed part one by restating what Matike Mai is not. It is not an event, nobody expects it overnight, and it is not something the Crown does. It is a hīkoi for everyone. The Crown will have its role eventually. For now, she argued, that role involves resourcing the process, protecting it from political interference over the next fourteen years, and getting out of the way while people hold the conversations needed to shape a Tiriti-centred constitution for Aotearoa.

She left viewers with an open question, first raised at an Iwi Chairs Forum. Colonisation froze hapū in time, fixing the polities that existed at contact, whereas new hapū emerged continually before it. How might a Tiriti-centred constitution allow new hapū to form? Would that be necessary, and what might the process look like? Ngata admitted she lacks the answers. She wants the conversation.

Part two, on constitutional foundations, will cover tikanga as a legal system in its own right, He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Ngata posts each reading on the morning of the session, which streams at 8pm on her Facebook page and TikTok.

A note on the te reo Māori in this record

This account draws on an automatic transcript, and automatic transcription handles te reo Māori badly. Matike Mai arrived as Mateke Mai and Matekemai, Te Tiriti as Tetsiriti, He Whakaputanga as hewakaputanga, Papatūānuku as Paputuanuku, whenua as fenua throughout, taonga as taunga, whakairo as whokairo, mōteatea and pātere as Motetia and Pathere, and Tūrangawaewae as Te Ranga Waiwai. This record restores them to standard orthography with macrons, and gives the leadership whakataukī in its standard form. Names Ngata cited from the report, among them John Rangihau, Bishop Manuhuia Bennett and Dame Mira Szászy, appear in the forms the published record uses. Where a word or name was too garbled to recover with confidence, this record leaves it out rather than guessing.

Sources

The substance of this record comes from the Facebook livestream itself. The Whakaata Māori poll Ngata cited ran from 29 August to 10 September 2026, when Curia Market Research surveyed 1,000 Māori voters across both rolls; Te Ao Māori News coverage of the poll, republished by The Spinoff, confirms the commissioning and method, though not the 65% figure on constitutional transformation, which this record attributes to Ngata. Matike Mai Aotearoa’s own account of the working group confirms that the hui ran between 2012 and 2015. The report itself is freely available as a PDF.

Addendum:
Source for 65% from Whakaata Māori:

I’ve started the antiracist reading nook back up – as a shared reading space for Matike Mai Aotearoa – the 2016 report of the constitutional transformation working group. I do this because now that it’s being discussed more broadly as a part of constitutional transformation discussions (yay!), there’s a lot of commentary about it, coming from those who have clearly not READ it (oh.)

So we will approach it in 4 parts. The first part will go up today and then 8pm each night I will do a live broadcast on both my Facebook and my Koekoeā tiktok.

Last night I did the introductory session announcing the four part series, talking about constitutional transformation in general, and asking if people have specific questions I can address in the readings. I have a wonderful friend who has also taken notes AND factchecked me (thankyou friend!), and provided the notes back for those who could not make it, so here are the notes from last night’s session:

Tina Ngata on Matike Mai

Tina Ngata revived her reading nook to work through Matike Mai Aotearoa, the 2016 report of the Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation, because she had watched candidates and commentators discuss it in this election campaign without having read it. This session was the introduction. Four more will follow, one for each part of the report.

Why she went live

Ngata opened by naming the problem that pushed her back to the camera. Matike Mai is getting traction in this election cycle, which she welcomed, though she had watched interviews and read comments from candidates who plainly had not opened the report. She declined to name them. What gave them away, she said, was the claim that Matike Mai is an academic document, a description she heard from several commentators and candidates and treated as a reliable tell of someone who has not read it.

It is not an academic report, and it was never meant to be. It was written for people rather than for a university or for scholars, in plain and accessible language, and a decent portion of several of its parts consists of quotations from the people who attended the hui. Her point was not that the report is simple. It is that the difficulty is manufactured. Making justice sound complicated, she argued, is one of the oldest habits of the coloniser, because a complex problem excuses an unjust answer. Her own compression of the matter ran to two sentences. You stole political power. It is time to give it back.

This session was introductory. The reading itself starts with part one, the nature of constitutions, and runs across four sessions to match the four parts of the report. She was explicit that she would summarise rather than read line by line, and that she would flag the passages that mattered to her. She also set homework, which is to read the thing.

Tikanga is law, spelt the same way

The spine of the talk was a claim about vocabulary. Ngata objects to the habit of writing tikanga as lore and Western law as law, because the distinction is doing quiet work. It implies that tikanga is less important, less applicable and less enforceable. Tikanga is law, she said, and it should be enforceable as law.

She grounded that in the word itself. The root of tikanga is tika, meaning correct or right, and tikanga is the correct way of doing things – correct because it has been tried and tested over generations until it worked. Legal systems here emerge out of the whenua rather than arriving on a ship. Those who came on waka had to test again what would hold in this place, because what had worked in Hawaiki did not simply transfer, and through repeated trial and error people worked out what was tika for here. Tikanga, on her account, is a legal system that grows out of a relationship to particular lands and particular waters.

From there she made the argument that carries the rest of the evening. If colonisation interrupted te reo, and interrupted education, and interrupted land-based and moana-based economies, and all of that is now openly discussed, then it also interrupted lawmaking systems and systems of governance – and that interruption has had almost none of the same reckoning. She placed this alongside the constitutional claim currently live before the Waitangi Tribunal.

The practices that made lawmaking possible are themselves taonga in her framing, and she listed them rather than abstracting them: karakia, waiata, pūrākau and the story-making traditions, mahi toi, mātauranga taiao, the disciplines of deliberating for a collective that includes past and future generations. Reo is a taonga. Mātauranga is a taonga. So, she argued, are the ways of deliberating and reaching a decision, and the right to retain them did not evaporate on the arrival of a colonial vessel.

Her contrast was the debating chamber. Members can say things that are racially offensive or outlandish and face no accountability because privilege protects them, and the thin set of rules that does exist sits with the Speaker, who, as she put it, has repeatedly picked and chosen how to apply them. Tikanga, practised properly, gives better ways of bridging difference and making a point without the nastiness.

Constitutions existed here before 1840

Asked repeatedly in the chat what a constitution actually is, Ngata gave a working definition and then applied it. A constitution answers who gets to make laws, how those laws will be administered, how people come together to deliberate and decide, and where the boundaries of that authority lie. On that test, she said, hapū had constitutions, because they had answers to every one of those questions. The kawa of a marae is a constitution in exactly this sense.

Boundaries were part of it. Tīpuna knew which rules applied on this side of the awa and which applied once you crossed it, and knew that many of the rules on the other side would be the same with a few deliberate differences. Relationships across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa were part of it too. Treaty-making did not begin in 1840, she said. Māori were making treaties, running hohou te rongo processes and setting standards for how relationships with other peoples were formed long before that, which makes it a colonial fiction to claim that rational decision-making, lawmaking and foreign policy arrived in 1769.

Lawmaking and governance, in her phrasing, did not arrive here by boat, and nobody was sitting on a beach waiting to be gifted a legal system.

How the Crown came to hold the pen

Ngata walked the audience through the sequence as she reads it. He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni, the 1835 Declaration of Independence, states who may make law on this land, and the mechanism it sets out is devolution rather than surrender. If anyone else is to make laws here, rangatira will say so and will be precise about the constraints. That is what tino rangatiratanga means, she argued, and it does not get diluted by the act of devolving a narrow power. Queen Victoria was granted a limited capacity to legislate for settlers who were not listening to tikanga, on the reasoning that they might at least listen to their own monarch. Those settlers, she added, arrived carrying three centuries of instruction that Māori could not make law because Māori were not rational, were savages, were natives, were part of nature and therefore not quite human.

The limited grant was then taken and run with. By the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852, the Crown was asserting authority over Te Waipounamu on the basis of discovery, which discovered nothing, and over the North Island on the basis of cession, which the Waitangi Tribunal has since found did not happen. Her conclusion follows directly. There is no legitimate basis for the 1852 Act, or for the government it formed, or for the constitutional statutes that followed it.

She traced the case law alongside it. Wi Parata v Bishop of Wellington, decided in 1877, imported the doctrine of discovery into New Zealand law, and was then used as precedent across multiple cases to extinguish native title. That line was broken by the Ngāti Apa decision, which she called pivotal and which she dated to 2004, though the Court of Appeal judgment came down in June 2003 and the Foreshore and Seabed Act followed in 2004.

Her illustration of how seriously the Crown took its founding document was its physical treatment. Te Tiriti was left in a trunk and damaged by rats and water, and she placed it in the basement of the Dominion Museum until the 1960s or 1970s, with no legislation giving it any standing until 1975. Her question was rhetorical and it landed. If it mattered enough to form a government on, it should matter enough to honour.

Twenty years of being told the same thing

The section of the talk that will travel furthest is her account of the international record, because it shifts the argument from what Māori want to what the Crown has already signed up to. Her point is sharp. It is bad enough that the Crown does not respect tikanga or Māori constitutional authority. It does not respect its own human rights standards either.

After the Foreshore and Seabed Act, Māori took the matter to the United Nations. She named Moana Jackson, Annette Sykes and Dayle Takitimu amongst those who did so, and they asked for a special procedure visit. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, then Special Rapporteur on the human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, visited in November 2005 and reported in March 2006. His recommendation, as Ngata reads it, was not that New Zealand hold a conversation about a constitution. It was that New Zealand formalise its constitution and place Te Tiriti at the centre of it. She dated this to 2005, which is when the visit happened, and the language of the report is stronger than a suggestion.

James Anaya followed. Ngata placed his report in 2007; the visit was in July 2010 and the report came to the Human Rights Council in 2011, and the substance is as she described it, that at a minimum the Crown should enter into a discussion about constitutional arrangements and about securing Te Tiriti within the domestic legal system so that it is not left to political discretion.

The treaty bodies then took it up in turn. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination framed it as a question of racism, telling New Zealand that addressing racism means addressing the constitutional and political status of Te Tiriti. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights said something similar. So did the Committee on the Rights of the Child, on constitutional protection for Te Tiriti. Ngata ran the years out loud: 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023, each carrying its own round of the same recommendation. She was raising it herself across those years, she noted, back when Meka Whaitiri still held Ikaroa-Rāwhiti for Labour.

A viewer asked whether anyone ever listens to the UN. She thought it a fair question and answered it in two parts. Some things do move because of treaty body pressure rather than because of declarations, and the constitutional review the John Key government eventually ran was partly a product of it, light on Te Tiriti though it was. Beyond that, the failure is worth naming for its own sake. They fail by our standards, she said, and it matters to point out that they also fail by their own.

Underneath all of it sits the right to self-determination in the UN Charter, and the recognition that indigenous peoples retain constitutional authority and the right to make law on their own lands. That right does not lapse, on her reading, because colonisers arrive.

How Matike Mai was made

Ngata was careful about provenance, and in one respect unusually frank. The National Iwi Chairs Forum, which pushed the kaupapa forward, took shape in a period when National was in government and was in part a construct of that government’s preference for how it engaged with different iwi and hapū. Many have since continued to gather under it voluntarily, under Labour as well, but she wanted the origin on the record rather than smoothed over.

The Forum resolved in 2010 that a working group examine constitutional justice centred on Te Tiriti. Pou Tikanga, led by Professor Margaret Mutu, carried it. Mutu chaired the working group and Moana Jackson convened it, with Veronica Tāwhai leading the rangatahi cohort. They planned around thirty hui. Demand overtook the plan, as Ngata put it in an image worth keeping, the way a slice of bread ends up feeding the whole iwi. The final count was 252 hui held between 2012 and 2015, with a further 70 rangatahi wānanga run by Tāwhai’s rōpū. Written submissions, focus groups and interviews with individual experts fed in alongside. The report, He Whakaaro Here Whakaumu Mō Aotearoa, was published on Waitangi Day 2016.

That is a rigorous process by any measure, and she said so. Her qualification matters at least as much. This is the beginning of the conversation rather than the whole of it, and no amount of fear-feeding changes that.

What she answered from the chat

One viewer wanted teeth. Ngata agreed without hesitation, and said that is precisely what constitutional transformation is for: making Te Tiriti enforceable, making tikanga enforceable, and building a space in which people can deliberate in their own reo, under their own values, about what enforcement should look like. European law was allowed to evolve into something fit for its own purpose in its own place, which is what parliamentary systems are for. The right to deliberate over tikanga, and to keep it fit for purpose for the conditions people are living in now, was never lost either. New problems arrive – she named the climate crisis, which was not in play before 1840 and is very much in play now – and deciding how tikanga meets them is a Māori decision, not anybody else’s. Colonial interference has fallen heavily on the resourcing of that deliberation rather than on its legitimacy.

Asked whether He Whakaputanga holds up in court, she reframed the question before answering it. Which court. Western legal systems derive from a rationalism built on the premise that only Europeans are rational and therefore only European law counts, which is the foundation of treating tikanga as something other than law. Under tikanga, He Whakaputanga holds. Whether it holds elsewhere is answered by asking why Te Tiriti itself was left to rot, and by the fact that nothing gave it legal standing until 1975. Then she applied her own definition. A constitutional document says who makes law, how law is administered, how people deliberate, and where the boundaries lie. He Whakaputanga contains all four, which makes it constitutional by definition. Te Tiriti, by the same method, meets the definition of a treaty. Hobson’s document, long circulated as the English version, does not.

Someone asked whether voting, petitions and protest help. Her answer was qualified rather than dismissive. Those things work when they are well organised, though the most valuable thing anyone can do right now is be informed about what they are standing up for. Read the report. Being able to hold a conversation with a sceptic, and to debate it, beats adding a name to a list, and she framed it partly as a matter of looking after your own energy.

Another viewer, Miharu, asked that the kaupapa be tied to what is happening now, and Ngata thought it close to self-evident. Look at how laws attacking Te Tiriti are being made today. Under a Tiriti-centred constitution, with tikanga sitting at its heart in an enforceable way, those laws could not be made, and the abuses being visited on the taiao would not be possible either.

She interrupted herself at one point to say she is not a constitutional lawyer. She is someone who believes in the kaupapa and in the legacy of those who carried it, Moana Jackson amongst them, and not because it was Moana Jackson but because the kōrero is tika and pono.

2040, and the argument about waiting

Matike Mai describes itself as a 170-year-old conversation. Ngata updated the arithmetic on air. Counting from 1840, it is now 186 years old, and 2040 will mark two centuries, which is the date the report floats as a plausible moment for a constitution that genuinely honours Te Tiriti and protects it from being mucked around with by successive colonial governments. Nothing stops it happening sooner. Even taking 2040 at face value, that is fourteen years away, which she pointed out is only a few elections. So the work needs to start.

She was insistent that this is a journey rather than an event. Not a magical night on which one constitution is wiped and another installed, but a kaupapa, a wānanga, a hīkoi that people travel together across a couple of decades and that may peak in 2040 without finishing there. The questions still to be worked through are substantial and she listed them without pretending they are settled. Te Tiriti was signed with hapū and the current government’s focus is on iwi, so the discussion between iwi and hapū has to happen without becoming a stoush. What constitutional transformation means for migrant communities, and for tauiwi who are not Pākehā, and for Pākehā communities, is live work that people are already doing well. Then there are the courts, foreign policy and borders, and which international and indigenous relationships the country holds.

On whether any of this is radical, she was flat. Complete constitutional rewrites have happened roughly 1,500 times around the world since the late 1800s, on her count. It is a big task if you want to do it properly. It is not an exotic one.

Her sharpest disagreement was with people who broadly share her politics. She said plainly that she believes in the potential of the Greens, and that she has heard figures from the Greens and from the Opportunities Party argue that constitutional transformation must wait until other things are in place. The version she has heard most often is that money must come out of politics first, or the millionaires will shut the conversation down. She does not follow the logic. If millionaires are powerful enough to block constitutional transformation, they are certainly powerful enough to block their own money being removed from politics. And the record cuts the other way in any case: constitutional transformation discussions did proceed under a National government, which was also content to let republican conversations run.

On Te Pāti Māori’s manifesto commitment to entrenchment, her reading was that its value lies in an enumerated funding commitment for these conversations across the motu, for every hapū and community, rather than in any claim to author the constitution itself. They have been clear that authorship is not their role, while insisting the resourcing exists so that communities can decide who holds that role. Māori have been crafting diamonds out of coal for a very long time, she said, and can move things without money. That is not an argument for continuing to withhold it.

The last thread she pulled concerned the Westminster system itself. It emerged, she argued, from a domestic European problem, as monarchs and lords faced repeated uprisings from a peasantry insisting it had rights. Out of that came a house for commoners alongside the retained house of lords, which makes the system classist at its foundation and built for conditions on the other side of the planet. The same problem was managed by exporting the surplus population to penal colonies and to colonised land sold as the chance to own property in a way that was impossible at home, which means the arrival of settler colonisers was itself part of the Westminster settlement. Whether it even works over there she declined to concede. That such a system would suit this land better than one grown out of it she called preposterous.

Which is why she treats this as a kaupapa matua rather than one issue on a list. She said she gets disappointed when constitutional transformation is filed alongside the taiao, freshwater rights or hyperincarceration as a parallel concern. Get this right, on her argument, and those fall into place, because the settings that determine who decides and how they decide would themselves be just. Problems would remain. The means of confronting them would not be borrowed.

A note on the te reo Māori in this record

This account comes from an automatic transcript, and automatic transcription handles te reo Māori badly. Names, places and terms arrived mangled: Matike Mai came through as Nate Mai and Natiki Mai, Te Waipounamu as Te Waiponamu, Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa as several different things, whenua as fenua throughout, and taonga as taunga. Those have been restored to standard orthography with macrons, and personal names have been checked against the published record, which is how Veronica Tāwhai, Dayle Takitimu and Meka Whaitiri appear here in the forms they use themselves. Where a word was too garbled to recover with confidence it has been left out rather than guessed at.

The glossary below covers the terms used above, for anyone circulating this to readers who do not have te reo.

Term

Meaning as used in this report

Aotearoa

New Zealand

awa

River

hapū

Kinship grouping, the signatories to Te Tiriti

Hawaiki

The homeland from which voyaging ancestors came

He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni

The 1835 Declaration of Independence. Spellings of the last two words vary, including Nu Tirene and Niu Tireni

He Whakaaro Here Whakaumu Mō Aotearoa

The title of the 2016 Matike Mai report

hīkoi

A walk or march, and by extension a journey undertaken together

hohou te rongo

Peacemaking, the formal process of settling conflict

hui

A gathering or meeting

iwi

Larger tribal grouping

karakia

Incantation, prayer, ritual chant

kaupapa

Purpose, cause, the matter being worked on

kaupapa matua

The primary or governing kaupapa

kawa

The protocols of a marae, its operating rules

kōrero

Talk, discussion, the substance of what is said

mahi toi

Artistic practice

marae

Communal meeting grounds and their complex of buildings

mātauranga

Knowledge, a body of knowing

mātauranga taiao

Environmental knowledge

motu

The country, the island, used for the nation as a whole

pono

True, genuine

Pou Tikanga

The tikanga arm of the National Iwi Chairs Forum

pūrākau

Story, the narrative tradition that carries knowledge

rangatahi

Younger generation

rangatira

Chief, leader

reo

Language; te reo Māori

rōpū

Group, committee

taiao

The natural world, the environment

taonga

Treasure, something of value held and passed on

tauiwi

Non-Māori, people who came later

Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa

The Pacific Ocean

Te Tiriti o Waitangi

The 1840 treaty, in its Māori text

Te Waipounamu

The South Island

tika

Correct, right, just

tikanga

Customary law and practice; the correct way of doing things

tino rangatiratanga

Paramount authority, self-determination

tīpuna

Ancestors; also tūpuna

waiata

Song

waka

Canoe, voyaging vessel

wānanga

A forum for deliberation and learning

whenua

Land, and the placenta, the two senses running together

Sources

The substance of this record comes from the Facebook livestream itself. Where Ngata gave dates and figures from memory, they have been checked against Matike Mai Aotearoa’s own account of the working group, which confirms the 2010 Iwi Chairs Forum mandate, the 252 hui held between 2012 and 2015 and the 70 rangatahi wānanga convened by Veronica Tāwhai; the Network Waitangi Ōtautahi record of the report and its terms of reference; the Stavenhagen mission report, E/CN.4/2006/78/Add.3, from a visit between 16 and 26 November 2005 and published on 13 March 2006; and the Anaya report on the situation of Māori people in New Zealand, A/HRC/18/35/Add.4, from a visit between 18 and 23 July 2010 and published in 2011. The report itself is freely available as a PDF.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.