We are living under the most right-wing government this country has seen in over five decades. In three short years, we have seen decades of work dedicated to protecting the rights of tamariki and whānau, lengthening our life spans, housing our most vulnerable, honouring Te Tiriti and protecting Papatuanuku laid to waste. The sum total of this is that as a nation, we are now much more vulnerable to corporate extraction and exploitation than we were in 2023. The yardstick on whether a law, policy or regulation should pass is no longer whether it is in the best interests of us as humans, or Papatuanuku as our collective home, but rather whether it serves corporate or private property interests.
David Seymour has been open about the fact that he is not finished. His Treaty Principles Bill was voted down at its second reading in April 2025, after the largest hīkoi in the country’s history arrived at Parliament’s gates. He treated the defeat as a beginning. He has told us. ACT will campaign on it again in 2026, that he is holding a Plan B and, if it comes to it, a Plan C and a Plan D, and that he means to keep pushing until a redefinition of Te Tiriti is written into the country’s constitutional foundations. He, and those he serves, want the reordering he has begun locked in at a level a future Parliament cannot easily undo. Similarly, New Zealand First have communicated an intention to continue to attack the Waitangi Tribunal, and limit the unique protections it provides us, and our home.
This political manoeuvre of advance and entrench is not peculiar to this government. It is the signature move of the political moment we are in, and it is happening globally. Across the democratic world the centre of political gravity has shifted hard to the right, and it keeps shifting.
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In Germany, a party the domestic intelligence service has classified as right-wing extremist took 20.8 percent of the vote in February 2025 and finished second, and now mass deportation (a phrase that would have ended a mainstream career a decade ago) is now ordinary policy talk.
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In the UK, we see the rise of the far-right Reform Party under Nigel Farage
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In the United States, we see masked, unidentified ICE agents seizing people from workplaces and courthouses, holding them without charge. Indigenous peoples, greencard holders, and citizens themselves dragged into the net for fitting the profile, and the very definition of what it is to be a “natural born citizen” is being redefined
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Italy is governed by the ideological descendants of fascism, with political pundits only debating whether they are far-right, or outright fascist.
By 2026 far-right parties sit in government in seven European countries, and researchers tracking political speech have shown that even where these parties are locked out of office, they set the terms the mainstream then adopts. Collectively this is referred to as the “global rise of the far right” and it is being tracked, documented and evidenced.
The thing to understand about this global creep to the right is that it lowers the base of what is deemed acceptable. Positions and processes that would disqualify a candidate fifteen years ago are now standard. Our own government’s abuse of urgency mirrors Trump’s abuse of executive action. It’s important for us to note the pattern also, that Trump’s second term was significantly more extreme than his first, with immigration reforms tracking six times more, and faster than his first term. Over time, the ICE deportations have increased but public outrage has waned as his ideas are integrated into the mainstream. The pattern of undermining independent watchdogs by appointing conservative allies here in Aotearoa, is also mirrored in Trumps far-right USA.
None of this is coincidence. We already know there are real political, social, professional and financial ties between the far right groups in Europe, the UK, Canada and the USA, collectively driving the global rise of the far right.
In colonial states, the pattern also carries a specific and familiar move inside it: rewriting the legal order to weaken the standing of Indigenous peoples. Canada offers the sharpest recent example outside of Aotearoa, and it’s important to note that it did not take an openly far-right government to do it. In mid-2025, under nationalist economic pressure and with the Conservatives pushing hardest, a Liberal government rammed Bill C-5 through Parliament in a matter of weeks, after seven days of so-called consultation, handing Cabinet the power to override other laws to fast-track major projects across lands protected by treaty. Nine First Nations went to court arguing the laws breach their constitutionally protected treaty rights.
In some cases, the courts catch it. But the rest becomes the new normal, and the next demand is pitched from there. It’s a form of political ram-raiding: push through as much radical change as possible, and rely on the center, or center right government to only reverse a portion of it, and the new starting point for your next phase of government is already primed. If we look at the 2023 coalition agreement it was an assault of repeal, revoke, reverse, ban, cancel, extinguish, and we have been on the back foot fighting assault after assault from that point on. Just ten weeks out from our own general election, there is no indication that a Labour led government would be anywhere near as enthsiastic in reversing what has been done.
This is why the comfort of “at least it failed” is so badly misplaced. The Treaty Principles Bill may have failed, but the argument it normalised did not, and many have argued that this was the very point of it in the first place. It dragged the idea of legislating Māori political status out of existence from the fringe into the range of respectable opinion, allowed our human and political rights to be debated in every paper, staged on every panel, and left it sitting there for the next politician to pick up in a version that polls a little better. Bad faith lines like “One law for all” are now legit governing slogans rather than a talkback line. Seymour understands this exactly. He said it himself: the seed is planted.
Online discourse analyst Sanjana Hattotuwa has tracked the impact of the far-right on our political and social landscape for years. In his words:
“Since the general election of late 2023, the far-right environment and the violence-adjacent discourse around it have worsened at pace.”
If we look at the trajectory of political ideas from ten years to now, and then follow that line forward, it does not bend toward safety. It sends us hurtling towards an Aotearoa that that treats its treaty obligations as a favour it can withdraw, that outranks someone’s right to life and dignity, with another person’s “right” to comfort, that cloaks hate-speech as free-speech, and trains a population to see its neighbours as the reason for its own hardship – these politics collectively have a dark destination. It ends with the machinery of the state turned on the very people it has taught the public to fear. We are watching an early version of it already, both here and overseas, all that is left for Aotearoa to do is lock it in, and deliver it at scale.
That is what is at stake.
In a country with our particular fault lines, a further lurch in this direction would mean open state hostility toward tangata whenua and a quiet licensing of the racial violence that already runs under the surface here. To be frank and fair: the current government did not CREATE this problem. It was a pre-existing level of colonial racism and bias, that has existed across both Labour and National led governments. Each government has been walking a tension between appealing to colonial voters, and progressing human rights in alignment with Te Tiriti o Waitangi and international human rights law and standards. This government has simply done away with those tools, and dialled the colonialism, and colonial fear, RIGHT up. The end of this road, which is rarely named until it arrives, is the deliberate setting of one people against another, which some people call “racialised conflict”, and others more bluntly call: “a race war”.
As confronting as this all may be to read, we cannot lose heart – it isn’t in their pocket YET, and in our corner, we have Te Tiriti o Waitangi. t is the one instrument capable of holding a line against exactly the trajectory now sweeping the democratic world, because it names an authority that predates and constrains the government of the day. That is the whole reason it is under attack. A government that wants power without limit has to get Te Tiriti out of the way first (which David Seymour has already declared is his next step if he gets back into power).
But an instrument only protects you if it can be enforced, and right now Te Tiriti floats above our constitutional arrangements without being anchored in them. It can be honoured or ignored at the discretion of whoever holds a majority on any given Tuesday. When a New Zealand government decides to legislate over the top of Te Tiriti, there is no higher law for us to appeal to. Constitutional entrenchment is a step in that direction.
Which brings us to the election in front of us, and to the trap hidden inside the hope of simply winning it.
Say the government changes.
Say the Regulatory Standards Act is repealed, section 7AA restored, MACA amendment reversed, the worst of the damage is addressed. Good… and fragile.
Everything won by ordinary legislation can be undone by ordinary legislation, and the right has already promised it will campaign to undo it, from a position further right than the one it holds today. Trump’s second term is not a rerun of his first. It is more radical, better prepared, and stripped of the internal brakes that slowed him the first time. That is how things are shaping up for us: each swing overshooting the last. Even if we vote this government out in 2026, we need to look at where the world is heading – the trajectories are clear and show no sign of slowing, let alone reversing. By 2029, by 2031, it’s tilting further right, not back toward the centre. So the next swing right here won’t just undo what the incoming government does, it will arrive harder than this one, tear out everything that government builds, and will come hard for Te Tiriti.
So, my friends, that only leaves us with extraordinary legislation, aka constitutional protection of Te Tiriti, or entrenchment. A government that wins on the promise of protecting Te Tiriti has to spend that mandate – in this term, not some later one it may never be granted – putting Te Tiriti beyond the reach of a bare parliamentary majority, and opening a real pathway toward a constitution built on it. We are not starting from nothing. Matike Mai Aotearoa did the hard work years ago, mapping how tino rangatiratanga, kāwanatanga, and the relationship between them might sit in relationship to each other. The next step is for us to progress the conversations, and for the constitutional, legal and Tiriti experts to support our pathway to a Tiriti centered constitution.
That process in itself will require protection from political interference, and internationally, constitutional rewrites have done exactly that: entrenched measures that protect the process of developing a new constitution across a fixed period of time. Back when these discussions were being triggered by the He Puapua Report, Ardern responded by saying that the “conditions aren’t right” for constitutional transformation. Earlier this year, both Chris Hipkins and Willie Jackson said they think there are “more important issues” than constitutional justice, and now we are hearing people say that constitutional protection of Te Tiriti cannot be rushed in this next term.
So let’s be clear, and for the people who say the same now: There may be no calmer season coming. The next swing of the pendulum could land harder than this one, but more importantly, honouring Te Tiriti in our political arrangements is not a Māori luxury to be seen to once the economy is sorted and the national mood has softened. It is the load-bearing wall of our human rights, and our strongest shield against the global rise of the far-right.
Yes, there are details to be worked through. We need clarity on the level of protection, and the process that is being protected, but we cannot, and must not, continue to delay Tiriti justice. We have to protect Te Tiriti in the strongest possible terms, as soon as possible, and lock that protection in, if we want to stop the creep of the far-right in Aotearoa, and chart a new, just pathway ahead.
