Ok so first of all… if you are not ready for the “where to from here” discussion, and are still sitting in grief and rage – you might want to put this to the side and come back later, when/if you’re ready. Frustration, fear, rage, shock and disbelief are more than understandable.
For the rest, let’s put on the kettle and have a chat.
Yes, the special votes may well come through in favour of changing government. At this point, that would require a number of conditions to be met in order for the “left” overhang to outweigh the “right” overhang and change the government. But stranger things have happened in previous years (like in 2017), and may well happen this year too.
Jacinda Ardern, in 2017, where the results were so close she nearly conceded, but wound up winning through special votes.That doesn’t change the fact that in 2026 so many New Zealanders voted for more racism, misogyny, ableism and bigotry.
And for those who have worked in the field of human rights, Tiriti advocacy, decolonial advocacy and antiracism for some years, it tracks.
For myself, I think the most accurate description of how I feel is that, at most, I’m saddened that I wasn’t happily surprised.
Because New Zealand is racist, and voted like it.
Now I won’t at all pretend that I’m happy for this result. Let’s be real, it’s going to result in great harm to the most vulnerable. This election result will be most starkly represented in avoidable deaths.
But for those who have spent years pointing to New Zealand’s racism, and the vast majority of responses refuse to acknowledge that it exists anywhere near them, let alone in them… it becomes gas-lighty.
So when 1,207,431 New Zealanders vote to retain the most explicitly racist coalition in living memory, there’s a grim kind of validation. Their vote to empower racist politics was not just an endorsement of racism. It was an act of racism, itself. In fact, it was a double-down.
New Zealand voters showed us who they were when they voted this government into power, and some of us didn’t believe them. Perhaps now, we will.
Perhaps now, we will drop the charade that we are somehow more progressive than other places around the world.
Perhaps now, the scales can drop from our eyes and we can just accept that we are, in fact, racist. Not just a little racist. Deeply racist. More-racist-than-Texas-racist.
Perhaps now, more of us can see the depth and scale of the work that needs to take place in order for us to turn the “progressive” lie we project to the world, into a truth.
And you know… I have to say, I don’t know that this clarity would have been achieved, had Labour won. Because they would have won on a campaign that ignored constitutional injustice, that still allowed racism against gang-whānau, and that refused to repeal a lot of the racist harm that the current coalition put in place.
And the rest of us will have patted ourselves on the back for a job-well-done, feeling reaffirmed that racism did not win here, and gone back to business-as-usual. Except business-as-usual was still climate injustice, was still Māori children in poverty, was still hyper-incarceration of Māori. Was still disproportionate Māori death.
Because you see, even the so-called left in NZ has been willing to construct a myth of progressiveness that required a blind-eye towards Māori dispossession, incarceration, and death.
It is hard, I know, to comprehend the callous cruelty of New Zealand voters right now… but the sad truth is that colonialism blunts empathy. A colonial media system that bombards you with violence in 1 minute soundbites, interspersed with jokes, normalises violence. A news culture that presents a genocide followed by a “feelgood” story keeps you dysregulated. A political culture which allows for public officials to spew explicit racism with no consequence, and in fact with reward, gives implicit permission for racism to surface, and spread. It eventually racism to become mainstreamed into the social collective psyche – and then we go ahead and vote for more of it.
How’s that tea. Top up?
So what does that mean for us now? Well, we have a few things and people we can build with:
Over the past few years, there has been a political fire lit in the bellies of our youth, and across many non-Māori communities. We cannot let that fire go out just because the vote did not go our way. Last week at our Doctrine of Discovery and Domination gathering, Kehinde Andrews addressed the question of whether we should still bother with colonial institutions like universities and the United Nations, and he replied:
“these places are the plantation, that doesn’t mean we can’t organise there, but that’s not where we will find freedom”.
The ballot box is the same. We can organise around them, but we should never see that space as our salvation or solution.
New Zealand’s electoral system is a reflection of its broader colonial racism. Corporate lobbying, prisoner voting bans, enrolment restrictions, voter suppression, youth voter suppression, racist staff-training… all of it is reflective of a white-supremacist system. So we should always view election outcomes within that context, and manage our expectations accordingly. We cannot tweak that system to be our salvation, because that, too, is a part of a larger constitutional arrangement that is built on white supremacy.
Political justice in this land cannot happen through mobilising in three year cycles. It requires deeper work, growing up from the soil. It requires us to understand how racism presents in our communities, it requires us to comprehend what true injustice looks like – so we can finally chart a pathway to justice. It means we have to take our stories OFFLINE, and also share them face to face, in community with each other, and see, smell, taste, feel, hear each other’s worlds. We have a lot of community building to do, together.
As I’ve said many times, peace requires justice, and justice starts with truth. So, Aotearoa, we have been faced with a truth about ourselves. As harsh and confronting as it is, that too can be of use to us, if we choose it to be. That can be the beginning of an honest reckoning about who we really are. That can be a part of the soil from which we grow our conversations about what real injustice looks like, from which may spring a new vision of a just Aotearoa, and how to get there, together.
I guess if there is one more thing to say, it’s that it is absolutely possible. A few weeks ago, we held our first Aotearoa International Summit on Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery and Domination. 250 attendees, 30 workshops, 11 keynotes and panels with voices and stories from Africa, Great Turtle Island, Kurdistan, Palestine, Hawai’i, Mapuche nation, Rarotonga, Tonga, Samoa, and UK – it was intergenerational, and couched in ceremony, in restoration of sacredness, in solidarity, and in frank discussions that confronted our own complicitness in harmful systems whilst still centering our belief in each others’ humanity, and in commitment to change and growth. It was uncomfortable in all the necessary ways, and healing in all the necessary ways. I’m even more grateful now that we held that gathering, as close as it was to elections and as busy a time as it was for us all. Because across that week, we built an incredible community, and it felt like a window into what could be. If we could build that, there, then we can build it elsewhere, and the rest is just time, faith, and consistency. Eventually, I believe, we will be an antiracist Aotearoa, and we will vote like it, and we will achieve all the transformation necessary to be who our mokopuna need us to be.
