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:

• There was also the graffiti in front of Papatoetoe Central School (that’s a school for five to eleven year olds, many of whom are Indian) saying “Kill All Indians”.
• A further call to kill all Indians was then spray-painted in a public space in Royal Oak
• MP Shane Jones declared that the NZ-Indian Free Trade Agreement would result in a “Butter Chicken Tsunami”
• Mayor Wayne Brown called an Indian RNZ staff member a “Muslim terrorist”

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.

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.

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 a Sikh 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.

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.

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).

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.

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, value is centralised, and exploitation is structurally embedded. 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.

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So when we speak about India as “whenua pohara”, 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 their 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” (usually forced) 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) needed labour for sugar plantations, and initially they used blackbirded workers, but then the British-Fiji colonial government later shifted toward Indian indentured labour as a more “regulated” supply.

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, highly 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 20^th 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.

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 how that 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.

I can’t NOT connect these two images

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.

2025 was transformational across multiple fronts. Not in a pleasant way, but I would argue, probably in a necessary way. Across the many battlefronts of taiao, reo, education, hauora, justice and living costs, we have battled, marched, occupied, and intervened on the streets, in front of the select committees, in international forums, in the media, in classrooms, courtrooms, offline and online. The fatigue is showing in our personal wellbeing, in our relationships, and in our movements. I think this era of national and global “colonial hyperdrive” has forced many to confront difficult truths – possibly the greatest confrontation relates to the concept that we have met over, repeatedly, in recent years: Kotahitanga.

It’s been on the nation’s lips over the past two years, and yet, heading into 2026 there appear to be more schisms than ever. Indeed, the kaupapa of Kotahitanga was led out by the Kīngitanga, and fast-forward to 2025, questions and anger hang over their focus on “Māori capitalism”; Iwi leaders have repeatedly convened over the concept, but many have been conspicuously absent from the frontline battles on bills such as MACA, the Treaty Principles Bill and the Regulatory Standards Bill. Te Paati Māori featured at the forefront of the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which was an incredible Kotahitanga moment in time for both Māori and Tangata Tiriti alike, yet not only has it failed to maintain that revolutionary momentum, but has struggled to hold its own infrastructure together.

We are fatigued, all of us (it’s showing in our personal health and the health of our relationships) and it is tempting to fall into despondency and scepticism about motives, but I honestly do believe that, more often than not, it simply comes down to a bunch of unexplored assumptions about who “we” are and what “we” stand for, and this is a concern I have held from the very outset of this discussion:

Kotahitanga requires a unity of purpose, and unity of purpose requires a shared understanding of the nature of the problem.

It was never said with an intention to be negative or contrary. Our differing understanding of the nature of the problem would always lead to conflict on how we should respond.

For some, the problem is party-based. They believe that simply getting out this coalition and replacing it with Labour, or even a better version of National, is the answer.

For others, the problem is that we place too much focus on government, and they have advocated for generating wealth through trade, in order to make government oversight redundant and achieve what they are calling “economic rangatiratanga”.

For others still, the problem is much broader: it is capitalism and colonial privilege. For this group, the solutions of the first two groups simply entrench the problem more deeply, and probably they throw up in their mouth a little when hearing about “Māori capitalism” and the NZ Initiatives take on “economic rangatiratanga”.

There are others still who, rather than looking at systems and parties, they look at individuals – the problem, as they see it, is David Seymour, or Christopher Luxon. Through constructing a particular person into a demon, they have a target for their rage, and it usually comes with a belief that simply removing that person is all that is required.  

And yet all of these very different perspectives can meet and talk all day about Kotahitanga, and liberation of our people as if we are all on the same page about what these things mean. We’re holding the hui, and creating extravagant optics about it all, but skipping the fundamentals. Small wonder that the outputs of these hui-a-motu would be short on action points, and big on soundbites.

Added to this is the fact that colonial power thrives upon distraction: it deliberately keeps us engaged in fighting so many fires, on so many fronts, that we fail to address the arsonist, and fail to envision a different way of wielding power. We have treated the parental issue of *power* like it is just another matter alongside the multiple oppressions in the realms of reo, environment, justice, health, housing or even the cost of living. Power is not simply another realm. Power defines and shapes all other realms.

And, failing to sit in wānanga over colonial power, we have failed to reckon with how colonialism has replicated itself within power structures of te Ao Māori.  

Now I acknowledge, it can feel difficult and thankless to critically examine yourself and your leadership while you are under a regime that is degrading you and your people every damn day. From this logic stems the responses of “Just get on with it” or “Stop that, you’re doing the colonisers work for them” – but critical accountability is not the same as a colonial attack. When we critically examine ourselves, it is with the intention to make ourselves better, when they do it, it is with full intention to destroy and discredit Māori as a whole. Please note, this is not because the colonial gaze matters – it is because the colonial gaze has become a very effective tool for recruiting the disenfranchised. The colonial gaze has learnt to validate our discontent and sense of betrayal by our own. The colonial gaze has become very sophisticated at legitimising and inflating our fear and distrust of each other, and the colonial gaze dominates our media narratives. This is exactly how Trump courted the working class, and how the fascist far-right secured power in Italy, and Brazil. It’s exactly how Destiny Church recruits from te Ao Māori, and exactly how we wind up with Māori zionists and Māori MAGA.

So critical examination of internal power is unescapable and necessary work for us to do. Without it, we have zero accountability and operate upon blind faith (which is exactly what results from “soundbite” outputs). That, in turn, invites corruption and empire in the front door, and once it sets up shop, it goes about putting people and processes in place to protect its role, and becomes very, very difficult to remove.

You may be reading this and thinking of a specific person or whānau. Let me hold your screen-hand and tell you – it is everywhere. I do not yet know of any iwi that doesn’t have individuals and whānau who have navigated colonial systems by securing proximity to power, and aggressively maintaining it. In nearly every case, I can tell you, they believe they are in service to their people. It starts off (and is generally defended) as “adaptation” but over time, it hardens into gatekeeping and exclusion.

The destination for this type of behaviour doesn’t have to be imagined, for many of us, it is already there, and has become normalised.

Any of these scenarios sound familiar?

• Late night phonecalls around committee members to secure “votes” on an agenda item the night before a hui.
• Charters and constitutions being amended to allow for people to stay in power.
• One particular whānau dominating trusts, committees, power roles and staff pools.
• Opportunities flowing down intergenerationally within the same whānau lines.
• Secretive and exclusionary meetings of “groups within groups”.
• Abusing “codes of conduct” within meetings to shut down reasonable dissent.
• Abusing cultural practices (eg using the reo, tikanga, or waiata) to exclude those who are culturally dispossessed.
• “Stacking” committees and trusts with loyalists to a particular cause.
• Lack of communication and transparency to the collective.
• Disproportionate focus on getting individuals into roles of power rather than the liberational work for the masses.

None of this is to attack our own, but merely to point out that these behaviours extend from colonial domination, not Indigenous origins and certainly they are not geared for Indigenous liberation. They are a necessary part of the work to decolonise power.

I’m not the first person to say this, nor has this issue only appeared under this government… many (mostly wāhine) have stood up to call internal power to account. More often than not they are shouted down, ignored, or called divisive, disloyal and then isolated and excluded. Naming patriarchy, privilege, and power abuse comes with dire consequences in te Ao Māori, and this is exactly why we have to come together over it. If we are real about achieving a kotahitanga that means more than a slick social media soundbite, then we can’t keep leaving it up to individuals who call problems out and get attacked for it. We have to get a shared understanding about what it means. Our failure to critically examine our ideas and approaches to power will continue to undermine any vision of kotahitanga, treaty justice, or true liberation for all of our people.

Aotearoa has invested very little into research and education on racism. As a result, we are still inclined to focus on racism as an interpersonal experience rather than a system, and concepts such as internal racism, lateral racism, systemic and environmental racism are far less understood, in general.

It’s also important to understand that racism is uniquely shaped by factors such as geographic location, political history, economy and, of course colonial interference. So while there are commonalities to, for instance, anti-blackness (eg use of racial slurs, cultural extraction), it is also uniquely shaped by factors such as geographic location, political history, and economy.

Environmental racism in Aotearoa is unavoidably shaped by the fact that we are a moana nation. Of course, this starts with the cultural – our relationships and history across Te Moananui a Kiwa inform who we are as Māori and as a nation. For Māori, the moana is an ancestor, a sacred site, a food cupboard, a school, and a highway. Geographically, we are never far from the ocean. No part of New Zealand’s landbase is more than 120km away from the shoreline, and most people here live within 50km of the ocean. Our moana estate outsizes our land-base. Our moana plays a major role in the economy, being estimated at a value of over $10billion. It plays a huge part of our day to day lives, identity, and economy.

We must also take into account that colonial racism is the bedrock of the nation-state of New Zealand. This is important because land and water dispossession and exploitation are distinct features of colonial racism.

So naturally, when environmental racism shows up in Aotearoa, it will show up in relation to our moana, in powerful ways. All of these factors come together, within the Marine and Coastal Areas Amendment Bill, or as MP Takuta Ferris recently noted, the easily-renamed “Foreshore and Seabed Here-We-Go-Again Bill”, about to be passed in parliament.

If you listen to the current government, they will tell you that, in deciding what it takes for Māori to establish “customary title” (ie a rightful claim on a coastal area), the courts have interpreted the act wrong, and so they are compelled to change the legislation and essentially raise the bar for that process, making it more difficult for customary title to be successfully claimed.

This is not the first time the government has decided to legislate over the top of the courts, in relation to our foreshore and seabed. The last major time this happened was in the landmark Ngāti Apa v Solicitor General case in 2003. In that case, a number of iwi from the Marlborough Sounds sought a determination from the Māori Land Court over whether parts of the foreshore and seabed in their rohe could be investigated for customary title. The Crown tried to block this by arguing that the foreshore and seabed belonged to the Crown by default — an argument that had been assumed as legal fact for over a century.

The Court of Appeal, led by Chief Justice Sian Elias, rejected this claim. The Court held that the Māori Land Court did indeed have jurisdiction to determine whether customary title existed, and crucially, that Crown ownership of the foreshore and seabed had never been lawfully established. This meant that iwi and hapū could pursue claims to prove their customary rights under the law, something that had been denied to us for generations.

In reaching this decision, the Court explicitly overturned the infamous Wi Parata v Bishop of Wellington (1877) precedent — and that brings us to the Doctrine of Discovery. You see, the 1877 case over Ngāti Toa lands had utilised an infamous courtcase in so-called United States called Johnson v M’intosh, where Chief Justice John Marshall found that the act of “discovery” granted Europeans title to native land. This of course, occurred off the back of three centuries of European society being shaped by religious doctrines which gave them entitlement to possess all “islands, lands, harbors, and seas”. From 1877 onwards, with the embedding of the Doctrine of Discovery into New Zealand land law, Wi Parata v Bishop of Wellington was then used as further precedent for multiple cases of native title extinguishment in Aotearoa, keeping the Doctrine of Discovery an active principle in our legal system throughout the following century.

In 2004, when Chief Justice Sian Elias rejected and overturned Wi Parata, the Court restored a measure of legal recognition to Māori customary rights that had been buried under colonial legal fictions for over a century – and had that been that, it would have been an interesting lesson about the time that the Doctrine of Discovery was rejected in New Zealand. But even though the New Zealand judiciary were ready to start rejecting the Doctrine of Discovery… the legislature were clearly not.

And so Helen Clark’s Labour government, having decided that this finding was politically inconvenient for them (not least because Don Brash was holding propaganda speaking  tours and funding full page ads about the government giving all the beaches to Māori and that New Zealanders would all be locked out of the beach)…. simply legislated it all away, through the Foreshore and Seabed Act, which formally took the entire foreshore and placed it in the ownership of the Crown. It was the largest act of colonial land-theft in modern history. Then in 2011 the National government, alongside the Māori Party, passed the Marine and Coastal Areas (Takutai Moana) Act, which didn’t repeal the Foreshore and Seabed Act but created some standards for establishing customary title, so that Māori could claim back their coastline. It was still colonial, it was still unfair, but as always, our people worked with what they were given, and so multiple cases were brought forward to claim back our mana takutai, our coastal territories. These cases went into millions of dollars, and represented thousands of hours by Māori lawyers, expert historians, kau mātua and many others who worked to reclaim the stolen legacy of our ancestors. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t always successful, but bit by bit, more often than not, it was working.

And then along came this government. The most hyper-colonial government we have seen, in many, many years.

And again, just like 2004, the government decided to simply legislate it all away, and lay waste to the last decade of work, by changing the rules yet again, making the standard for establishing customary title nearly impossible, and worse than that, making it retrospective, so even those who won their cases, would lose their coastline all over again, anyway.

Which all makes today’s news, that the original land of Wi Parata has finally been bought back by Ngāti Toa Rangatira, somewhat bittersweet. But it is also a powerful moment to honour this tīpuna Wiremu Te Kakakura Parata, who bravely stood against the Doctrine of Discovery being applied to his whenua, in the face of extreme colonial supremacy. An act of environmental racism that would become the basis of multiple other acts of environmental racism through to this day. He knew the right thing to do, and the right thing to say, regardless of who stood before him. Last week, at the second reading of the bill, we heard this momo again in the voice of Ngāti Wai rangatira Aperahama Edwards, speaking his truth, in the language of this land, from the gallery as parliament again moved to exercise the Doctrine of Discovery on our coastline.

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Next week, the Marine and Coastal Areas Amendment Bill will enter its third reading and apparently pass into law.

On Thursday morning, I listened to Chris Bishop bluster his way through an interview on Breakfast tv and amongst the very confused and confusing lines of reason from the very simple question of “how can you justify passing this against such clear public opposition”, he stumbled into the “settlement” of New Zealand and the rights to “common law” that Māori retained at that time.

Here is the link to the full interview (it starts at 1:22:40). Apart from a blustery Bishop (right) you’ll also get to enjoy Labour MP Kieran McNulty (left)affirming the right of courts to interpret legislation as they see fit and expressing concern that this National government could simply legislate over the top of that, with no apparent reflection that it was his party who did all of that, to the letter, first, and also no commitment to repeal it if they get back into power.

Again this is a helpful example of environmental racism. In spite of what Chris Bishop says here, even the English draft document favoured by government as “the treaty” guarantees full, exclusive, undisturbed possession of our fisheries and coastline for as long as we desire to retain it (and of course the actual treaty, Te Tiriti, affirms our full political authority over our worlds. Beyond that, as I mentioned in the outset, our own environmental legal system, aka tikanga, is also a part of our social estate that we are entitled to keep regardless of people who show up with guns, greed, supreme entitlement, and a strange idea that everywhere they travel around the world, they can take their legal system with them and plant it on the land much like their flags, swords and diseases. It really is some kind of weird arcane idea that their magic pink toes, upon coming into contact with Indigenous land, automatically extinguish native title, along with native legal systems and native political authority. This is exactly the logic Chris Bishop appears to be clinging to when he describes the bill today.

For the rest of us, this is another page in New Zealand’s shameful colonial rap sheet. A long criminal history of theft and illegitimate domination. We did not stand for it in 1877. We did not stand for it in 2004. We do no stand for it in 2025, and we will continue to show up, and fight by all means, for the rightful return of all our ancestors left for us.

Toitū te whenua, toitū te moana, toitū te iwi Māori, ake, ake, ake.

GUEST POST – TANIA WAIKATO

Are you sick of the coalition of chaos?

Today David Seymour ascends to Deputy Prime Minister in the second half of a term of government that has done more damage to race relations in this country than any other in living history. But it’s not just Māori who are under fire from the seemingly never-ending obsession to serve corporations instead of the people. It’s everyone who isn’t wealthy.

From cutting pay equity for women and funding for disabled support, to handing out tax cuts to people that own more than one house and reviving a once destined for death tobacco industry, you really have to ask – who does this government truly serve?

The Regulatory Standards Bill is an ugly name for an ugly Bill. But the opportunity that this piece of attempted constitutional vandalism by David Seymour and the ACT party represents to potentially crack this coalition wide open is one that anyone who doesn’t want David Seymour running this country permanently should grab with both hands – because we only have a fleeting window until the 23 of June to do it.

Am I talking about a snap election? Absolutely. How? Let me explain.

The coalition agreements that birthed the current legislative monstrosity included an agreement to pass “a” Regulatory Standards Act “as soon as practicable”. This Bill has been on the ACT party’s Christmas wish list for more than twenty years and has been voted down on the three previous attempts to pass it. On the most recent attempt in 2021, the Regulatory Standards Bill was blocked by an unhappy Treasury, who knew that the provisions that will allow for companies to sue the government if they pass laws infringing their property rights could bankrupt our country. Yes, you heard me correctly. The current Regulatory Standards Bill could wind up giving your hard- earned taxpayer dollars to multibillion dollar corporations. Sound like a bad idea? Treasury used to think so too.

But now both National and NZ First have agreed to let this ultimate restraint on the independence of Parliament and dog collar to the might of overseas foreign interests be strapped around the neck of the Beehive. Or have they?

The day immediately following our Toitū te Tiriti Waitangi Tribunal hearing into the Regulatory Standards Bill on 14 May — which found that the Crown had breached the Treaty Principles by failing to consult with Māori on this Bill due to its constitutional significance — Newsroom released a story quoting NZ First leader, Winston Peters:

“Winston Peters has revealed New Zealand First is seeking changes to Act leader David Seymour’s controversial Regulatory Standards Bill, describing the law as “a work in progress”. Peters’ remarks come despite his party’s obligation to support the law through its coalition agreement with National.

However, asked by Newsroom on Thursday whether New Zealand First was fully supportive of the Regulatory Standards Bill, Peters said: “Put it this way: it is a work in progress still, substantially.” Peters confirmed his party was seeking changes to the bill but did not explain what those were, saying they would be shared “in due course as those changes are made”.

In further comments after Question Time, he said he was confident the law would be drafted in such a way that New Zealand First could support it, but did not say what would happen if that was not the case.”

Well let’s talk about what might happen, if that is not the case. And more to the point, let’s talk about what might happen if there is an almighty backlash of submissions in opposition made on this dangerous Bill over the next three weeks on a similar scale to the 300,000 submissions made on David Seymour’s most recent project – the Treaty Principles Bill.

In a brilliant article published this week in The Post, former Green Party leader Russell Norman took us all on a stroll down memory lane to remind us (and Winston Peters) that it was less than a decade ago that NZ First introduced the “Fighting Foreign Corporate Control Bill” that aimed to stop the exact disaster that the Regulatory Standards Bill now seeks to create – allowing powerful multinational companies to sue the government for compensation whenever a new law affects their “property” rights. Russell wrote:

“NZ First still maintains it will ensure “that the government always serves in the interests of all New Zealanders”. But this bill tries to redefine our constitutional and legal order so it serves corporate interests instead of New Zealanders.

NZ First has the power to stop it. Winston became famous for helping to end the new right revolution of the 1980s and 90s, it would be a shame if he ended his career dancing to Roger Douglas’ tune.”

Winston Peters steps down today as Deputy Prime Minister, having served the full first-half of the Coalition government’s term in order to make way for David Seymour to have his turn as second in command. But anyone who is old enough to remember why Winston Peters was dubbed the “King-Maker” after holding the balance of power to create a position for himself as Deputy Prime Minister under both a National-led and Labour-led coalition government will know this. Winston has a plan. Winston always has a plan.

And whether that plan includes cutting David Seymour’s reign as Deputy Prime Minister short in order to honour the long-held roots of the NZ First party that pledged to always put New Zealanders first by blocking the Regulatory Standards Bill, and causing a snap election remains to be seen. All I can tell you is this. If you make a submission against the Regulatory Standards Bill, it just might.