National’s Challenges

National’s Challenges

With Labour ahead of National in the polls on the back of doing absolutely nothing, it seems clear that the electorate has rejected National.

Does the country want or need to have Labour back?

Hell No!!!

Six years of Labour (from 2017 to 2023) left New Zealand buried in debt, divided by race, and drowning in broken promises. Now the same people who caused that mess are moaning about how bad things are and stating that it's the coalition governments fault.

But at the same time they are not putting any policies out on which the electorate can make an informed decision to support or reject Labour and their possible coalition partners.

We can still maintain this current coalition government but achieve significant change in policy by voting for the minor parties in the coalition rather than supporting Labour.

Even though National’s numbers are declining in the polls, overall there is still support for the coalition government as a whole to remain in power through transfer of votes from National to the minor parties (NZ First & Act).

The Real Driver behind the Decline

As I said in my previous article when you dig deeper than just the results of the polls I believe that the most important driver behind the drop in National’s numbers is their failure to action their pre-election promises made before the 2023 election.

The coalition partners made a promise to stop the tribal takeover.

This is what National, ACT and New Zealand First promised to do when they agreed to prioritise “Ending race-based policies” in their Coalition Agreement.

When it comes to the pre-election promises to end race‑based laws and practices the Coalition has failed dismally.

Mandate for Change

The Coalition government was elected to undo the damage caused by six years of Labour. It’s what we expected them to do. And while they claim to be addressing the issues - and to be fair, repairing a severely broken country is not a minor fix - there is widespread frustration that they continue to fall short.

The reality the Coalition has had to deal with is that when Jacinda Ardern was in office, she embedded political loyalists deep within the machinery of government. Her focus on identity politics - that cultural-Marxist framework that divides people by race, gender, and sexuality - led to a rapid expansion of radicalised public servants. Many of the 20,000 additional staff hired over that period was committed activists.

Axing this army of radicals - and the programmes they run – would not only save taxpayers more than $1.5 billion a year in wages alone, but it would significantly curtail the extremism that infects much of the State sector.

Looking back at the Labour Government

Let’s get the facts straight, once and for all.

When Labour took power in 2017, annual core Crown spending was $76 billion and net core Crown debt sat at $60 billion. By the time they were booted out in 2023, spending had hit $139 billion—an extra $63 billion every single year—and debt had more than doubled to $155 billion.

That was not Jacinda’s “kindness”; it was a debt on every taxpayer’s future for years to come.

Solving the problems of a decade of reckless borrowing isn’t an overnight job. Every dollar we pay in interest is a dollar Labour stole from schools, hospitals, and roads.

Capital gains tax

In 2017 Labour swore blind there would be no new taxes for 95 percent of Kiwis and repeatedly ruled out a capital gains tax. Now, in 2025, they’re openly campaigning for a 28 percent CGT on rental properties, shares, and family businesses to pay for their latest wish list. Once they break a promise, they never stop.

Covid cowardice

The 2025 Royal Commission laid bare the lockdown disaster—$200 million wasted small businesses crushed, mental health in tatters. Yet Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins, Grant Robertson, and Ayesha Verrall all refused to front up in person to face the music.

Division by stealth

Labour quietly signed us up to the UN’s indigenous-rights action plan and rolled out a secret 2040 roadmap for co-governance—parallel systems in health, water, justice, and local government based on race. Three Waters gave unelected tribal appointees 50 percent control of water assets—National scrapped it. The Maori Health Authority swallowed $1.5 billion and delivered longer waiting times for everyone—National shut it down. Bill after bill was amended to entrench division. Labour split us on purpose.

Yet Labour now states that everything is “falling apart” and tries to lay the blame at the feet of the current Coalition Government.

The obsession with Colonisation

New Zealand’s public discourse has hardened into something resembling a ritual where colonization is invoked, rehearsed, and recycled with near‑religious regularity, as if repeating the word itself constitutes historical insight.

It is an inconvenient, immovable fact that every society on Earth has been colonized, conquered, absorbed, displaced, or overwritten.

New Zealand is no exception: Maori settlement involved displacement, warfare, and territorial consolidation well before British administration layered another system of power on top. None of this is controversial—it is basic historical literacy.

Yet modern New Zealand politics, mainstream media, and institutional culture behave as though history conveniently begins in the 1800s and ends with perpetual grievance.

Parliamentary debates return to colonization like a stuck record. Mainstream media frame contemporary issues through the same moral lens, regardless of relevance.

Local councils, policy documents, and educational materials repeat the same narrative until it becomes accepted as fact. The result is one story endlessly retold, which adds up to narrative enforcement.

The deeper problem with colonization

The deeper problem is not that colonization is discussed as such, but that it is discussed selectively, emotionally, and without proportion.

This selective fixation produces a warped worldview in which history is flattened into villains and victims, present politics are moralised beyond recognition, and complexity is treated as betrayal.

Acknowledging colonization as universal does not excuse injustice; it destroys the fantasy that history can be morally simplified. Civilizations are built on conquest, collapse, adaptation, and inheritance. Every society develops over layers of prior displacement, whether it admits it or not. Until that happens, the conversation will remain loud, repetitive, and fundamentally dishonest.

Challenge of the Treaty of Waitangi

I’m sick of people using the Treaty of Waitangi to divide our country.

We are mainly fifth-generation (or more) Kiwis whose ancestors built this nation with sweat and steel, working side by side and forging a country with an agricultural backbone where people could live and work in peace with all people having equal rights before the law.

But currently our country is being divided more every year over a simple three paragraph document that was never meant to rule us forever.

The Treaty of Waitangi is an agreement signed in 1840 which consisted of three paragraphs in which Maori chiefs gave the Crown governance over settlers. In return they received protection and British citizenship. That’s it. No co-governance. No veto rights. No modern reinterpretations; Just an agreement so people could live and work together in peace.

Today, that deal is being abused. A word meaning chieftainship is stretched into control over water, roads, councils, and coastlines.

“Local Water Done Well” has become Treaty-based theft. Separate local government wards become Treaty-based apartheid.

Yet none of this exists in the text of the Treaty.

Waitangi Tribunal

The Waitangi Tribunal set up in 1975, has become a gravy train. Thousands of claims, billions paid, and still it never ends. Ordinary working Kiwis fund iwi corporations richer than most families, all justified by alleged breaches over land that was willingly sold generations ago.

And here’s a fact that’s almost never mentioned, the so-called “principles of the Treaty” didn’t even exist in law until 1975 — 135 years after the Treaty was signed. Parliament invented that concept in the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 when it created the Waitangi Tribunal.

The Act did not define what those principles were.

It simply left them open to interpretation.

In the late 1980s — particularly after a 1987 Court of Appeal decision — courts and officials began expanding and interpreting these “principles”.

But even today there is no single, settled, written list of Treaty principles in statute. They are loosely worded, change over time, and mean whatever judges, tribunals, or governments decide they mean at the time.

So when people talk about “Treaty principles” as if they were agreed in 1840 and are fixed and sacred — that simply isn’t true. They are a modern legal invention, layered on decades later and endlessly expandable.

No modern democracy runs its future governance through an open-ended 19th-century racial agreement forever. Nations acknowledge history, reconcile, and then move forward under equal law. We seem determined to do the opposite.

And here’s the part no one likes to talk about, the South Island wasn’t even governed by consent from hundreds of chiefs. It was claimed by right of discovery. Yet now we’re told the entire country must be re-engineered around a document that never mentions partnership and never promised shared sovereignty.

The Treaty refers to the country as New Zealand not Aotearoa and it states that governance was ceded to the Crown.

It says the Crown had first right of land purchase.

It says Māori became British subjects, equal under the law.

That was the deal. No amendments. No invented “principles”. No race-based supremacy.

Exploitation of the Treaty

What we see now isn’t honouring the Treaty, it’s exploiting it. Road blocks, occupations, demands for control over assets and spectrum, all justified by interpretations that didn’t even exist until the late 20th century.

If the Treaty is about fairness, then it must apply fairly to everyone alive today, not punish people for ancestors they never had, and not privilege people for ancestry alone. Justice that depends on bloodlines isn’t justice at all.

And the final insult? It’s a tiny modern tribal elite pushing these demands onto everyone else, including immigrants and families with no colonial history at all. While claiming moral authority over a past they themselves are descended from on both sides.

What worries me most isn’t the past, it’s what we’re normalising for our kids. Teaching them that law, opportunity, and voice depend on ancestry is the opposite of unity.

If this was really about healing, it would have ended by now. Processes that never conclude aren’t reconciliation, they’re revenue streams.

The Treaty was a deal, not a suicide pact for our people. New Zealand needs a real constitution or agreement, written, clear and amendable by future generations.

One that locks in equality ends race-based law, and stops 1840 ghosts and 1970s inventions from dividing us in 2026.

A country obsessed with ancestry can never be united, but a country built on equal citizenship can be.

Benefits for Maori under co-governance

When people talk about “tribal control” or “iwi-based governance” of New Zealand, it often sounds empowering. The language used is mostly about rangatiratanga, partnership, and self-determination.

Under a tribal governance model, political power would not rest primarily with individuals as equal citizens, but with iwi and hapu as corporate bodies. Representation, influence, and access would increasingly flow through tribal structures — runanga, trust boards, and mandated iwi organisations — rather than directly through universal democratic institutions.

For many Maori, this would mean that their political voice would depend on their tribal affiliation, not simply your citizenship. If you are well connected to your iwi, registered, active, and aligned with its leadership, you may gain influence or access to opportunities.

If you are urban, disconnected from your rohe, unsure of your whakapapa, affiliated with multiple iwi, or simply uninterested in tribal politics, your voice may be effectively absent.

Importantly, tribal leadership is not elected by the general public, and, in most cases, not by the tribe as a whole either. Iwi authorities are typically governed by trustees chosen through limited rolls or internal processes. In practice, the average Maori has little or no ability to vote out iwi leaders who perform poorly, misuse funds, or pursue agendas they disagree with — yet those leaders would exercise growing power over resources, policy, and representation.

Supporters of tribal governance often present it as a correction to history. But this raises an uncomfortable truth: the original treaty was signed by Maori leaders who acted prudently, not recklessly. They sought protection, order, and equal status under the Crown — not permanent tribal control over future generations.

What proved disastrous for many Maori communities was not British governance, but the large-scale alienation of land through voluntary sales not the product of democratic citizenship, or of equal law. It was the result of poor decisions, incomplete information, and internal division. Replacing one elite structure with another does not correct that mistake — it risks repeating it.

Maori who do not belong to a recognised iwi or who live away from tribal centres, or who reject being politically defined by ancestry may find themselves spoken for, but not listened to.

There is also a cultural reality that is rarely acknowledged honestly: tribal systems are inherently hierarchical. They are based on descent, status, and internal rank.

A system that empowers tribes does not automatically empower all Maori equally.

For many Maori today — particularly those of mixed heritage — identity is personal and flexible. Tribal governance would make identity administrative and political, potentially forcing people to define themselves narrowly in order to participate fully in public life.

For the average Maori on the street, tribal governance is unlikely to feel like empowerment. It is far more likely to feel like another layer of authority making decisions in their name, controlling resources meant for their benefit, and claiming legitimacy without meaningful accountability.

One does not need to speculate about where this path leads. The growing wealth, status, and political access of today’s tribal leadership — alongside persistent underperformance in Maori health, education, and income outcomes — tells its own story.

Power has been consolidated, assets have grown, and influence has expanded, YET THE AVERAGE MAORI REMAINS NO BETTER OFF.

Where to from here?

We can still maintain the current coalition government and achieve change in policy by redirecting our votes from National to either of the other coalition partners (NZ First & Act).