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Tēnā koutou, e te whānau. I am Ivor Jones — Te Arawa, Ngāti Pikiao, Welsh whakapapa — The Māori Green Lantern, writing from themaorigreenlantern.maori.nz, because darkness requires a witness who brings his own light. Christopher Luxon walks back ‘bizarre claim’ about the GreensChristopher Luxon has walked back claims made by one of his ministers about the Greens, before then suggesting - wrongly - that they originated from the media.RNZRNZ | Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa Here is what this essay covers, laid out plainly so no one is surprised. > **First** , I outline RNZ's report of the Prime Minister's Friday "walk-back." > **Second** , I explain the framework I use to critique it: Tika, Pono, Tikanga — the ancestral test of whether a system preserved mana, recognised whakapapa, respected wairua, involved whānau, and returned people to wellbeing. > **Third** , I give you three concrete examples a Western mind can understand — a phantom statistic, a burned rulebook, a manufactured smear — with harm quantified and solutions named. > **Fourth** , I lay out the mauri ledger: what this government depleted, what the kaitiaki built. > **Finally** , I say directly, who should — and should not — hold power after our November election. Every numerical claim in this essay is audited, with working shown, in the appendix table at the end. I would love for you to read this essay from beginning to end, because it carries a wealth of verified information you can use in your daily life — at the polling booth, across the dinner table, in the staffroom argument, at the marae. There is an audio podcast that lays out this kaupapa in deep, deliberate detail, a short video that explains it in minutes for whānau who scroll on the run, and for the long-form readers among you, nearly three thousand sourced words wait below, every claim hyperlinked to its evidence. This is a repository for our mokopuna, so that in the decades to come they can look back across whatever landscape this government leaves behind and say: at least The Māori Green Lantern — amongst a few brave others — was warning us. * * * ## What The Records Say Happened > On **29 September 2026** , the Dutch environmental justice organisation Both ENDS did something no organisation in the world had ever done: it filed the first climate complaint in history under EU trade enforcement rules — and the defendant was Aotearoa New Zealand, a country that signed an EU trade deal carrying, in the European Commission's own celebration, "gold standard" environmental commitments, including Article 19.2(4): a party "shall not weaken or reduce the levels of protection afforded in its environmental or labour law in order to encourage trade or investment". > Both ENDS filed in its own name because, under the EU's Single Entry Point mechanism, "only EU-based organisations can" — but it filed alongside Aotearoa co-sponsors: the Environmental Law Initiative, Greenpeace Aotearoa, OraTaiao (the New Zealand Climate and Health Council), Professor Emeritus Jane Kelsey, **Ngāti Pūkenga Iwi ki Tauranga Trust** , and Mike Smith of Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Kahu. > On **30 September 2026** , Trade Minister Todd McClay responded — not with compliance documents, but with an accusation: New Zealand organisations were "joining with foreign actors to attack New Zealand", and by the reporting of the following day the Green Party stood squarely in the frame. RNZ asked McClay's office for its evidence. None was provided. On **2 October 2026** , RNZ's deputy political editor Craig McCulloch published the article at the heart of this essay: "Christopher Luxon walks back 'bizarre claim' about the Greens". > Its anatomy deserves close reading, because it records three moves in sequence: the Prime Minister **walked back** his Trade Minister's accusation; he then **suggested the media had originated it** — which RNZ states flatly was "wrongly"; and when told Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick was innocent of any involvement, he **congratulated the journalists** — "Well done, well done. Good job... please bottom that out" — as if the press gallery were his compliance department. The same article records his rhetorical retort on climate substance: "When any other country gets to 96.3 percent renewable electricity, then you might want to throw some stones at us." That figure, as this essay demonstrates below, appears nowhere in his own ministry's data. That is the record. Now for the framework that reads it. * * * ## The Framework — Tika, Pono, Tikanga, And The Mauri Ledger Our tūpuna gave us an analytical toolkit sharper than anything the coloniser's op-ed pages invented. ### Three tests, five questions, one ledger **Tika** asks: is it _right_? Not legal — right. Does the act align with what justice requires, by the measure of covenant and of plain fairness? **Pono** asks: is it _true_? Pono is more than factual accuracy; it is the integrity of the speaker — whether words spoken between peoples carry the weight of reality, whether the wairua of kōrero is honoured. **Tikanga** asks the deepest question of process — the question I put to every act of Crown power I analyse: **did the system preserve their mana? Recognise their whakapapa? Respect their wairua? Involve their whānau? Return them to wellbeing?** And beneath it all runs **mauri** — the life force that accumulates or depletes in every transaction of power. Government conduct either builds mauri in the people and the whenua, or drains it. The ledger never lies, even when ministers do. **Apply that framework to the record above, and this government's week fails on every axis, in the Crown's own documents.** * * * ## The Five Tests Applied ### Did The System Preserve Mana? It Stripped It > When McClay condemned "New Zealand organisations joining with foreign actors to attack New Zealand," the published co-sponsor list leaves only one honest reading: he branded **an iwi trust — Ngāti Pūkenga Iwi ki Tauranga Trust — tangata whenua of Tauranga Moana** as traitors to this country for filing a lawful complaint, in daylight, under a mechanism the Crown's own signature created. > Swarbrick stated plainly the Greens were not involved: the seventh-ranked minister accused a parliamentary party of conduct adjacent to treason and produced not one document, one email, one affidavit. > Then his leader, rather than apologise, told journalists it was "up for you guys to ascertain whether she has or hasn't" — outsourcing the fact-checking of his own government's slander to the very press corps he then blamed for it. In logic this is burden-shifting married to false attribution. In te ao Māori it has a simpler name: **teka**. To smear Māori guardianship and Green parliamentarians alike while calling it patriotism is mauri-depletion dressed in a flag. ### Did The System Respect Wairua? It Mugged It In Public The wairua of public life in a democracy is the shared trust that numbers spoken from a podium correspond to numbers sitting in ledgers. Luxon faced the EU complaint and answered with theatre: "When any other country gets to 96.3 percent renewable electricity, then you might want to throw some stones at us." His own ministry — MBIE, the Crown's statistician — records in Energy in New Zealand 2026 a renewable electricity share of **88.5%** for 2025 ("the highest share since 1981") and **85.5%** for 2024. Checkable by any mokopuna with a phone: **96.3 − 88.5 = 7.8 percentage points** of fabrication (against 2024: 10.8 points). No MBIE-published figure anywhere reaches 96.3; the origin of the number is, I state plainly, **unverifiable with available sources**. A Prime Minister forging climate statistics at a press conference, while the country's access to a $21.5 billion-a-year trading relationship sits under a historic test, does not merely fail Pono — he teaches every tamariki watching that whaikōrero is cheap and truth is optional at the top. ### Did The System Recognise Whakapapa? It Amputated It Mike Smith — kaumātua, claimant, plaintiff — had earned, through years of litigation, the Supreme Court's clearance to take seven of this country's biggest emitters to trial. That is whakapapa working as it should: one man's genealogical obligation to his whenua meeting the law and prevailing. This government's answer was not argument but excision — the Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Act, passed to retrospectively delete his standing — against the explicit advice of the **Ministry of Justice** , which "had not identified any evidence that the ongoing court proceedings have had a measurable impact on business confidence". I documented this corporate hand-delivery of legislation in "Swimming In Their Sea: How A White Supremacist Neoliberal Government Sold A Kaumātua's Day In Court To Fonterra And Z Energy" — the whakapapa link between that essay and this one now sits endorsed in a filing before the European Commission. ### Did The System Involve Their Whānau? It Logged Their Voices And Shredded Them > When the tort-bar bill went to select committee: 623 written submissions; 93% opposed — my working: 0.93 × 623 = 579.39, so roughly 579 citizens said no. The government proceeded anyway, "in the stated purpose of gaining trade benefits" — a phrase that reads as if drafted specifically to spring the trap of Article 19.2(4). Five hundred seventy-nine lawful voices, treated as noise. The Full pattern of consultation-as-theatre is laid out in my essay "The Receipts: Destroying Every Reason This Government Gave for Urgency" — urgency as erasure, public process as decoration. ### Did The System Return Them To Wellbeing? Count The Harm The projected emissions shortfall runs to **84 million tonnes of CO₂-equivalent** ; Treasury-commissioned modelling prices offshore compliance at $4.4–5.0 billion — midpoint, my working: ($4.4bn + $5.0bn) / 2 = $4.7 billion — and Luxon's response for the record, preserved by RNZ from June 2026, was "we ain't sending billions of dollars offshore." So the Crown chose instead to risk the deal's suspension machinery over trade worth $21.5 billion a year, with $1.8 billion in annual export gains foreseen by 2035 — **my ratio: 21.5 ÷ 4.7 ≈ 4.6 times more trade put in hazard than duty dodged**. Laura Clarke — former British High Commissioner to Aotearoa, now leading ClientEarth — told Morning Report the case "goes to the integrity and the credibility of the content of trade agreements," with the 100% Pure brand genuinely at stake. McClay, it must be recorded, declined the invitation to answer on Morning Report. Wellbeing is not a vibe; it is a number this government will not read aloud. **Tika? Failed. Pono? Failed. Tikanga — mana, whakapapa, wairua, whānau, wellbeing? Failed on all five tests, in one week, in the Crown's own documents.** * * * ## The Deep Dive Podcast New Zealand Faces First EU Climate Complaint 0:00 /1191.322993 1× Listen to a lively conversation between two hosts, unpacking and connecting topics in the sources of this essay. I apologise in advance for the AI's very harsh pronounciation of reo. Please dont shoot me, :). ## Youtube Video Like video? Here is a short video suppporting the essay. Again, don't shoot the messenger please because of AI's pronounciation. :) * * * ## Koha consideration You might ask who pays The Māori Green Lantern to produce high-quality, high-volume, every-claim-cited essays like this one — the MFAT warnings, the 579 ignored submissions, the phantom 96.3%, all traced and audited while the government hoped you weren't watching. The answer is: you do. There is no corporate entity lavishly supporting Ivor. No oil explorer picked up this tab; Fonterra did not sponsor a single hyphen. Every koha signals that whānau are ready to support the accountability that Crown and corporate structures will not provide — the same accountability Ngāti Pūpenga, OraTaiao, Mike Smith, and Both ENDS demanded this week in Brussels. Rangatiratanga includes the power to support our own truth-tellers. Four pathways exist: * **Koha** (voluntary contribution): https://app.koha.kiwi/events/the-maori-green-lantern-fighting-misinformation-and-disinformation-ivor-jones * **Subscribe** to receive essays directly: https://www.themaorigreenlantern.maori.nz/#/portal/support * **Bank Transfer** : Ivor Jones — 03-1395-0099387-000 * **Facebook** : https://www.facebook.com/Themaorigreenlantern/subscribe/ If you cannot koha, no worries at all — subscribe, kōrero, share this essay with your whānau and friends. That is koha in itself. **_Kia kaha, whānau. Stay vigilant. Stay connected. And if you are able, consider a koha to ensure this voice continues._** * * * ## Three Examples For The Western Mind — Harm Quantified, Solutions Named ### **The Phantom 96.3%, Explained As A Bank Auditor Would Read It** A company CEO announces 96.3 cents profit in every dollar while the audited accounts say 88.5. The gap is 7.8 cents of fiction, puntable only by someone who believes the shareholders will never open the annual report. Luxon's annual report is MBIE's Energy in New Zealand 2026; the auditors are all of us; the fiction is on the record at RNZ. **Harm quantified:** 7.8 percentage points of invented national virtue broadcast into a live trade dispute. **Solution:** never repeat a politician's number without the ministry ledger. **Tikanga impact, translated:** pono is not mere accuracy — it is the wairua of kōrero, the trust that words spoken between peoples carry the weight of reality. A leader who mints phantom figures poisons that trust for every voice that stands at a podium after him — most painfully for rangatahi raised to believe whaikōrero is sacred. ### The Burned Rulebook, Explained As A Rugby Fan Would Read It A team loses at the full-time whistle of the Supreme Court. Its remedy is not to play the next match but to change the laws of the game _retroactively_ , so the losing score never happened — while its own officials state on paper "not identified any evidence" the original match harmed anyone, and while 579 of 623 public submissions (93%; 0.93 × 623 = 579.39) protest the rule change. That is the Tort Liability Amendment Act. **Harm quantified:** one Māori plaintiff's Supreme Court victory extinguished; 579 submissions voided; seven of the country's largest emitters immunised from climate tort claims. **Solution:** repeal the bar; restore access to justice; let _Smith v Fonterra_ draw breath again. **Tikanga impact, translated:** whakapapa is the deep archive of accountability — kaumātua hold claims across generations precisely because harm crosses generations. Amputating a kaumātua's standing attacks the archive itself; it tells mokopuna their grandfather's due process is revocable at corporate request. ### The Manufactured "Foreign Actors" Smear, Explained As A Small Business Owner Would Read It Your biggest customer files a formal compliance complaint — the first of its kind ever lodged under these contract rules worldwide. The correct response is paperwork. This government's response was to accuse a competitor of "joining with foreign actors to attack" it — **with zero evidence** (RNZ asked McClay's office; nothing came back) — while the actual counterparty is a lawful mechanism in a contract the Crown signed, in force since 1 May 2024, and whose non-regression clause the Crown's own MFAT officials warned could be triggered by the very policies now complained of. **Harm quantified:** $21.5 billion in annual trade and a $1.8 billion export trajectory shadowed by suspension risk, against a $4.4–5.0 billion compliance liability the government refuses to plan for — a 4.6-to-1 gamble with other people's livelihoods; plus the 100% Pure brand itself on trial, per the former diplomat who personified it. **Solution:** keep the signed word rather than smearing its enforcers — Both ENDS wrote the sentence itself: if market access is ever lost, "it will be because the government broke its word, not because anyone complained." **Tikanga impact, translated:** mana is communal, not individual. When the Crown is found untrustworthy, it is not Luxon whose mana is marked down in Brussels and Beijing — it is ours: every winegrower, every kaimahi, every hapū named on a shipping manifest. Spending our collective mana on a cover-up is theft by another name. > And one domestic fact crowns all three examples: while Brussels tests the Crown under trade law, the Waitangi Tribunal's Wai 3325 Climate Change Priority Inquiry sits in session right now — panelled by Judge Stephanie Milroy and Professor David Williams among others — explicitly examining this government's climate targets, the Emissions Trading Scheme, and the exemption of agriculture, with the Climate Change Commission summoned to give evidence. The world's largest market and Aotearoa's founding covenant are auditing the same defendant simultaneously. * * * ## The Mauri Ledger — Naming The Forces Plainly ### Mauri-Depleting > A Trade Minister who fires untargetable treason-adjacent accusations with no documents in hand. > A Prime Minister who fabricates a statistic contradicted by his own statistician, misattributes the origin of his own government's smear to the media (RNZ's transcription: "wrongly"), and hires the press gallery, rhetorically, as his unpaid evidence unit. > A Justice Ministry whose "no evidence" advice was noted and ignored. > An MFAT whose own warning that the oil and gas reversal could breach this very deal was noted and ignored. > A caucus that weighed a kaumātua's whakapapa and 579 citizens on one scale, and Fonterra's litigation convenience on the other, and chose Fonterra. ### Mauri-Enhancing > Both ENDS, filing soberly in the open, in its own name, because the mechanism demanded it. > Ngāti Pūkenga Iwi ki Tauranga Trust, standing as an iwi has always stood, for the whenua. > OraTaiao, translating climate harm into the health of tamariki. > Professor Kelsey, forty years of warning made suddenly, gratifyingly enforceable. > And Mike Smith: _"As Indigenous protectors of the natural world, we have a duty to generations yet to be born"_ — his words in the filing that may yet drag this Crown back to its signature. > And the journalists — McCulloch and the RNZ politics team, Morning Report — who did the one thing this coalalition hates most: ask the question a second time, in front of a microphone that records. * * * ## My Verdict For November — Do Not Return Them; Vote Green, And Here Is Why Greenpeace Aotearoa frames November's general election as the very hinge on which Aotearoa's seat in these climate accountability proceedings will swing — the complaint's timeline runs straight through the campaign. So I say plainly, founded upon the cited facts above: **do not return this coalition to power in November.** > Not because of my temperament — because of its record, recorded in its own ministries' documents: a Trade Minister who accuses without evidence and is rebuked, mid-flight, by his own leader; a Prime Minister who fabricates 7.8 percentage points of renewable virtue against his own statistician's tables; parliamentarians who watched the Ministry of Justice warn there was no evidence for the tort bar, watched MFAT warn the oil and gas reversal could breach the trade deal, watched 579 citizens file their opposition — and voted on anyway. Character is revealed when a government's own documents accuse it. Theirs already has. Vote Green. Not from habit — from evidence. The Green Party was the _target_ of this week's fabrication precisely because the real signatories — a Dutch filing, a Ngāti Pūkenga signature, a Ngāpuhi kaumātua's pounamu chain — could not be credibly painted as villains; the Government needed a domestic one it recognises on sight: the party that has consistently refused to treat climate obligations as optional, refused to exempt the largest emitters from accountability, and whose co-leader faced the Prime Minister's "ascertain it for yourselves" inversion of justice and answered, factually, that her party had no involvement — because there was none. > These tests are not partisan property. They are whakapapa property. Whichever government we elect this November, we will hold it to Tika, Pono, Tikanga. But a crew that forges statistics, extinguishes kaumātua lawsuits, smears iwi as foreign agents and blames the journalists who catch them has forfeited any claim to ask for our trust again. Aotearoa deserves signed promises kept. The mirror is not the culprit, e te whānau. The people shouting at it are. **Kia kaha. Kia māia. Stand at the ballot box in November and vote with your mokopuna in the room.** Ka mau te wehi. * * * _Disclaimer: This essay is protected honest opinion and fair comment on matters of public interest, based on facts cited and hyperlinked as they arise. No criminal allegation is made or intended against any individual. If any party named identifies a factual error, my correction and retraction protocol under the Defamation Act 1992 engages immediately._

INFORMATION FOR APPLICANTS Kaipukahu Writer in Residence 2027 – a full-time residency fostering NZ writing at the University of Waikato, supported by Creative New Zealand. The late Ngāti Wairere elder...

> Former Speaker of the House and Labour MP Adrian Rurawhe has died following a recent illness. > > Rurawhe (Ngāti Apa, Whanganui), who served in parliament for more than a decade and became speaker in 2022, died after recently becoming unwell. > > His whānau announced his death in a statement first reported by Te Ao Māori News, saying they were coming to terms with a significant loss to their whānau, Te Hāhi Rātana, his iwi of Ngāti Apa and Whanganui, and his former colleagues in parliament. > > His whānau described Rurawhe as a pillar of their family and acknowledged his deep connection to the Rātana faith and its legacy. > > Stuff Read More

Mtsogoleri wa chipani cha UDF, Atupele Muluzi wati amalemekeza kwambiri m'tsogoleri wa dziko lino, Peter Mutharika koma wati ndikofunika kuvomereza kukula kwawo.Muluzi wanena izi pamene amacheza pa wayilesi ya kanema ya Zodiak, nkati mwa pulogalamu ina."Ine ndine m'modzi amene ndinagwira ntchito ndi President Professor Arthur Peter Mutharika, ndagwira nawo ntchito dzaka ngati Nduna, I respect...

Anyone reading the headlines announcing that Auckland’s underground City Rail Link had been “blessed” would not have needed to read the accompanying article to guess that it wasn’t Catholic or Anglican bishops conducting the ritual. It was, of course, mana whenua, who performed a formal dawn mahi ōkawa (blessing) of the new CRL stations. The purpose of the blessing – led by Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei and supported by seven other local clans – was allegedly to “provide important tikanga and cultural safety ahead of upcoming ‘First Look’ public open day events and the commencement of passenger services”. “Tikanga and cultural safety” will, of course, be meaningless to almost all the passengers who ride the trains. The only kind of safety they will care about is to not be assaulted by thugs during their journey and for the trains not to collide or lurch off the tracks. The blessing will not keep anyone “safe”. However, it furthered Māori nationalists’ mission of establishing themselves as the pre-eminent spiritual and cultural guardians over every sphere of New Zealand society and endeavour, including the natural and mechanical worlds. It was yet another show of soft power given it is only Māori activists who get to officially endorse most public projects by offering their cultural and spiritual stamp of approval. It is evident the authorities in charge of the expensive rail project have decided that every Aucklander – whether they are Catholic, Anglican, Muslim, Jewish, Taoist, Buddhist or atheist – belongs to the Northern Diocese of the High Church of Treatyism. Treatyism arises from an interpretation of the Treaty as a “partnership between races”, as the 1987 Lands Case judges described it. That view provides the basis for co-governance that gives Māori tribes the opportunity to insert themselves into a range of enterprises – no matter how remote their connection or usefulness – as “partners”. ACT has identified Treatyism as “New Zealand’s new religion”, with particular requirements for salvation. In a recent newsletter, it wrote: “Colonisation was the original sin, but if you wear the adornments around your neck, practise the rituals before your meetings, and smite non-believers as ‘racist’ then, maybe, you will be saved.” CRL Ltd has certainly gone out of its way to “practise the rituals” of Māori religion and fully show off the “adornments” of Māori wonderfulness. The $5.5 billion publicly funded subterranean network has become a shrine to animistic spirituality – with the dawn ritual merely an amuse-bouche in an ongoing religious feast. City Rail Link tells us: “Three of the CRL stations are designed around the creation story with Ranginui (the sky father) and Papatūānuku (the earth mother), while Karanga-a-Hape Station’s design also references their son, Tāne Mahuta, God of the forest, who pushed his parents apart to create light (day). “The gifted station names Maungawhau, Karanga-a-Hape, Te Waihorotiu and Waitematā reflect the mythology, atua [gods], people and aspects of early life indigenous to the landscapes.” We also learn that “the [Maungawhau] station’s entrance wall is patterned precast concrete from floor to ceiling with basalt inserts. The giant wall design references the atua (deity) Mataoho, the creator of the basalt volcanic field in Tāmaki Makaurau.” According to mātauranga Māori experts, basalt, like every other animate and inanimate form, has “mauri” (life force or vital essence) flowing through it: The CRL website notes: “In the Māori worldview, all natural and physical elements of the world are related through whakapapa (genealogy) and each is controlled and safeguarded through spiritual beings. All living things have mauri. The protection of mauri is essential.” Science rejected animism and vitalism a long time ago and we can all be grateful that the physical safety of passengers doesn’t rely on traditional Māori “knowledge” and spirituality being taken seriously by the CRL’s engineers and tunnellers. As it happens, the extensive Māorification of the train network is the culmination of a political project that was started 14 years ago. CRL says it has had “a longstanding partnership with our Mana Whenua Forum which began in the early stages of the project in 2012. Part of the purpose of this partnership is to ensure Māoritanga is intrinsically woven through the essence of CRL at every stage.” However, there are some inconvenient facts in the push to impose Māoritanga on Aucklanders. In his defence of Auckland Council spending $1.38 million on two bronze artworks by Māori artists positioned outside Te Waihorotiu station in Victoria St, councillor Richard Hills claimed Auckland is a “Māori city”. Unfortunately, the 2023 Census figures don’t support his contention. Only 12.3 per cent of the Auckland region’s population is Māori, compared to 50 per cent European and 30 per cent Asian. Auckland is overwhelmingly a European-Asian city. Undeterred, the authorities have decided that the information signs in the stations should have Māori words in bigger and heavier type than the English – and precede the words in the only language that virtually every person born here understands. Thus _Ararewa_ appears above _Lift_ ; _Putanga_ before _Way Out_ ; and _Pārongo_ before _Information_. Yet they will be fully aware that only a tiny proportion of Aucklanders – and virtually no tourists – will be able to understand the words in Māori and will need to look for the English term, in smaller type, following them. Like Latin in a traditional Catholic Mass, it is of no importance to the tribal clerisy whether passengers understand what the words mean. It is simply an assertion of the Māori elite’s power. As a further way of asserting the dominance of Māori nationalists and language revitalists over transport policy, two of the train stations, which already had well-established English names, have been retitled. Britomart Station – named after Point Britomart, a former coastal headland that honoured the British Royal Navy ship HMS _Britomart_ , which first surveyed the Waitematā Harbour in 1841 – has become “Waitematā”. Mt Eden Station has been renamed “Maungawhau”. It’s worth remarking that the ‘decolonisation’ of the stations has meant a clean sweep of Māori names rather than two of the four remaining in English. This is a particular kind of “partnership”, which in effect means iwi saying: ‘Let’s compromise. Let’s do it our way!’ Auckland Transport’s explanation of why it “incorporated te reo Māori across its transport network” is a blatantly political manifesto: > Te reo Māori in public spaces is essential for a thriving Māori identity in Tāmaki Makaurau. Since 2016, there has been a concerted effort by Auckland Transport (AT) to make the transport network bilingual. This began with bilingual announcements on trains, and has continued to include passenger wayfinding and bus services. > > In the last few years we’ve seen the presence of te reo Māori in our public spaces increase substantially – not just in Tāmaki Makaurau but across Aotearoa. These new [CRL] station names are part of AT’s commitment to ensuring te reo Māori is seen, heard, spoken and learned across our network. Anyone who still thinks the entire role of the transport agency is to provide efficient and safe ferries, buses and trains is clearly mistaken. AT has taken upon itself the task of providing compulsory language lessons to a captive audience when, according to the 2023 Census, only 2.6 per cent of Aucklanders understand te reo. Perhaps the most preposterous aspect of CRL’s publicity campaign to manufacture a significant role for Māori in the new network is the “Waka Train”. The company commissioned graphic artists to show a waka morphing into a train carriage barrelling along the tracks. The tenuous link postulated between a canoe and a train is that where Britomart Station stands used to be water before the land was reclaimed. The image apparently “depicts the change from a traditional waka to a modern equivalent: a train”. In fact, there is no obvious evolution between a canoe and a train given the former doesn’t have wheels because Māori never got around to inventing them. The most pertinent link would be the evolution from a 19th century steam locomotive billowing clouds of smoke from its smokestack – like the ones on Auckland’s first railway line between the CBD and**** Onehunga, which officially opened on December 20, 1873 – to a sleek, modern, electric train. However, highlighting that development would presumably be a tacit admission that colonisation brought vastly superior land-based transport to New Zealand. Unsurprisingly, the long collaboration between CRL and the Mana Whenua Forum is only the beginning of the panel’s ambitions. It has decided a case study of the relationship will “provide a framework for future large infrastructure developments to enter into mana whenua iwi partnerships for the benefit of all”. • _The CRL opened on September 13._ This article was originally published by the Platform.

Kia ora e te whānau. I am Ivor Jones, The Māori Green Lantern—Te Arawa, Ngāti Pikiao and Welsh—documenting the political machinery used to diminish Māori authority, disguise Crown power and convert the consequences into suffering for whānau. My kaupapa is fighting misinformation and disinformation from the far Right, as set out through The Māori Green Lantern. This essay examines: > What Labour promised Māori between 2020 and 2026; Which promises became laws or institutions; Which reforms the National–ACT–New Zealand First coalition repealed or reversed; What Chris Hipkins now promises to restore; What he refuses to restore; Why devolution is not the same thing as rangatiratanga; How these decisions perform under the tests of **Tika, Pono and Tikanga** ; Whether they preserve mana, recognise whakapapa, respect wairua, involve whānau and return people to wellbeing; Why I regard this coalition’s programme as white-supremacist and neoliberal; Why Labour’s proposed repair job remains far below the standard Māori should accept; Why, based on the published record, my editorial support in the November election sits with the Green Party. I use the term **white-supremacist neoliberal government** as an expressly stated political judgment about the programme and its effects—not as an allegation about the secret personal beliefs of every minister or voter. By _white supremacist_ , I mean a system that repeatedly preserves Crown and Pākehā institutional supremacy over Māori authority. By _neoliberal_ , I mean a system that elevates markets, private property, contracting, austerity and centralised fiscal control above collective responsibility and Treaty-based power sharing. The evidence is the blade. The opinion is where I strike with it. * * * ### Read It, Hear It, Watch It I would love you to click into this essay because it contains a storehouse of information you can use in daily conversations, workplaces, classrooms, whānau hui and debates about the future of Aotearoa. I have created an audio podcast laying out this kaupapa in detail. ## The Deep Dive Podcast Mori Authority Between the Axe and Cage 0:00 /1340.929161 1× > Listen to a lively conversation between two hosts, unpacking and connecting topics in the sources of this essay. I apologise in advance for the AI's very harsh pronounciation of reo. Please dont shoot me, :). I have created a short video explaining the central argument. ## Youtube Video > For long-form readers, this fully cited essay preserves the evidence, the legislation, the calculations and the links so nobody needs to depend on a politician’s memory or a social-media slogan. This is more than content. It is a repository for our mokopuna. When they look back and ask who saw the dismantling, who recorded the bills, who counted the repeals and who warned that Māori authority was being stripped out of the state, they will be able to say that The Māori Green Lantern—alongside other vigilant voices—was watching, documenting and warning. Silence leaves no whakapapa of resistance. A repository does. * * * ## Koha — Support This Repository You might ask who supports The Māori Green Lantern to produce high-volume, evidence-based essays about our society, our institutions and the political decisions imposed upon whānau. The answer is you. There is no procession of corporate interests paying me to soften the language, bury the Tribunal findings or pretend that destroying Māori authority is administrative tidying. This mahi is supported through koha. Every koha supports the work of recording the repeals, following the legislation and preserving an evidence repository for mokopuna. It signals that rangatiratanga includes the power to support our own truth-tellers when Crown and corporate structures will not provide meaningful accountability. Kia kaha, whānau. Stay vigilant. Stay connected. If you are able, please consider a koha to help this voice continue. If you cannot koha, there is no shame and no pressure. Subscribe, follow, kōrero and share this kaupapa with whānau and friends. That is koha in itself. **Four Pathways Exist:** * **Koha:** Support The Māori Green Lantern through the Koha platform. * **Subscribe:** Receive essays directly and support through subscription. * **Direct Bank Transfer:** Ivor Jones, account number **03-1395-0099387-000**. * **Facebook:** Subscribe to The Māori Green Lantern on Facebook. * * * ## The Framework Of Tika, Pono And Tikanga I am not judging these governments solely by whether a minister followed parliamentary procedure. Colonial law can follow its own procedure perfectly while producing an unjust result. I apply four connected tests. > **Tika** asks whether the action was right, accurate, justified by evidence and directed towards a just outcome. > **Pono** asks whether the Crown acted honestly, consistently and in good faith. Did it say one thing and do another? Did it disclose the evidence? Did it honour its word? > **Tikanga** asks how power was exercised. Did the system preserve mana? Did it recognise whakapapa? Did it respect wairua? Did it involve whānau? Did it return people to wellbeing? > **Mauri** asks what the decision left alive. Did the policy increase Māori authority, capability, dignity, connection and wellbeing—or did it extract those things? Tikanga is not a decorative Māori word placed inside a Crown policy document. It is a system concerned with relationships, obligations, balance, authority, protection and restoration. Māori legal thinking has described tikanga as the first law of this land, grounded in whakapapa and carrying powers to define, protect, decide and reconcile.Moana Jackson’s account of tikanga and Māori authority explains those powers. Whakapapa does not mean an optional cultural biography. It connects human beings, ancestors, whenua, knowledge, tikanga and the spiritual world.Te Ara explains whakapapa as a framework binding and transmitting those relationships. Nor can wellbeing be reduced to whether a person receives an appointment or survives a hospital admission. Tā Mason Durie’s Te Whare Tapa Whā locates hauora across taha tinana, taha hinengaro, taha wairua and taha whānau, resting upon whenua.The Ministry of Health describes those four interconnected dimensions. A system that treats the body while crushing the spirit, excluding the whānau, dismissing whakapapa and denying authority is not well. It is merely operating. * * * ## The Waka Labour Would Not Defend Labour built a waka, invited Māori aboard, painted _partnership_ on the hull and then failed to defend it when the coalition arrived swinging axes. Te Aka Whai Ora was smashed. Labour’s water-services framework was repealed. Māori-ward protections were reversed. Section 7AA was removed. Treaty provisions across a government review covering 19 Acts were lined up for weakening, while the Waitangi Tribunal’s urgent inquiry examined reforms concerning 18 statutes.The Ministry of Justice records the 19-Act scope, while the Tribunal reporting concerns 18 statutes. Now Chris Hipkins stands beside the wreckage and promises Māori a safer voyage. > But he will not rebuild the waka. He will not restore Te Aka Whai Ora. He will not give the Waitangi Tribunal binding authority. He will not unconditionally restore stronger Tiriti obligations. He will not challenge Parliament’s possession of final authority.Hipkins states those positions in his Te Ao with Moana interview. He offers devolution, direct contracts, consultation and flexibility. Māori may paddle harder. The Crown keeps the steering blade. > Labour’s position is a doctrine of surrender disguised as caution. If the Right destroys a Māori institution, Labour treats that destruction as evidence that rebuilding it would be politically dangerous. The vandals win twice. First, they destroy the institution. Then, they frighten its builders into preserving the ruins. * * * ## The Political Autopsy Hipkins makes several meaningful commitments in his September 2026 interview with Moana Maniapoto. He says Māori did not cede sovereignty. He says Labour will repeal the Regulatory Standards Act, stop the coalition’s Treaty-clause legislation if it remains before Parliament, scrap move-on orders, restore the offshore exploration ban, reopen pay-equity work, restore locally delivered school lunches and increase direct support for Māori providers.The complete interview records those commitments. > He admits Labour failed to communicate and defend co-governance properly. He says the party too often abandoned Māori MPs to front debates that the Labour leadership should have owned.Hipkins makes that admission during the co-governance discussion. **That confession is important. It is also an indictment.** > Labour knew Māori MPs were being placed on the political front line. Labour knew co-governance was being misrepresented. Labour held the Treasury benches, the ministerial offices and the communications machinery of government. **Yet it left Māori MPs on the pā wall while much of the party sheltered behind polling, euphemism and political caution.** Hipkins now promises to stand beside them. **That would have been more useful before the wall was breached.** * * * ## What Labour Put Into Law Labour’s record was not a blank page. The Te Kāhui o Matariki Public Holiday Act 2022 established Matariki as a public holiday. The Local Electoral (Māori Wards and Māori Constituencies) Amendment Act 2021 removed the former machinery through which 5% of electors could force a binding poll against Māori wards. The Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Act 2022 established Te Aka Whai Ora as a dedicated Māori health authority. Labour also enacted its water-services reforms and maintained section 7AA as an operative Treaty duty within Oranga Tamariki. Those were material changes. They were not imaginary. They were not merely press releases. They were statutes and institutions. > They were also built so weakly into the constitutional ground that the next government tore most of them out with an ordinary parliamentary majority. Labour-Era Measure| What Happened| Position By September 2026| Tika, Pono And Tikanga Judgment ---|---|---|--- Matariki public holiday| Parliament enacted the holiday in 2022.Official legislation.| Retained| Recognition of mātauranga and whakapapa; mauri-enhancing Māori-ward reform| Labour removed the exceptional binding-poll mechanism in 2021.Official legislation.| Reversed through the 2024 Māori-wards legislation.Official 2024 Act.| Mana and representation placed back under majority veto Te Aka Whai Ora| Labour established a Māori health authority in 2022.Official legislation.| Disestablished on 30 June 2024.Ministry of Health.| Rangatiratanga and Māori-designed redress removed Water-services framework| Labour enacted three principal statutes| All three were repealed in February 2024.Parliamentary history.| Shared authority replaced by council-centred control Section 7AA| The provision imposed Treaty-related duties on the Oranga Tamariki chief executive| Repealed from 8 April 2025.Official legislation.| Whakapapa and whānau safeguards weakened In this declared five-reform sample, one remained and four were repealed or materially reversed. The calculation is simple: * Retained: 1÷5×100=20%1÷5×100=20%. * Repealed or materially reversed: 4÷5×100=80%4÷5×100=80%. This does **not** mean Labour enacted only five Māori-related measures. It means that, among these five major reforms selected for comparison, the measures involving representation, authority or structural power proved dramatically less durable than the measure centred on national recognition. Matariki survived. **Most of the sampled redistributions of authority did not.** The Crown welcomes Māori culture most enthusiastically when it can consume the performance without surrendering control of the theatre. * * * ## The Coalition’s Axe The coalition says its Māori-ward legislation restores democratic choice. Its 2024 Act required affected councils retaining Māori wards to hold binding polls with the 2025 local elections.The operative requirements appear in the 2024 Act. That defence sounds democratic only if the listener ignores who is being subjected to the additional veto. The former law allowed 5% of electors to force a binding poll specifically over Māori representation.The 2021 bill’s official explanatory material records the 5% threshold. General wards did not face that special obstacle. Māori representation did. That is not equal treatment. It is the majority being handed a specialised weapon against the minority and then being told the weapon is democratic because everyone can help fire it. The coalition did not restore neutrality. It restored an inequality. The Green Party publicly opposed that reversal, arguing that Māori wards provide equitable representation and that the additional referendum requirement threatens Māori participation and Tiriti obligations.The Green Party’s published position is available here. A majority empowered to vote on whether a minority deserves dedicated representation is not a neutral umpire. It is the dominant group deciding whether the people it has historically excluded may enter the room. * * * ## Example One For The Western Mind ### Te Aka Whai Ora The Core Claim: Te Aka Whai Ora moved Māori health beyond ordinary consultation by creating a dedicated statutory authority. It represented an institutional attempt to address the Crown’s long failure to reflect tino rangatiratanga within the health system.The Waitangi Tribunal describes the authority as redress for that long-standing failure. The Quantified Harm: The coalition assessed Te Aka Whai Ora after only ten months while allowing other health-system changes longer to develop. The Tribunal’s Part 2 report identified that disparity as a double standard.The Part 2 report records the ten-month assessment period. In Part 1, the Tribunal found breaches of five expressly named Treaty principles: 1. Tino rangatiratanga. 2. Good government. 3. Partnership. 4. Active protection. 5. Redress. The Tribunal found that the Crown did not consult Māori, did not gather substantive official advice, departed from responsible policymaking and made an ideologically driven decision despite knowing about grave Māori health inequities.The Tribunal states each of those findings. For the Western mind, imagine a government finally creates an authority to address a documented institutional failure. Before that authority has completed a meaningful operating cycle, a new government abolishes it without consulting the people most affected, without a proper evidential case and without a working replacement. Then the party that created it says rebuilding would be too risky because another government might smash it again. That is not prudent government. That is submitting to the vandal’s veto. The Tikanga Impact: Was Māori mana preserved? No. Māori rejected the decision but were denied the authority to determine what was best for hauora Māori.The Tribunal records that denial of self-determination. > Was whakapapa recognised? Not adequately. A national Māori institution designed around Māori health responsibilities was replaced by dispersed Crown-controlled arrangements. > Was wairua respected? No. The process treated health as an administrative structure to be rearranged, not as a relationship among tinana, hinengaro, wairua, whānau and whenua.The Ministry of Health’s own Māori-health framework identifies those interconnected dimensions. > Were whānau involved? The Tribunal found there had been no proper Māori engagement before the decision.Waitangi Tribunal. > Did the action return Māori to wellbeing? The Tribunal found the replacement remained unclear and recommended revisiting a stand-alone Māori health authority.Waitangi Tribunal. The Solution: Restore an independent Māori health authority through co-designed legislation. Give it protected commissioning powers, a defined appropriation, transparent reporting duties and legal safeguards against unilateral abolition without substantive Māori agreement. Fund Māori providers, but do not confuse delivering the Crown’s services with governing Māori health. A contractor receives Crown instructions. A rangatira exercises authority. Hipkins says he will not restore Te Aka Whai Ora because people were traumatised when the coalition destroyed it.His reasoning appears in the interview. The trauma is real. His conclusion is upside down. Māori workers carried the trauma. Māori patients lost the institution. Māori communities retained the inequity. The coalition kept the political victory. Labour avoided the political risk. **Compassion without restoration is surrender wearing a sympathetic face.** ## Example Two For The Western Mind ### Māori Wards The Core Claim: Labour’s 2021 reform removed the mechanism through which 5% of electors could force a binding poll against a council’s decision to establish Māori wards.The official bill explanation records both the threshold and the removal. The coalition restored binding polls in 2024 and required specified councils retaining Māori wards to hold them with the 2025 local elections.The 2024 Act sets out those requirements. The Quantified Harm: Under the former rule, the threshold was 5%. A petition supported by one elector in every 20 could trigger a binding vote over dedicated Māori representation. General wards were not subjected to the same Māori-specific countermand mechanism.The 2021 legislation sought to align Māori wards with general wards. For the Western mind, imagine that Parliament reserved several seats so rural communities could be heard—but urban voters were given a special referendum power to abolish those seats. Then imagine politicians describing the arrangement as equal democracy. Nobody would mistake the mechanism for neutrality. The Tikanga Impact: Did the system preserve mana? No. Māori representation was made conditional upon majority permission. Did it recognise whakapapa? Barely. Māori wards recognise a political relationship grounded in tangata whenua status, but the poll mechanism flattens that status into an ordinary demographic preference. Did it respect wairua? No. It converted belonging and constitutional relationship into a recurring public argument over whether Māori should have a seat. Did it involve whānau? It involved whānau as voters, but inside a structure where the wider majority retained the decisive veto. Did it return communities to wellbeing? It introduced instability into representation affecting decisions over whenua, wai, housing, infrastructure and local services. The Solution: Remove the special referendum barrier. Place Māori wards on at least the same legal footing as general wards. Require substantive engagement with mana whenua when representation arrangements are altered. The Green Party opposed the coalition’s reversal and described Māori wards as a mechanism for equitable local representation.Its public position is stated here. The coalition calls the special Māori veto democracy because “majority domination” would look ugly in a ministerial press release. ## Example Three For The Western Mind ### The Treaty-Clause Machine The Core Claim: The Ministry of Justice records that the government’s final review scope covered 19 Acts administered by 11 agencies.The Ministry’s review page records those numbers. The Waitangi Tribunal’s inquiry concerned reforms affecting 18 statutes and found that Cabinet had approved weaker obligations, including a ceiling no stronger than “take into account”, without adequate evidence or analysis of Māori impacts.The Tribunal findings are summarised here. In September 2026, the government advanced three omnibus bills under urgency. One standardised wording, one weakened operative duties and one repealed existing provisions.The parliamentary developments are reported here. The Quantified Harm: The verified numbers are: * 19 Acts in the government’s final review scope. * 11 administering agencies. * 18 statutes within the Tribunal’s urgent findings. * Three omnibus bills introduced in September 2026. These figures describe different stages and must not be falsely merged. For the Western mind, imagine a government reviewing protections against discrimination across 19 Acts. It decides that strong duties must be weakened to the lowest preferred standard, drafts three bills and drives them through first readings under urgency—after the specialist tribunal warns that the process lacks evidence and proper engagement. Now replace “protections against discrimination” with Treaty obligations. That is the machine. The Tikanga Impact: Did the process preserve mana? No. Māori interests were treated as a drafting problem to be reduced. Did it recognise whakapapa? No. Te Tiriti obligations grounded in the relationship between rangatira and the Crown were treated as inconsistent statutory clutter. Did it respect wairua? No. Sacred and intergenerational obligations were converted into a technical exercise in legislative uniformity. Were whānau involved? The Tribunal found meaningful engagement and co-design were missing.The Tribunal recommended that the programme be halted until meaningful engagement occurred. Would it return people to wellbeing? The Tribunal warned of significant prejudice, including possible damage to health, environmental outcomes, kaitiakitanga and rangatiratanga.The identified risks are recorded in the Tribunal reporting. The Solution: Stop the bills. Retain existing protections. Publish the evidential case for every proposed change. Conduct genuine co-design with Māori connected to each statute. Do not reduce enforceable obligations to the weak language of “take into account”. The Green Party has publicly opposed the weakening and repeal of Treaty clauses, describing the programme as a concealed continuation of the Treaty Principles Bill agenda.Its published position appears alongside its Māori-wards statements. This is the Treaty Principles Bill’s corpse being cut into smaller pieces and smuggled through Parliament in three coffins. * * * ## The Health Double-Cross The Waitangi Tribunal found that Te Aka Whai Ora had been co-designed with Māori, was widely supported by Māori and formed an integral part of an equitable health system.The Tribunal’s Part 1 findings confirm those points. The Crown could have retained the authority until a proper replacement was ready. It chose haste instead.The Tribunal expressly records that choice. > Hipkins now refuses restoration. **He does not establish that the authority’s purpose was wrong. He does not produce evidence that a collection of partnership boards and provider contracts will wield equivalent power. He does not explain how Māori commissioning authority survives when the Crown retains the appropriation, institutional design and final policy decision.** **His defence is durability: another government might repeal it. That is the cowardice doctrine. Under that doctrine, nothing transformative should ever be attempted because reactionaries may later destroy it.** Women’s rights could be reversed. Workers’ rights could be reversed. Environmental protections could be reversed. Treaty settlements could be undermined. Māori seats could be attacked. The possibility of future injustice does not excuse present surrender. It creates a duty to build stronger protection. * * * ## Devolution Is Not Rangatiratanga Model| Who Delivers?| Who Defines Success?| Who Controls Funding?| Who Holds Final Authority?| Mauri Effect ---|---|---|---|---|--- Crown contracting| Māori provider| Crown agency| Crown agency| Crown| Māori capability used, Māori authority constrained Flexible devolution| Māori provider| Negotiated within Crown settings| Crown appropriation| Crown| Some mana enhanced, dependency retained Co-design| Shared| Shared| Negotiated| Usually Crown| Better relationships, incomplete authority Co-governance| Shared institutions| Shared| Shared or protected| Shared| Stronger partnership and accountability Māori authority| Māori institution| Māori within an agreed public framework| Protected Māori-controlled allocation| Māori authority| Strongest expression of rangatiratanga Hipkins points to pandemic-era Māori providers and argues that local organisations achieved strong results when given resources and flexibility.His explanation appears in the provider-devolution section of the interview. That model has value. Māori providers carry whakapapa relationships, local knowledge and community trust that Crown agencies cannot manufacture through a procurement portal. But the political language slides between two different ideas: * Māori delivering services. * Māori governing the system. They are not the same. Hipkins offers movement towards flexible devolution. He refuses to restore the institution that came closer to Māori authority. > A contractor may decide how to perform work. An authority helps decide what the work is, what success means, where the resources go and how the system answers for failure. A contractor receives Crown money. A rangatira exercises mana. Labour is offering Māori a better seat in the engine room while refusing to share the bridge. * * * ## Sovereignty Inside A Crown Cage Hipkins says Māori did not cede sovereignty. He then says the Crown asserted sovereignty, New Zealand now has one Parliament and he does not propose to change that.The sovereignty exchange begins here. His position becomes: * Māori did not surrender sovereignty. * The Crown asserted sovereignty anyway. * Parliament now exercises final authority. * Labour will not alter that final authority. * Te Tiriti must operate only within the limits Parliament permits. He recognises the taking and preserves its institutional product. The same ceiling appears in his refusal to give the Waitangi Tribunal binding authority. The Tribunal may investigate, identify breaches and recommend remedies—but the Crown retains the legal freedom to ignore it.Hipkins rejects changing the Tribunal’s recommendatory status. The constitutional circuit is obscene in its simplicity: **The Crown Makes The Decision → Māori Suffer Prejudice → The Tribunal Investigates → The Tribunal Finds Breaches → The Tribunal Recommends Action → The Crown Decides Whether The Crown Will Obey.** Sir Taihākurei Durie has similarly observed that the Tribunal generally has recommendatory powers and that governments do not have to follow them.His discussion of the Tribunal’s constitutional position is available through E-Tangata. That is not accountable government. It is the defendant retaining control of the remedy after losing the case. * * * ## Seven Concealed Connections ### Destruction Becomes Precedent The coalition abolished Te Aka Whai Ora. Hipkins now uses the harm caused by that abolition as a reason not to restore it.His explanation appears here. The coalition swings the axe. Labour preserves the stump. ### Recognition Survives Redistribution Matariki remains law while Māori health authority, Māori-ward protection and water reform were dismantled or reversed.The Matariki Act remains in force. A public holiday recognises Māori identity. It does not control national health commissioning, local representation, infrastructure governance or public money. Recognition is permitted. Power is contested. ### Universalism Conceals Control Hipkins repeatedly talks about policies benefiting everybody.His universal-policy argument appears throughout the interview. Universal services matter. But equal access to a system producing unequal outcomes does not automatically create equity. The state can offer everyone the same ladder after digging the hole deeper beneath Māori feet. ### Advice Replaces Enforceability The Tribunal found serious breaches over Te Aka Whai Ora. The authority remained abolished.Waitangi Tribunal. The Tribunal recommended halting the Treaty-clause reforms. The government advanced three bills under urgency anyway.The September 2026 parliamentary action is reported here. A watchdog that may bark but cannot compel the burglar to return the property is not enough. ### Trauma Is Weaponised Hipkins recognises the trauma caused when Te Aka Whai Ora was abolished. He then uses that trauma to justify leaving the institution dead.His position is recorded here. Māori carry the injury. The coalition keeps the policy victory. Labour avoids the fight. ### “Appropriate” Means Crown Permission Hipkins promises stronger Tiriti references where Labour thinks they are appropriate.The rapid-fire exchange records that qualification. Who decides? The Cabinet. Not hapū. Not iwi. Not the Tribunal. Not the whānau who live with the consequences. Labour puts Te Tiriti back inside a ministerial dimmer switch. ### The Attack Is A Pattern The same machinery appears across welfare, education, climate, health and Treaty law: Māori authority is reduced, universal rhetoric disguises unequal effects and Crown control is presented as neutrality. I previously traced how punitive welfare settings disproportionately consume Māori whānau inThe Traffic Light Taiaha. I also documented how corporate access and legislative design can bypass ordinary accountability inSwimming In Their Sea. **These are not identical cases. They reveal a common architecture: concentrated decision-making at the top, weakened accountability below and whānau absorbing the consequences.** * * * ## My Election Judgment This is a public editorial judgment based on published conduct and policy. It is addressed to every eligible voter—not tailored to anyone because of ethnicity, religion or private personal information. I do not believe the National–ACT–New Zealand First coalition should be returned to power in the November election. It abolished Te Aka Whai Ora without proper Māori consultation or a ready replacement, restored special binding polls over Māori wards, repealed section 7AA, dismantled Labour’s water legislation and advanced three bills weakening or repealing Treaty provisions despite Tribunal opposition.The health findings, Māori-wards legislation, section 7AA repeal andTreaty-bill processestablish that public record. That record fails Tika. The evidence did not justify the haste or scale of the destruction. It fails Pono. The Crown’s professed commitment to partnership sits beside processes the Tribunal found lacked good faith, proper evidence or meaningful engagement. It fails Tikanga. The programme did not preserve Māori mana, recognise the authority carried through whakapapa, respect wairua, centre whānau or return Māori to wellbeing. It depleted mauri. Based on the public positions currently available, my editorial support is for the Green Party. That is not because any political party deserves blind loyalty. It is because the Greens have publicly opposed the Māori-ward rollback and Treaty-clause weakening, have stated support for tino rangatiratanga and have proposed an ongoing protected funding structure for marae, hapū and their communities through Te Waonui a Tāne.The Māori-wards position is here, and the 2026 marae policy is here. Those are party promises, not guaranteed outcomes. They must be tested against budgets, drafting, implementation and future conduct. But on the evidence available, their stated direction is closer to the standard of Tika, Pono, Tikanga and mauri-enhancing government than the coalition’s documented programme of repeal. My challenge to every voter is simple: Read the legislation. Read the Tribunal findings. Read the parties’ policies. Then decide whether the people who dismantled Māori authority deserve another term holding the axe. My answer is no. * * * ## The Verdict Labour deserves credit for the Māori reforms it enacted. **It deserves judgment for failing to defend them, explain them and make them durable.The coalition deserves direct responsibility for destroying or reversing them. Hipkins deserves scrutiny for his answer to that destruction: repeal some laws, stop some damage, finance some providers—but do not restore the strongest Māori health institution Labour created.** That is the fatal weakness in his offer. > If Māori did not cede sovereignty, acknowledging that truth while protecting the system created by unilateral Crown assertion is not courage. > If Te Aka Whai Ora represented redress, refusing to restore it because the Right might destroy it again is not prudence. > If the Waitangi Tribunal repeatedly proves breaches but cannot require a remedy, preserving that weakness is not accountability. > If Te Tiriti applies only where a Labour Cabinet considers it appropriate, Māori rights remain conditional upon Crown comfort. **Hipkins is not offering the restoration of Māori power. He is offering a kinder administrator for its containment. The coalition’s message is that Māori power must be destroyed. Labour’s message is that Māori power must be moderated until Pākehā voters stop feeling nervous. Both place Pākehā political comfort ahead of Māori constitutional justice.** The first is an assault. The second is an apology delivered with the handbrake still on. > Kaua e pōhēhē ko te kirimana ratonga he rangatiratanga - **Do not mistake a service contract for sovereignty.** > Kaua e pōhēhē ko te kupu whakaari he ture - Do not mistake a promise for law. > And never allow any party to mourn the whare it refuses to rebuild. **Kia kaha, whānau. Stay vigilant. Stay connected. And if you are able, consider a koha to ensure this voice continues.** * * * ## Disclaimer This essay distinguishes verified facts from analysis and political opinion. It addresses legislation, public policy and politicians acting in their public capacities. It does not allege criminal conduct or claim knowledge of private motives. Descriptions such as “white supremacist”, “vandalism”, “cowardice”, “surrender” and “political execution” are evaluative opinions based on the cited conduct, institutional effects and Treaty findings. Any material factual error should be corrected promptly and transparently when reliable evidence is supplied. The Māori Green Lantern welcomes sourced corrections and substantive public replies.

Former Speaker and Labour MP Adrian Paki Rurawhe has died after illness. A respected Rātana and Ngāti Apa leader, he served as MP 2014–2024, including Speaker in 2022–23

Kia ora koutou katoa. I am Ivor Jones. I am Te Arawa and Ngāti Pikiao, with Welsh whakapapa. I am The Māori Green Lantern. I am not a newsroom pretending to be one man. I am one man doing work that should require a newsroom. > I research the claims. I follow the money. I map the organisations. I read the legislation, reports, policy papers and public records. I compare what politicians say with what their governments do. I turn the evidence into essays, podcasts, videos and permanent public records so our whānau do not have to fight organised propaganda armed with nothing more than a Facebook comment and a bad feeling. Then Moana Maniapoto published a kōrero about journalists needing to collaborate because the powerful already do. The powerful have figured out how to work together. Journalists need to catch upAnalysis: It was a set of interviews I did on the Māori delegation to Israel for Te Ao with Moana recently – and the release of the Nicky Hager book Dirty Work – that took me backTe Ao Māori NewsMoana Maniapoto, Te Ao with Moana Moana did not mention me. She did not endorse me. She did not identify The Māori Green Lantern. That boundary matters. **Pono requires me to state it without wriggling.** > But the mahi she describes—fact verification, data collection, network mapping, following the money, resisting disinformation, translating complex evidence and building Indigenous collaboration—is the mahi I am already doing through The Māori Green Lantern. That is the focus of this essay. This is not an essay about why Moana should have named me. **It is an essay about why the work she says democracy needs already exists, why it is being carried largely by one independent Māori researcher, and why whānau must decide whether they want that work to survive.** > I will show how organised political power collaborates; how The Māori Green Lantern performs the accountability mahi that collaboration makes necessary; how **Tika, Pono and Tikanga** create a stronger standard than performative “balance”; and why supporting independent Māori fact-checking is not charity. It is democratic infrastructure. I will also give three plain examples for the Western mind: each identifying the evidence, quantifying the harm, explaining the solution and testing the outcome against tikanga. ### I Would Love You To Click I would love for you to click on my essays because they contain a wealth of sourced information you can use in daily life: when you read a poll, hear a minister blame Māori, see a lobby group presented as grassroots, or watch a public asset being dressed for sale. For this kaupapa, there is an audio podcast that lays out the argument in detail. ## The Deep Dive Podcast Indigenous truth versus the lie machine 0:00 /869.842721 1× Listen to a lively conversation between two hosts, unpacking and connecting topics in the sources of this essay. I apologise in advance for the AI's very harsh pronounciation of reo. Please dont shoot me, :). There is a short video explaining the core issue. ## Youtube Video Like video? Here is a short video suppporting the essay. Again, don't shoot the messenger please because of AI's pronounciation. :) For long-form readers, there is this fully cited essay. That is not simply a content package. It is an archive. I am building a repository so that our mokopuna can look back and say: > At least we knew The Māori Green Lantern—and a courageous few others—were warning us. They will not have to ask whether anybody saw the machine being constructed. They will have the dates, the documents, the statements, the denials, the connections and the consequences. They will know that somebody was keeping the receipts. * * * ## The Lie Machine Has A War Room Organised political power does not wake up each morning and improvise. Lobby groups test messages. Pollsters measure emotional reactions. political parties repeat the successful language. Friendly commentators normalise it. Social-media pages strip away context and push the most inflammatory version. Algorithms reward anger. By the time policy arrives, the target population has already been turned into the problem. That is not a description of every campaign or every disagreement. > It is the pattern alleged in Nicky Hager’s _Dirty Work_ , where he argues that opposition to Three Waters became an anti-Māori political weapon rather than a good-faith dispute about water infrastructure. The Taxpayers’ Union rejects that characterisation and says Hager failed to offer it a reasonable opportunity to answer before publication; its response should be read directly in Jordan Williams’ statement. Hager’s central account and the organisation’s denials have also been reported by RNZ and The Spinoff. I examined that machinery in “The Taxpayer Mask”. My argument was not that every person opposing Three Waters was racist. It was that anti-Māori grievance became politically useful, financially rewarding and structurally connected to a wider neoliberal network. The Taxpayers’ Union describes itself as predominantly supported by small donations, acknowledges its membership of the Atlas Network, and says industry money represents less than three percent of its revenue. Jordan Williams explained that position directly in an extended RNZ interview. That response belongs in the record because fact-checking that hides contrary evidence is not fact-checking. It is propaganda wearing reading glasses. The political right understands collaboration. It understands message discipline, donor cultivation, repetition, emotional targeting and institutional camouflage. Meanwhile, independent researchers are expected to defeat that machinery between doing the washing and checking whether the power bill has been paid. That is not a fair contest. It is a structural ambush. * * * ## The Māori Green Lantern Is Not A Hobby The Māori Green Lantern is the digital manifestation of Ivor Jones as an independent watchdog against misinformation, racism, white supremacy and neoliberalism. The publication analyses news, political claims and social-media narratives through a Māori framework and translates complex material into plain language. That is fact-checking, but it is not the sterile version that merely stamps **TRUE** or **FALSE** on a sentence and then walks away from the wreckage. A claim has whakapapa. > It has an author, a funder, an intended audience, a distribution network, a political purpose and a beneficiary. > It may contain technically accurate words arranged to produce a dishonest conclusion. > It may omit the history that gives the statement meaning. It may use “equal treatment” to conceal unequal power. **My work asks who said it, who paid for it, who amplified it, who benefits from it and what happens to whānau when it becomes policy.** In “Digital Banishment”, I examined how platform systems and the retreat from fact-checking can marginalise voices already pushed to the edge. In “The Shield They Built For Themselves”, I examined official election-protection structures and the danger of treating institutional authority as a substitute for accountability. In “The Crown Ripped Māori Hands From The Health System”, I tested health reform against Tika, Pono and Tikanga rather than accepting administrative targets as proof of wellbeing. In “The Ten-Point Con Job Has A Whakapapa”, I applied transparent arithmetic to political promises rather than swallowing the headline number. > This is the mahi Moana is talking about. The difference is that global conferences discuss building teams to perform it. **The Māori Green Lantern is already doing it without the team.** * * * ## Koha Consideration You might ask who pays The Māori Green Lantern to produce this volume of research, fact-checking and public education about Aotearoa. You do. The Māori Green Lantern is supported through koha and subscriptions. There is no procession of corporate entities lavishly supporting this mahi. Every koha says whānau are prepared to support the accountability that Crown and corporate structures too often fail to provide. It says rangatiratanga includes the power to support our own truth tellers. Kia kaha, whānau. Stay vigilant. Stay connected. If you are able, consider a koha so this independent Māori fact-checking voice can continue tracing the money, mapping the networks and preserving the evidence. If you cannot koha, no worries. Subscribe, follow, kōrero and share the work with whānau and friends. That is koha too. Four pathways exist: * Koha—Support The Māori Green Lantern * Subscribe To The Māori Green Lantern * Direct bank transfer: **Ivor Jones, 03-1395-0099387-000** * Support The Māori Green Lantern On Facebook * * * ## Tika, Pono And Tikanga **Tika** asks whether the claim, action or system is right, just and properly aligned. **Pono** asks whether the evidence is truthful, whether the deeds match the words and whether contrary facts have been honestly disclosed. **Tikanga** asks a deeper set of questions: * Did the system preserve mana? * Did it recognise whakapapa? * Did it respect wairua? * Did it involve whānau? * Did it return people to wellbeing? * Did it leave the mauri stronger than it found it? Western bureaucracy often measures motion and calls it progress. How quickly was the application processed? How many targets were met? How much regulation was removed? How many dollars were allegedly saved? > Tikanga asks what happened to the people. **A policy can be efficient while destroying mana. It can be lawful while violating whakapapa. It can meet a target while depleting mauri. It can treat everybody “the same” while preserving every structural advantage held by the powerful.** Research into Māori journalism records that Māori journalists commonly work through obligations such as whakawhanaungatanga, manaakitanga, tika and pono, with the objective of upholding the mana of those involved rather than pretending the journalist exists outside all relationships. That account can be read in E-Tangata’s examination of tikanga and journalism. The Māori Green Lantern does not claim a magical exemption from error. Tikanga increases the duty to correct error. Pono requires uncertainty to be named. Tika requires the evidence capable of disproving a claim to be sought before publication. That is not weakness. **That is how the taiaha stays sharp without becoming reckless.** * * * ## Example One: One Researcher Against An Industrial System ### The Evidence During India’s general election, the Shakti collective brought fact-checkers and publishers together to identify, translate and distribute corrections. It circulated more than 6,600 fact-checks in more than 10 languages, according to the Global Investigative Journalism Network and DataLEADS. DataLEADS reported a 92 percent increase in election fact-checks, a 180 percent rise in regional-language checks and a fourfold increase in teams involved. Those results were produced through organised collaboration—not by telling one exhausted researcher to post harder. ### The Quantified Harm The scale mismatch is brutal. Shakti had a consortium. The Māori Green Lantern is an individual publication. If thousands of false or misleading claims circulate across platforms, one person cannot research, verify, write, record, edit, publish, distribute, moderate and archive at industrial speed without something eventually breaking. That something may be the publishing schedule. It may be income. It may be health. It may be the researcher. **The lie machine benefits either way.** ### The Western Explanation Imagine asking one volunteer firefighter to protect an entire city while the arsonists share vehicles, fuel, maps and radios. Then imagine criticising the firefighter for not producing enough content. That is the absurdity. ### The Tikanga Impact Tikanga recognises that knowledge work is relational. It depends on whakapapa, trust, reciprocity and responsibility. When an independent Māori researcher is treated as endlessly extractable, the audience consumes the product while the producer’s mauri is depleted. That is not manaakitanga. It is digital strip-mining. ### The Solution The solution is a distributed Māori fact-verification network in which researchers, journalists, lawyers, economists, data specialists, designers and iwi knowledge holders can share evidence without surrendering editorial rangatiratanga. The Māori Green Lantern should remain independent. Collaboration must strengthen its mana—not absorb it into a larger institution and erase the whakapapa of the mahi. ### Example Two: Treaty Removal Disguised As Tidying ### The Evidence The coalition Government decided to alter Treaty references across 19 statutes. Its own description divides the programme into two references made more specific, seven repealed, and 10 constrained so the legal standard goes no higher than “take into account.” The arithmetic is plain: **2 + 7 + 10 = 19** , as recorded in the Government’s announcement. The Government says this creates clarity and consistency and says iwi consultation and a select-committee process will occur. That is its stated justification, and readers should examine it directly. The Waitangi Tribunal reached a materially different judgment. After one education measure was considered separately, its inquiry into the remaining 18 laws found breaches involving good government, active protection and partnership. The findings and division between the inquiries are explained in E-Tangata’s account of the Tribunal report. ### The Quantified Harm The harm is not one stray phrase removed from one forgotten statute. It is a programme touching 19 laws. Seven references are marked for repeal. Ten are marked for restriction. Together, **17 of the 19 statutes are subjected to either removal or an imposed ceiling on the Treaty standard**. Calculation: **7 repeals + 10 capped references = 17 affected by removal or restriction**. That figure does not prove the effect of every amendment will be identical. It establishes the scale and direction of the Government’s own announced allocation. ### The Western Explanation Imagine a company promising to honour a contract while deleting or weakening the contract’s protections across 17 operating manuals. The company then calls the exercise “clarification.” Nobody in a boardroom would be stupid enough to accept that without reading every amendment. Māori are expected to smile while the Crown does it to Te Tiriti. ### The Tikanga Impact Whakapapa makes Te Tiriti a living relationship, not decorative wording. Removing its legal visibility weakens the pathways through which descendants can call the Crown back to its obligations. Mana is not preserved when one party rewrites the rules governing the relationship. Whānau are not involved merely because consultation occurs after the political programme has already been selected. Mauri is depleted when the Crown treats Te Tiriti as administrative clutter and Māori resistance as an obstacle to efficiency. ### The Solution Every proposed change should be paused until affected iwi and hapū have participated at the point of design, not after Cabinet has chosen the destination. Independent Māori researchers must compare Cabinet papers, regulatory assessments, ministerial claims, Tribunal findings and legislative text so the public sees the entire record. That is exactly why The Māori Green Lantern must exist. ## Example Three: Journalism Under Coordinated Attack ### The Evidence The International Federation of Journalists reports that at least 240 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza. Moana’s account places that horror beside the practical question of how journalists cooperate when governments, armed forces, corporations and digital platforms possess vastly greater resources. More than 1,500 participants from 135 countries attended GIJC25, according to both Moana’s account and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. The Indigenous News Alliance provides one answer: Indigenous and Indigenous-affairs newsrooms share reporting, coordinate coverage and build cross-border relationships while retaining their distinct voices. ### The Quantified Harm The number 240 represents a minimum, not a rhetorical flourish. Each death removes knowledge, relationships, local access and memory from the public record. A murdered journalist cannot correct a lie. A silenced newsroom cannot document the next attack. An exhausted independent researcher may remain alive yet still be removed from public life through financial starvation, algorithmic suppression or relentless abuse. The scale differs. The principle does not: destroy the messenger and power gets to edit reality. ### The Western Explanation A society would not expect a court to function after dismissing its investigators, burning its files and leaving its only witness to pay for the prosecution. Yet democracies repeatedly expect journalism to investigate organised wealth while begging that same wealth for advertising, platform reach or charitable mercy. That model is not independent. It is a hostage negotiation with branding. ### The Tikanga Impact Journalism carries mauri when it keeps relationships alive, preserves memory and returns useful knowledge to the people from whom the story came. It depletes mauri when communities are mined for trauma, sources are discarded after publication and Indigenous knowledge becomes raw material for somebody else’s institutional prestige. The Indigenous News Alliance model matters because it connects collaboration with Indigenous authority. The goal is not simply to put brown faces inside an unchanged machine. It is to protect rangatiratanga over the stories, evidence and relationships. ### The Solution The Māori Green Lantern should be connected to a wider Indigenous verification network without being swallowed by it. That network could share: * Document verification * Legal review * Data analysis * Source protection * Translation * Cross-border pattern recognition * Secure evidence storage * Republishable fact-checks * Emergency support during harassment or legal threats The powerful already share strategy. Truth tellers must share infrastructure. * * * ## The Five Connections Power Hopes You Miss ### Connection One: Disinformation Is Policy Preparation The propaganda does not sit harmlessly online. It creates emotional permission for political action. > Māori are framed as privileged; Māori institutions are then dismantled in the name of equality. Te Tiriti is framed as divisive; Treaty protections are then restricted in the name of clarity. Environmental safeguards are framed as red tape; property rights are elevated over collective protection. **The policy arrives after the public has been trained to resent the people it harms.** ### Connection Two: Neoliberalism Needs Racism Neoliberalism transfers power from the public sphere toward property, markets and private accumulation. But “make wealthy interests wealthier” is a miserable election slogan. **It therefore needs a scapegoat.** > Māori rights, welfare recipients, public servants, migrants and environmental protections become the alleged reason ordinary people are struggling. Anger is directed sideways or downward while wealth and power travel upward. > When I describe this Government as advancing a white-supremacist neoliberal programme, that is an evidence-based political judgment, not an allegation that every minister privately subscribes to an explicit doctrine of racial supremacy. The basis is the cumulative pattern identified in reports warning of coordinated attacks on Māori rights and racial equity, including analysis from the Aotearoa Centre for Indigenous Peoples and the Law, repeated adverse findings from the Waitangi Tribunal, and the Government’s own programme for altering Treaty protections across legislation. The label describes the structure and its consequences. ### Connection Three: Platform Power Rewards The Arsonists Digital platforms reward attention, and outrage holds attention. **A careful explanation needs context. A racist slogan needs a meme.** The lie reaches thousands before the correction has finished downloading the Cabinet paper. The fact-checker must prove each link while the propagandist needs only manufacture suspicion. That is why my investigation into digital banishment matters. Platform architecture is not separate from political power. It determines which voices are encountered, which are buried and which are repeatedly delivered to users because anger is profitable. ### Connection Four: Archives Are Political Infrastructure Today’s article becomes tomorrow’s evidence. A searchable archive allows whānau to compare a politician’s current denial with the earlier announcement. It allows researchers to reconstruct the network. It prevents each scandal being treated as an isolated accident. > That is why The Māori Green Lantern is a repository, not just a stream of opinions. Whakapapa methodology asks where the claim came from, what it descended from and what it produced. An archive protects that chain from deliberate forgetting. ### Connection Five: Exhaustion Is A Form Of Censorship Power does not always need to ban a critic. Sometimes it only needs to make the work economically impossible. > If an independent researcher must choose between investigating a political network and earning enough to survive, the powerful receive silence without passing a censorship law. If a platform suppresses reach, the publisher disappears without being formally removed. If abuse becomes constant, withdrawal can be made to look voluntary. **That is the quiet genius of neoliberal censorship: the voice remains technically free while being materially unable to speak.** * * * ## What Mauri-Enhancing Journalism Looks Like Mauri-depleting journalism extracts a quote, packages conflict, harvests attention and abandons the community with the consequences. **Mauri-enhancing journalism returns knowledge.** > It names the source. It discloses uncertainty. It preserves contrary evidence. It corrects mistakes. It follows relationships across time. It recognises that an investigation can affect the mana, safety and wellbeing of real people. For The Māori Green Lantern, that means: * **Tika:** testing whether the framing is just, not merely whether each isolated sentence can survive a lawyer. * **Pono:** linking readers directly to the evidence and disclosing what could not be verified. * **Tikanga:** examining whether systems uphold mana, whakapapa, wairua and whānau. * **Kaitiakitanga:** protecting the information environment as a taonga held for future generations. * **Rangatiratanga:** retaining Māori authority over the kaupapa, framing, archive and direction of the work. * **Manaakitanga:** remaining scathing toward power while refusing to treat vulnerable people as collateral material. This does not require false neutrality. A fire investigator does not become biased by identifying petrol. * * * ## Why The Māori Green Lantern Must Survive The case for The Māori Green Lantern is not that I am always correct. **The case is that Aotearoa needs an independent Māori researcher prepared to read the material power hopes nobody reads, connect the organisations power presents as separate, and preserve the record power would prefer forgotten.** > The World Economic Forum’s experts ranked misinformation and disinformation as the leading global risk over the following two years. That assessment is documented in the Global Risks Report 2025 and corroborated by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Yet independent fact-checkers are expected to fight that threat through personal sacrifice. That is obscene. > Nobody tells an epidemiologist to monitor a pandemic using koha and spare evenings. Nobody tells a fire service to sell subscriptions while the city burns. But an independent Māori fact-checker confronting organised political misinformation is expected to research, write, record, publish, defend and distribute the work while pretending exhaustion is evidence of commitment. The powerful have a network. **The Māori Green Lantern has whānau.** **The question is whether whānau recognise that sharing, subscribing and giving koha are not applause after the work. They are part of the infrastructure that makes the work possible.** * * * ## My Election Verdict The 2026 general election will be held on 7 November. From 29 September, that leaves 39 days. > In my opinion, this coalition Government must not be returned to power. That judgment rests on its documented record: the dismantling of Te Aka Whai Ora, attacks on Treaty protections, the reduction or removal of Treaty references, the elevation of property-rights ideology, the weakening of Māori representation and repeated Waitangi Tribunal findings of Crown breaches. The Tribunal’s current reports and inquiries are collected on the Waitangi Tribunal website, while the scale of the proposed Treaty-reference changes is confirmed by the Government itself. > I believe this Government has treated Māori rights as negotiable, Māori institutions as disposable and neoliberal doctrine as though it were a natural law. > It is not conservative stewardship. > It is constitutional vandalism with a communications team. **For the party vote, I recommend the Green Party. That recommendation is my political opinion, based on its stated commitment to upholding Te Tiriti, resourcing marae, supporting te reo Māori and opposing cuts to Māori broadcasting. Those positions can be checked against the** Green Party’s published 2026 Māori commitments and media statements**.** The Greens are not beyond criticism. No political party should be. Support must never become obedience. But among the available parliamentary choices, I believe the Green Party offers the clearest alignment with climate responsibility, social justice, Māori media, Te Tiriti obligations and collective wellbeing. > Do not vote for another term of calculated amnesia. > Do not reward a coalition that weakens Te Tiriti and calls the vandalism clarity. **Vote for a future in which whenua, wai, whānau and mokopuna matter more than the appetite of donors, lobbyists and property ideologues.** In my view: **party vote Green.** Then keep watching them too. Fact-checking does not end when the preferred side wins. * * * ## Final Kupu Moana Maniapoto did not name The Māori Green Lantern. She did something more useful. > She named the mahi. She described the need for journalists and fact-checkers to collaborate, follow the money, map networks, verify information, resist coordinated propaganda and build Indigenous alliances. Her complete kōrero should be read directly at Te Ao Māori News. **The Māori Green Lantern is already doing that mahi.** Not perfectly. Not effortlessly. Not with the resources the work deserves. But publicly, independently and with receipts. The powerful built a war room. **I built an archive.** Now whānau must decide which one our mokopuna inherit. _Kia mau ki te tika. Kia mau ki te pono. Kia mau ki te tikanga._ _Hui e, tāiki e._ * * * ## Public Interest And Legal Notice This essay concerns political power, public policy, lobbying, journalism, misinformation and the 2026 election. Those are matters of substantial public interest. Factual claims are linked to public sources. Statements describing white supremacy, neoliberalism, constitutional vandalism or political machinery are expressly presented as analysis and opinion based on the cited record, not as allegations of undisclosed criminal conduct. No malice is intended toward any named person. Criticism concerns public roles, published claims, institutional conduct and documented policy. Corrections supported by credible evidence will be considered and, where warranted, published transparently.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the number of meals being delivered a day in 2025.

Sarah Hirini (Ngāti Kahungunu) sits down for an in-depth conversation about life on and off the field. Two Olympic golds, two Rugby World Cups and 283 matches later, Hirini reflects on the journey tha...

A central North Island iwi has delivered a public dressing-down to Manawatū-Whanganui’s regional council over its handling of conflict-of-interest complaints.

I am Ivor Jones, The Māori Green Lantern. Ko Te Arawa, ko Ngāti Pikiao ōku iwi. I carry Welsh whakapapa too. I am a tohunga mau rākau wairua and a kaitiaki of evidence. I do not raise the taiaha because a politician irritates me. I raise it when power scrubs its own fingerprints from the weapon and tells whānau the bloodstain is “cohesion”. _Tika_ means what is correct, just, fair and appropriate, while _pono_ means what is true, honest, genuine and sincere, according to Te Aka Māori Dictionary and a Te Puni Kōkiri case study. Pā Hēnare Tate’s formulation is even sharper: tika is doing the right thing; pono is doing it the right way, as explained by E-Tangata. That is the test I apply here. Is selecting Murray Chong **tika** after his documented public record? Is Shane Jones’s effort to reduce that record to “one or three colourful lapses” **pono**? My conclusion is no. Not remotely. ### The Tika And Pono Test > This essay follows five connected threads: NZ First’s selection of Murray Chong; Chong’s record concerning Māori representation, te reo Māori, the Confederate flag and an inclusive procurement policy; Shane Jones’s attempt to wash that record clean with the words “loyalty” and “cohesion”; the measurable local and national damage to Māori representation; and the practical choice facing voters on 7 November 2026. I would love you to click through and use this essay, because it contains a storehouse of information you can carry into the smoko room, the dinner table, the marae, the workplace and the voting booth. I have created an audio podcast that lays out this kaupapa in detail, a short video that explains it plainly, and this long-form cited essay for readers who want the complete paper trail. This is not content confetti to disappear down a corporate algorithm. It is a repository for our mokopuna. One day they may look back at this period and say: _at least The Māori Green Lantern, alongside the other voices who refused silence, warned us while the machinery was still moving._ * * * ## The Candidate And The Laundry Cycle NZ First announced Chong as its New Plymouth candidate and called him a “dedicated local advocate” committed to honest public service, transparency and prudent public spending; his campaign slogan includes “one country, one people, one law, one flag”, according to the party’s published announcement and RNZ’s report. New Zealand First names New Plymouth veteran councillor Murray Chong as election candidate*Correction: An earlier version of this article said Murray Chong was New Plymouth’s Deputy Mayor. He is one of three deputy mayor’s who will be in rotation in May 2027.RNZRNZ | Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa That official varnish omits the splinters. In 2025, Mayor Neil Holdom ordered Chong out of the council chamber after Chong called a procurement strategy “racist”, withdrew the remark, and then repeated it. The policy aimed to save money and produce local economic, social, cultural and environmental gains, including better partnerships with iwi, hapū and Māori businesses, according to 1News and Local Democracy Reporting. Chong’s supporters said he had used the wrong words and deserved some slack; councillor Dinnie Moeahu rejected that excuse and asked what opponents of Māori inclusion feared they had lost, while Holdom said leadership should be inclusive rather than divisive, according to the same 1News report. That counter-evidence matters. Pono requires the whole record, not only the pieces that sharpen my argument. Chong abstained when the council voted in 2024 to retain its Māori ward, citing threats to his safety, and a bullet had struck his distinctive vehicle during the public controversy, as reported by RNZ’s candidate profile and the New Zealand Herald. That reported violence is indefensible. Political disagreement never licenses threats, intimidation or gunfire. But condemning violence against Chong does not require anyone to launder his politics. In 2019, he apologised after saying he was ashamed to sing the national anthem in te reo Māori, according to RNZ. Earlier reporting also recorded his defence of displaying the Confederate flag at an Americana event; he acknowledged its association with slavery but framed it through childhood television nostalgia, as reported by the Otago Daily Times. These are not identical acts and must not be falsely collapsed into one legal allegation. They are, however, a public pattern: resistance to specific Māori representation, hostility to a policy designed partly to include Māori suppliers, a recorded rejection of the Māori-language anthem, and defence of a symbol inseparable from racial oppression. In my evidence-based opinion, that pattern makes NZ First’s language of “cohesion” look less like principle and more like industrial-strength political detergent. * * * ## Jones Puts Loyalty Above Accountability Shane Jones backs NZ First’s controversial New Plymouth candidate selectionNew Zealand First deputy leader Shane Jones is backing the party’s controversial candidate selection for the New Plymouth electorate.RNZRNZ | Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa At a New Plymouth rally attended by about 300 supporters, Shane Jones said Chong was valuable and loyal to the elements making up NZ First’s identity. Jones dismissed the controversies as “one or three colourful lapses” and claimed voters would instead consider national cohesion, cost of living and industry, according to RNZ’s rally report. There is the reveal. Jones does not deny the record. He miniaturises it. Conduct affecting Māori language, Māori representation, racial symbolism and Māori economic participation is pushed through the rinse cycle until it emerges as colour — vivid perhaps, embarrassing perhaps, but supposedly superficial. Chong told RNZ that many controversies were old, that he had learned, and that his strong electoral record proved community respect; he pointed to receiving twice as many votes as other candidates, according to RNZ. The official 2025 result supports the narrow electoral claim: his 9,566 first preferences were 2.02 times David Bublitz’s 4,743, according to NPDC’s final result. But popularity is not moral absolution. A large vote proves that many people chose a candidate. It does not prove every statement was tika, every symbol pono, or every affected community unharmed. Elections confer office; they do not wash history. * * * ## The Deep Dive Podcast Murray Chong and the Mori Ward Battle 0:00 /1267.763084 1× Listen to a lively conversation between two hosts, unpacking and connecting topics in the sources of this essay. I apologise in advance for the AI's very harsh pronounciation of reo. Please dont shoot me, :). ## Youtube Video Like video? Here is a short video suppporting the essay. Again, don't shoot the messenger please because of AI's pronounciation. :) * * * ## A Koha To Keep The Laundry Lights On You might ask who pays The Māori Green Lantern to produce high-volume, evidence-heavy essays that follow the stains power wants hidden. The answer is whānau through koha. No corporate queue stands behind this mahi. Every koha says that accountability will not be left to the same Crown and political structures being examined; it says rangatiratanga includes the power to **support** our own truth tellers. Kia kaha, whānau. Stay vigilant. Stay connected. If you are able, consider a koha so this voice can keep testing political claims against tika, pono and the public record. If you cannot koha, no worries. Subscribe or follow The Māori Green Lantern, kōrero about the evidence, and share it with whānau and friends. That is koha too. * **Koha — Support This Mahi:** Make A Voluntary Contribution * **Subscribe — Receive The Essays Directly:** Support The Māori Green Lantern * **Direct Bank Transfer:** Ivor Jones, 03-1395-0099387-000 * **Facebook:** Follow And Subscribe * * * ## Five Connections They Hope You Miss ### Connection One: Loyalty Is The Real Qualification Jones praised Chong’s loyalty to NZ First’s core identity, while Chong said the party held true to his values, according to RNZ. The selection is therefore not an accidental mismatch between a respectable party and an inconvenient candidate. By their own words, it is ideological alignment. ### Connection Two: “One People” Deletes The Treaty Relationship NZ First’s candidate announcement promotes “one country, one people, one law, one flag”, according to its published release. The slogan pretends formal sameness repairs historical and institutional inequality. Constitutional scholar Claire Charters explains the defect plainly: treating everybody the same does not automatically create equality when a majority can dominate a minority, in E-Tangata’s constitutional discussion. I traced the same solvent in “The Coalition Conveyor Belt”: “equal citizenship” is used to rub Crown obligations from the page while leaving Crown power untouched. That is not equality. It is unilateral power wearing a supermarket-brand fairness label. ### Connection Three: Local Provocation Meets National Rollback New Plymouth’s poll recorded 15,004 votes to remove Māori wards and 12,046 to keep them, a removal margin of 2,958, according to the official NPDC result. Nationally, 24 of 42 referendum councils voted for removal, according to RNZ and Te Ao Māori News. The coalition reinstated compulsory poll provisions for many councils; Policy.nz explains the legislative reversal, while Vote Local lists the 42 affected councils. I examined the wider closure of Māori-representation pathways in “The Grandmother Who Kept The Door Open While They Bricked The Rest Shut”. ### Connection Four: “Cohesion” Means Māori Must Absorb The Blow Jones said Chong could contribute to a more cohesive nation, according to RNZ. But cohesion without repair is simply enforced quiet. If Māori must accept attacks on our representation, language and participation so other people can feel united, then “cohesion” is not peace. It is submission with a press release. ### Connection Five: Extraction And Culture War Share A Spine At the same rally, Jones used “drill, baby, drill”, said “bugger the climate”, promised to cut red and green tape, and maintained NZ First’s commitment to seabed mineral extraction, according to RNZ. I traced that extractive ideology in “Drill Baby, Drill — Into Your Own Fraud” and Jones’s accountability record in “How Shane Jones Loots The Public Purse And Winston Peters Calls It Statecraft”. The connection is structural. The same politics treats Treaty duties as tape, Māori representation as division, kaitiakitanga as obstruction and extraction as common sense. I call that white-supremacist neoliberal government not as a claim about anyone’s secret soul, but as my judgement of a system that preserves settler control, devalues collective Māori authority and opens whenua to profit while demanding that Māori call the result unity. * * * ## Three Examples For The Western Mind ### Example One: The Boardroom With The Reserved Seat Removed Imagine a company takes your family’s land, builds its headquarters on it, and signs an agreement promising your descendants an enduring role in decisions. Generations later, the board calls that reserved voice “racial privilege” and lets all shareholders vote on whether your family may remain in the room. **The Harm:** New Plymouth’s final poll produced 15,004 remove votes and 12,046 keep votes; the removal side won 55.47% of valid choice votes, according to the official result. Nationally, 57.14% of the 42 referendum councils voted for removal, according to RNZ and Te Ao Māori News. **The Tikanga Impact:** Whakapapa locates authority and obligation within relationships among people, whenua and generations. A Māori ward is not full rangatiratanga, but it creates a route for mana whenua perspectives to enter decisions. Removing that route weakens whanaungatanga and tells tangata whenua that their relationship with place may be overruled by a temporary numerical majority. **The Solution:** Restore councils’ ability to establish Māori wards under the same democratic rules used for general wards; entrench Māori representation against discriminatory veto mechanisms; and require transparent reporting on Māori participation and outcomes. The Green Party has opposed the forced referendums and defended Māori wards. ### Example Two: The Supplier List That Calls Inclusion Discrimination Imagine a city discovers that contracts repeatedly circulate among the same established firms. It adopts a buy-local strategy to save money and widen access for smaller businesses, including Indigenous suppliers. One director labels that effort racist, repeats the allegation after withdrawing it, and is later marketed for his commitment to prudent public money. **The Harm:** New Plymouth’s strategy aimed at economic, social, cultural and environmental gains and sought stronger partnerships with iwi, hapū and Māori businesses, according to 1News. The immediate harm cannot be honestly reduced to a dollar figure from available sources. The measurable institutional harm is the obstruction and stigmatisation of a formally adopted inclusion mechanism. **The Tikanga Impact:** Manaakitanga is not ceremonial kindness. It is the active protection of dignity and the creation of conditions in which others can participate. Calling the opening of a blocked economic doorway “racism” reverses victim and beneficiary: the excluded are recast as privileged, while the inherited advantage behind the closed door disappears from view. **The Solution:** Publish procurement outcomes by business location and relevant supplier categories; audit whether promised access produces contracts rather than brochures; and use independent review to test value for money and equity together. Tika demands evidence of results. Pono demands that inclusion is neither exaggerated nor sabotaged. ### Example Three: The Employee Whose Misconduct Becomes “Colour” Imagine an employee repeatedly creates reputational damage involving language, race and inclusion. Management does not examine the pattern. It calls the incidents “colourful lapses”, praises the employee’s loyalty and sends him out as the organisation’s public face. **The Harm:** The individual episodes are documented: the 2019 te reo anthem controversy and apology in RNZ; the Confederate-flag defence reported by the Otago Daily Times; the 2024 Māori-ward abstention under reported threats in RNZ; and the 2025 chamber expulsion reported by 1News. Jones then publicly reduced the controversies to “one or three colourful lapses”, according to RNZ. **The Tikanga Impact:** Pono requires truthfulness and consistency. Ngākau pono can mean loyalty, but loyalty detached from tika becomes protection of the in-group rather than integrity. In Western terms: loyalty is not a character defence when the organisation is asking whether the conduct itself meets the standard. **The Solution:** NZ First should publish the candidate-vetting standard it applied, explain why the documented conduct meets that standard, and state what change it believes occurred. Chong should be judged on his full record, including his apology, his electoral support, the violence directed at him and the conduct for which he remains publicly accountable. * * * ## Tika Without Pono Is Branding Chong says he has learned. That deserves a fair test, not automatic disbelief. But learning is shown through changed conduct, acknowledgement of harm and repair — not merely the passage of time or the size of a vote tally. Jones offers none of that architecture. He offers loyalty. He offers industry. He offers the political equivalent of throwing a sheet over the stain and accusing anyone who notices the smell of opposing cohesion. This is where my judgement becomes scathing because the evidence has earned it. NZ First is not cleaning a record. It is laundering a political asset. Chong supplies the grievance vocabulary; Jones supplies the industrial spin cycle; Peters supplies the brand; and Māori are expected to drink the grey water and call it national unity. * * * ## The Electoral Verdict The general election is on **Saturday 7 November 2026** , according to the Electoral Commission, Parliament and the Prime Minister’s announcement. > I do not recommend returning this National–ACT–NZ First coalition to power. That is my political opinion, based on the documented pattern in this essay: compulsory Māori-ward referendums, rhetoric that treats Māori inclusion as division, candidate loyalty elevated over accountability, hostility to environmental safeguards and an extractive programme sold as common sense. > I recommend a Green Party vote. The Greens have publicly opposed attacks on Māori wards and called for equitable Māori representation, according to their local-government statements. > They have proposed entrenching Māori seats, allowing greater Māori electoral-roll choice and strengthening Māori representation, according to their Māori seats announcement. > Their 2026 programme includes 13 Māori candidates, nine in the top 20, and an additional $200 million commitment for te reo Māori, according to Green Party election material and RNZ. A recommendation is not worship. The Greens must still be measured against tika and pono after election day. But on the evidence available now, they offer a clearer route toward Te Tiriti, climate responsibility, Māori representation and public accountability than a coalition whose deputy leader calls this record “colourful” and whose candidate slogan attempts to compress two peoples and a Treaty relationship into “one”. The ballot is not the whole taiaha. It is one grip on the shaft. Use it. Ivor Jones The Māori Green Lantern Fighting Misinformation And Disinformation From The Far Right * * * ## Legal Disclaimer This essay is public-interest political commentary concerning candidates, elected representatives, government policy and democratic accountability. Factual claims are linked to the sources relied upon; interpretations and political judgements are identified as opinion and grounded in the disclosed record. Named people are discussed only in their public capacities. No malice is intended. No allegation of criminal wrongdoing is made unless expressly attributed to a verified source, and none is made against Chong or Jones here. Corrections will be made promptly where credible evidence establishes an error. A retraction or response request may be submitted through The Māori Green Lantern.

> **Public Interest Statement:** I write this in the public interest about public commentary, public advocacy, published accounts, political influence, and an election-year contest over Te Tiriti and democracy. I allege no crime. My scathing conclusions are opinions based on the verified facts linked beside them. Where the evidence stops, I stop. I am Ivor Jones, The Māori Green Lantern — Te Arawa, Ngāti Pikiao, with Welsh whakapapa. I use the taiaha of evidence to trace the whakapapa of political power, expose misinformation and neoliberal machinery, and protect whānau from people who think a polished opinion column should be allowed to erase an accounting trail. My kaupapa is fighting misinformation and disinformation from the far right.themaorigreenlantern Nicky Hager is of an elite intelligentsia who hold a kind of Free Speech Union derangement revealed in Dirty WorkNicky Hager is of an elite intelligentsia who hold a kind of Free Speech Union derangement revealed in Dirty Work.pdf112 KBdownload-circle This essay does five things. First, it tests Dane Giraud’s Herald opinion against his organisation’s own accounts. Second, it traces the disclosed connections among the Free Speech Union, the Taxpayers’ Union, The Campaign Company, Jordan Williams, and Atlas Network. Third, it explains why calling scrutiny “derangement” is a childish diversion from the evidence. Fourth, it gives three plain-language examples for the Western mind, with quantified capacity, solutions, and tikanga impacts. Fifth, it explains why a coalition whose policies repeatedly diminish Māori authority must not be returned on 7 November, and why I recommend the Green Party as the strongest available party vote for this kaupapa. I would love you to click into this essay, because it contains a wealth of information you can use in daily life: how to read a lobby group’s accounts, how to spot a false grassroots story, how to distinguish free speech from freedom from scrutiny, and how to follow power without inventing a conspiracy. I have created an audio podcast that lays out this kaupapa in detail, a short video that explains the core argument, and, for long-form readers, this fully cited essay. This is not disposable content. It is a repository for our mokopuna, so they can look back and say: at least we knew The Māori Green Lantern — among a few others — was warning us. * * * ## Tika And Pono: The Framework Of The Strike **Tika** asks whether the claim is right, fair, proper, and valid. The Māori research-ethics framework _Te Ara Tika_ explains tika as what is right and good for a particular situation and connects it to validity, sound design, benefit, and transformative outcomes.Te Ara Tika guidelinesfmhs.auckland **Pono** asks whether I am being truthful, genuine, sincere, accurate, and faithful to the evidence. Te Aka Māori Dictionary defines _pono_ through truth, validity, honesty, genuineness, sincerity, correctness, justice, and fairness.maoridictionary Tika means I must acknowledge evidence that cuts against my argument. The FSU’s accounts say related-party sums were provided at or below market value and were subject to council oversight; Giraud says the Atlas grant supported a challenge to the National-led Government’s gang-patch ban; the FSU describes itself as legally separate from the Taxpayers’ Union; and the accounts were compiled rather than audited. Those are the organisation’s own qualifications, and hiding them would make me no better than the propaganda I oppose. Pono means those qualifications do not magically delete the disclosed network. Separate incorporation does not erase shared governance, paid administration, shared office accommodation, digital-marketing support, council-linked suppliers, or an admitted Atlas funding relationship. I will not call that criminal because there is no evidence here of a crime. I will call it what the documents support: a materially interconnected political-advocacy ecosystem. * * * ## The Megaphone That Calls Questions Censorship A taiaha is not a theatre prop. It is a responsibility to strike only where the evidence holds. Giraud’s Herald opinion wants readers to see a humble union of ordinary New Zealanders besieged by Nicky Hager and an “elite intelligentsia.” He calls the scrutiny a kind of “Free Speech Union derangement,” describes the organisation as “scrappy,” and presents its small donors as proof that critics are attacking the agency of working people.nzherald.co That is a fine little campfire story. The accounts pour cold water on it. The FSU’s own report records $1,485,519 in revenue, 12,443 donations, at least 14,600 facilitated submissions and petitions, 88 media releases, 13 public events, 4 speaker tours, and $201,634 in legal expenses for the year ended 31 March 2026. Its medium- to long-term objectives expressly include influencing legislation, public policy, and institutional practice, informing public debate, and building an engaged support base.fsu There is nothing illegal about that. There is nothing inherently illegitimate about that. But there is something spectacularly dishonest about presenting that capacity as though it were a battered trestle table run from somebody’s garage. This is political power. When political power calls the reading of its own accounts “derangement,” it is not defending speech. It is demanding deference. * * * ## The Deep Dive Podcast Grassroots uprising or million dollar machine 0:00 /1348.243447 1× Listen to a lively conversation between two hosts, unpacking and connecting topics in the sources of this essay. I apologise in advance for the AI's very harsh pronounciation of reo. Please dont shoot me, :). ## Youtube Video Like video? Here is a short video suppporting the essay. Again, don't shoot the messenger please because of AI's pronounciation. :) * * * ## Koha Consideration You might ask who is supporting The Māori Green Lantern to produce detailed, high-volume educational essays that read the accounts powerful lobbyists hope you will ignore. The answer is: you do. This mahi is supported through koha. There is no Atlas cheque behind me, no Taxpayers’ Union administration contract, no Campaign Company office down the hall, and no corporate line waiting to approve the conclusion. Every koha says whānau are ready to support the accountability that Crown and corporate structures will not provide. It says rangatiratanga includes the power to support our own truth tellers — especially when million-dollar advocacy machines call basic scrutiny “derangement.” Kia kaha, whānau. Stay vigilant. Stay connected. If you are able, consider a koha so this voice can keep tracing the money, the personnel, the ideology, and the harm. If you cannot koha, no worries. Subscribe or follow The Māori Green Lantern, kōrero about this essay, and share it with whānau and friends. That is koha in itself. **Four Pathways Exist:** * **Koha — Direct Support:** Support The Māori Green Lantern through a voluntary koha. * **Subscribe — Essays And Ongoing Support:** Subscribe to The Māori Green Lantern. * **Direct Bank Transfer:** Ivor Jones, account number **03-1395-0099387-000**. * **Facebook:** Follow and subscribe to The Māori Green Lantern. * * * ## The Disclosure Giraud’s Readers Deserved Giraud identifies himself in the Herald as a long-serving FSU council member. That disclosure matters, but it is incomplete beside the organisation’s current financial report. > The FSU report identifies him as deputy chair and records $15,480 paid to him for professional services; it also records $1,775 paid to Loukas Giraud, described as the son of a council member.fsu The payments do not prove misconduct. The report says related-party sums were at or below market value and subject to council oversight. But a deputy chair and paid service provider writing a national-newspaper defence of the organisation is not an independent spectator describing somebody else’s battle.fsu Readers deserved the whole relevant disclosure at the top: **FSU deputy chair; council member; paid professional-service provider.** The issue is not whether Giraud may speak. Of course he may speak. The issue is whether readers are given enough context to judge the speech. My opinion, based on those documents, is blunt: partial disclosure turns transparency into costume jewellery. It shines just enough to distract from what is missing. ### The Whakapapa The Column Cannot Erase The Herald’s own contextual note says the FSU describes itself as separate from the Taxpayers’ Union, while also stating that Taxpayers’ Union executive director Jordan Williams co-founded the FSU and sits on its 11-member council.The Herald records both propositions.nzherald.co The accounts add the operational whakapapa. Note 13 identifies the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union as influenced by a council member and records $18,000 for administrative support. It identifies The Campaign Company as influenced by a council member and records $56,320 for shared services including administration, digital-marketing advice, and office accommodation. It identifies Franks Ogilvie as influenced by a council member and records $139,531 for legal advice.fsu Add those three items to the disclosed payments to Dane and Loukas Giraud: **$18,000 + $56,320 + $139,531 + $15,480 + $1,775 = $231,106.** Divide that selected subset by total revenue: **$231,106 ÷ $1,485,519 × 100 = 15.56%.** That calculation does not show corruption. It does not show overcharging. It does not establish secret control. It shows that a material share equal to 15.56% of reported revenue flowed through the selected, disclosed related-party relationships. That is why those relationships are relevant when an officeholder tells readers the network is basically a hallucination suffered by elites. A company number does not cut whakapapa. A separate letterhead does not make shared people, premises, administration, suppliers, and strategy evaporate. The law may recognise separate entities; the public is still entitled to recognise an ecosystem. I previously mapped this political stage in “The Stage They Refuse To Leave”, where I explained how debate platforms, polling, personnel, and shared political goals can confer legitimacy without proving secret command. I also traced the deeper Atlas and anti-Tiriti connections in “Jordan Williams And Elliot Ikilei Try To Chop Down Te Tiriti”. ### The Atlas Alibi Collapses Giraud states that 96% of the FSU’s income came from New Zealanders and 4% from Atlas Network grants, which he says were obtained to challenge the National-led Government’s gang-patch ban.His article makes that admission and gives that explanation.nzherald.co Good. That is a disconfirming fact against any lazy claim that every FSU campaign is dictated by the coalition or that Atlas money was used only for orthodox right-wing causes. I do not make either claim. But “only 4%” is not an eraser. Four percent of the reported $1,485,519 revenue is $59,420.76. The accounts record $59,373 in general grants, a difference of $47.76.The figures are in the FSU report.fsu The near match corroborates Giraud’s percentage, but the accounts do not name the grantmaker. Therefore the exact attribution cannot be independently verified from the financial report alone. That is the proper confidence limit. The wider Atlas relationship is not imaginary. Atlas Network itself identifies Jordan Williams as a Smith Fellowship alumnus and describes that programme as training emerging think-tank leaders in marketing, fundraising, management, and related organisational skills. RNZ reported that Williams answered “of course” when asked whether the Taxpayers’ Union belonged to Atlas, and that his Atlas association included its Think Tank MBA. Atlas later quoted Williams saying the Taxpayers’ Union would not be where it was without Atlas professional development and mentoring, and described it as a 2023 Smart Bets partner receiving grants, training, and mentorship.Atlas’s own account says so.rnz+2 That is not a conspiracy theory. Those are public acknowledgements from the participants. Cash is only one artery. Training, mentoring, contacts, fundraising methods, message testing, credibility, and institutional replication also move through political networks. My opinion is that Giraud calls Atlas a “bogeyman” because ridicule is cheaper than explaining why a supposedly irrelevant network keeps appearing in the funding, training, leadership, and organisational history. * * * ## The Fake Grassroots Binary Giraud offers a false choice: either the FSU has genuine small donors, or it is a professional political machine. Both can be true. Ordinary supporters can sincerely care about expression. Workers can face unfair consequences for speech. A membership organisation can take useful cases. None of that makes its governance links, paid infrastructure, or overseas ideological relationships disappear. The accounts report 766 registered members at 31 March 2026 and 1,557 at 31 August 2026.The FSU publishes both figures. The working is **1,557 ÷ 766 = 2.03** , or a **103.3% increase**. That growth may be real and politically significant. It still does not transform a million-dollar operation into a powerless outsider.fsu This is where the “ordinary Kiwi” performance becomes insulting. It asks working people to believe they are too simple to understand that genuine membership and professional political engineering can coexist. It turns donors into human shields: question the leadership, and you are supposedly sneering at every member. Nah. Whānau are not stupid. Workers are not stupid. Donors are not stupid. They are entitled to more disclosure, not less. * * * ## Free Speech Is Not Freedom From Scrutiny Giraud’s article collapses two rights into one slogan. The first is the right to speak, organise, litigate, advocate, seek donations, and criticise the state. I defend that right, including when the FSU challenges a government gang-patch ban that it considers unjust.Giraud says Atlas support was used for that challenge.nzherald.co The second is an invented right not to have the organisation’s money, governance, suppliers, and political relationships examined. No such democratic immunity exists. Freedom of speech protects Giraud’s column. It also protects Hager’s investigation, this rebuttal, Māori criticism, journalistic questions, and a citizen reading Note 13 with a calculator. The FSU’s own stated objectives include influencing public policy and institutions.Its report says so. Once an organisation seeks power in public life, transparency is not persecution; it is the admission price to democratic credibility.fsu I have covered the weaponisation of “free speech” against Māori previously in “We Have Been Conned — But Not By Treaty Ideology. By The Union Selling It To You”, where I applied tika and pono to an FSU historical narrative and showed why institutional context matters. I also examined an earlier FSU leader’s public intervention in “The Wolf In The Pulpit”, tracing how free-speech branding can sit beside policy advocacy affecting marae and Te Tiriti. * * * ## The Māori Question: Whose Speech Gets A Megaphone? Māori know the trick of supposedly neutral rules. The state calls its authority universal while treating tino rangatiratanga as sectional. Lobbyists call their own access democracy while describing Māori participation as privilege. Institutions call their platform open while the cost of lawyers, media production, polling, donor acquisition, and travel decides who can be heard repeatedly. The FSU reports at least 14,600 facilitated submissions and petitions, 88 media releases, and $115,000 in legal costs aimed at speech rules in institutions and legislation.Those outputs are in its service-performance statement. That is measurable agenda-setting capacity, not merely an individual right to stand in a public square.fsu The Taxpayers’ Union offers the wider pattern. Newsroom reported that between 1 August 2023 and election day it commissioned national and electorate polling, issued almost 100 press releases, hosted seven debates, published four policy reports, started a petition, and drafted alternative legislation. Newsroom also reported that third-party promoters were not required to disclose their funding sources and that much of the group’s activity fell outside Electoral Commission oversight because that oversight focused on advertising.newsroom.co That is how unequal speech works. Nobody needs to ban the lobby group. The machine simply needs to be named as a machine rather than marketed as the spontaneous voice of “ordinary New Zealand.” Tikanga sees speech as relational. Words carry whakapapa, obligations, consequences, and effects on mana. A political culture that counts only the speaker’s liberty while ignoring organised power, accumulated wealth, and harm to relationships is not neutral. It is a megaphone auction pretending to be a marae. * * * ## Three Examples For The Western Mind ### Example One: The Fire Alarm Company Calling Smoke “Derangement” **Core Claim:** Imagine a company selling fire alarms while refusing to disclose that its director also owns the inspection service, pays related suppliers, and writes newspaper columns attacking anybody who checks the wiring. The inspection may still be valid, but the relationships plainly matter. **Quantified Capacity:** The FSU reports $1,485,519 in revenue, 88 media releases, 13 public events, 4 speaker tours, and at least 14,600 facilitated submissions and petitions.The organisation reports those figures itself.fsu **Quantified Harm:** The exact number of people harmed by those activities cannot be verified from the available records. The measurable democratic risk is concentration of agenda-setting capacity: one organisation generated 88 releases and facilitated at least 14,600 political actions in one reporting year. Pretending that scale is merely one fragile citizen speaking erases the power imbalance. **Solution:** Every media article written by an officer defending their organisation should disclose current governance office, paid service-provider status, and relevant related-party relationships at the top. Advocacy organisations seeking to influence law should publish grant-level funding disclosures and campaign-level spending. **Tikanga Impact For The Western Mind:** Pono is the difference between technically saying something true and giving the audience the truth it actually needs. Saying “council member” while omitting “deputy chair and paid provider” is like giving a pepeha with half the mountains removed: the words may exist, but the whakapapa has been mutilated. ### Example Two: Three Shopfronts, One Back Office **Core Claim:** Imagine three shops with different signs but overlapping directors, administration, office space, marketing support, and suppliers. They may be legally separate, but no competent auditor, journalist, or customer would call them unrelated. **Quantified Capacity:** The selected disclosed related-party items total $231,106: $18,000 to the Taxpayers’ Union, $56,320 to The Campaign Company, $139,531 to Franks Ogilvie, $15,480 to Dane Giraud, and $1,775 to Loukas Giraud.The complete context sits in Note 13. That selected total equals 15.56% of reported revenue.fsu **Quantified Harm:** The figure does not prove a single dollar was misused, and the FSU says the sums were at or below market and overseen by the council.The report states that qualification. The harm is informational: presenting the entities as though separate registration settles the political question deprives readers of material context about how advocacy capacity is assembled.fsu **Solution:** Publish the conflict declarations, procurement comparisons, council abstentions, service agreements, data-sharing boundaries, office-sharing arrangements, and grant conditions behind every material related-party payment. If the arrangements are proper, daylight strengthens them. **Tikanga Impact For The Western Mind:** Whakapapa does not accuse; it locates. It tells us who is connected to whom, through what obligation, resource, and history. Refusing to trace those ties is like analysing a corporation while refusing to look at its subsidiaries because each has a different logo. ### Example Three: The Imported Toolkit Sold As A Local Uprising **Core Claim:** Imagine a local campaign leader trained by an international network in fundraising, marketing, and management, whose organisation receives that network’s grants and mentorship, then dismisses questions about the international relationship as paranoia. The relationship does not prove foreign control; it does prove that “purely spontaneous local uprising” is an incomplete story. **Quantified Capacity:** Giraud says 4% of FSU income came from Atlas grants. Applied to reported revenue, that equals $59,420.76; the accounts’ general-grants line is $59,373, only $47.76 lower.Giraud supplies the percentage, while the FSU report supplies the totals.nzherald.co+1 **Quantified Harm:** No source reviewed proves Atlas directed the FSU’s campaigns, and I do not claim it did. The measurable fact is an admitted grant relationship of about 4%, combined with the documented Atlas training and mentoring history of Jordan Williams.Atlas describes the training, and RNZ records the membership admission.rnz+1 **Solution:** Disclose every overseas grant, its purpose, application, agreement, conditions, reporting requirements, and resulting campaign outputs. Also disclose overseas training and mentoring when leaders publicly market an organisation as an untouched expression of local grassroots sentiment. **Tikanga Impact For The Western Mind:** Kaitiakitanga requires knowing what enters the ecosystem and what it changes. An imported seed is not automatically poisonous, but a kaitiaki identifies it, tracks its spread, and refuses to let a salesman rename it native bush. * * * ## The Coalition’s White-Supremacist Effects I will use the wording chosen for legal and evidential precision: this coalition’s documented policies reproduce white supremacy in effect. I am not alleging that every minister privately holds a white-supremacist belief. I am saying that repeated Crown decisions centralise Pākehā state authority, diminish Māori institutions, weaken Tiriti duties, and treat Māori collective rights as obstacles to a supposedly neutral order. That conclusion rests on more than rhetoric. The Waitangi Tribunal found that the Treaty Principles Bill policy breached partnership and reciprocity, active protection, good government, equity, redress, and the article 2 guarantee of rangatiratanga; it said the policy lacked a proper imperative, relied on flawed rationales and a disingenuous historical narrative, and distorted te Tiriti. The Tribunal recommended abandoning the policy and pausing the Treaty-clause review for collaboration and co-design.waitangitribunal The Tribunal also found that the Crown’s disestablishment of Te Aka Whai Ora breached tino rangatiratanga, good government, partnership, active protection, and redress; it found the Crown acted unilaterally, failed to consult Māori, and did not conduct a robust policy process.waitangitribunal In September 2026, RNZ reported that the coalition advanced three bills affecting Treaty references: one removing references from six statutes, one standardising wording in 12 statutes, and one reducing obligations to no higher than “take into account”; the Human Rights Commission warned of inconsistency with domestic and international human-rights standards. The Post reported that the bills were pushed through first readings under urgency despite iwi opposition and the Tribunal’s recommendation to halt.rnz.co+1 That is the bridge between this lobby-network essay and the government. The FSU is not proved to command the coalition, and the coalition is not proved to command the FSU. The connection is ideological and infrastructural: lobby networks normalise a language of “one law,” deregulation, taxpayer grievance, and suspicion of Māori authority; parties translate compatible ideas into policy; organisations then amplify, defend, or litigate around the resulting programme. The coalition’s neoliberal method strips collective obligations down to individual choice, treats public institutions as costs, and defines concentrated private power as freedom. Its white-supremacist effect is to restore Crown dominance whenever Māori exercise collective authority. The combination is colonialism with an accountant’s tie: take the relationship, turn it into a line item, cut the line item, and call the amputation equality. * * * ## What Giraud Still Must Answer Giraud’s insults do not answer these questions: * Why did the Herald disclosure not state that the FSU report identifies him as deputy chair and records $15,480 in professional-service payments to him? * Why defend organisational separation without squarely discussing $18,000 in Taxpayers’ Union administration and $56,320 in Campaign Company shared services, digital-marketing advice, and office accommodation? * Which grant or grants make up the Atlas funding Giraud describes as 4%, what conditions applied, and what reporting was required? * What conflict-management processes governed payments to council members, relatives, and council-member-influenced entities? * Were any mailing lists, donor data, campaign plans, technology, research, legal strategy, or staff shared among the FSU, Taxpayers’ Union, and Campaign Company; if not, will the organisations publish the boundaries? * Does the FSU accept that journalists, researchers, Māori communities, and citizens have the same freedom to investigate it that it claims for itself to campaign? Until those questions receive documentary answers, “derangement” is not analysis. It is a smoke grenade rolled across the floor while the accounts sit open on the table. * * * ## The Moral Verdict Ivor Jones The Māori Green Lantern Fighting Misinformation And Disinformation From The Far Right Giraud does not disprove the network. He confirms a critical part of it by admitting Atlas funding, while the FSU’s accounts disclose the remaining governance and operational relationships.The admission appears in the Herald, and the transactions appear in the FSU report. His argument is a confidence trick built from technically compatible fragments: separate legal entity, genuine members, mostly domestic income, and a minority foreign grant. Each fragment may be true. Put together without the related-party transactions, overlapping governance, shared services, office accommodation, training history, and influence objectives, they produce a picture that is materially incomplete. **My opinion is that the column launders organised political power through the moral innocence of the individual donor. It places ordinary members in front of the machine like a human barricade, then accuses anyone examining the engine of attacking the passengers.** I am not attacking the passengers. I am opening the bonnet. * * * ## Why This Coalition Must Not Return In November The 2026 general election is on Saturday 7 November. Do not vote this coalition back into power.elections Do not reward a government that advanced Treaty-overhaul bills under urgency after the Waitangi Tribunal told it to stop.The Tribunal’s findings and the later legislative push are on the public record. Do not reward parties that treat documented Māori-Crown obligations as red tape while right-wing advocacy infrastructure is dressed up as the neutral voice of ordinary people. I recommend a party vote for the Green Party. That is an explicit political opinion, not a neutral research finding. I make that recommendation because the Green Party’s 2026 manifesto expressly commits to an Aotearoa that honours Te Tiriti, shifts power and wealth toward communities, supports Māori decision-making for whānau, hapū, and iwi, and funds public services through higher contributions from the super-rich and large corporations. Its platform also frames democracy as decisions made by New Zealanders rather than lobbyists and corporations, alongside affordable lives, healthy nature, and public ownership.The party states those priorities publicly. The Greens are not sacred. No political party deserves blind loyalty. Hold them to tika and pono too. But on the evidence available, they offer a clearer break from the coalition’s assault on Tiriti protections, neoliberal austerity, and lobby-driven politics than returning National, ACT, and New Zealand First to office. Vote Green because Te Tiriti is not a culture-war prop. Vote Green because wai is not a commodity with Māori guardianship edited out. Vote Green because public services should serve whānau rather than be starved until privatisation looks inevitable. Vote Green because “free speech” must not become a mask worn by well-resourced networks while Māori speech, authority, history, and institutions are cut from law. Then keep watching the Greens. Rangatiratanga does not outsource judgment to any party. That is tika: test the claim. That is pono: tell the whole truth. That is the taiaha: evidence in the hands of the people who are expected to live with the consequences. _Kia kaha, whānau. Stay vigilant. Stay connected. The taiaha is evidence. The light is tika. The duty is pono._ * * * ## Disclaimer This commentary concerns public actors in their public roles and public-interest questions about political advocacy, transparency, Te Tiriti, and electoral influence. It alleges no criminal conduct. “Lobby machine,” “confidence trick,” “power laundering,” and similar language are expressions of opinion based on the disclosed records linked in the same sections. Any reliable evidence correcting a factual statement should be assessed promptly, with a visible correction or retraction where warranted.

I'm so sick of this question! Iwi whakapapa books aren't available to the general public... - Yes, and I knew of a vague connection to Ngāti Mahuta since 2017. My paternal uncle sent me photos, one of which was Princess Piki's wedding party. Those were of ET Huia Riddell, and family photos that he had easy access to. She was known as Nanny Riddell by Riddell's of his generation. This was later confirmed by the National Library in 2025. It turns out that my great-great-grandfather had an affa

> _The Taxpayers’ Union is not a neutral public service. It is part of a right-wing political network—and National and ACT keep helping it look respectable._ I am Ivor Jones, The Māori Green Lantern. I _descend_ from Te Arawa, Ngāti Pikiao and Welsh whakapapa. I write with **Tika** —the truth backed by evidence—and **Pono** —the duty to act properly once the truth is clear. This essay explains why National and ACT still appear on Taxpayers’ Union debate stages after serious allegations were made in Nicky Hager’s _Dirty Work_. It explains why the Taxpayers’ Union is not a neutral group, how it connects to National and ACT through people, polling and shared political goals, and why this matters for Māori, Te Tiriti, our water, and our mokopuna. National and ACT do not see the Taxpayers’ Union as an outsider. They see a familiar ally. It gives them polling, platforms, media attention, a ready-made audience, and political messages they often agree with. Nicky Hager alleges that the Taxpayers’ Union used anti-Māori racism to build support during the Stop Three Waters campaign. The Taxpayers’ Union denies this. The Green Party pulled out of the group’s debates after the book was released. National and ACT did not. RNZ reported Hager’s allegation, the Taxpayers’ Union’s denial, the Green Party withdrawal, and the responses from Christopher Luxon and David Seymour I am not saying every allegation in Hager’s book is already proven. It is not. But National and ACT did not need a court case to make a basic political decision: stop giving their time, their faces and their credibility to a lobby group facing serious public questions. They chose not to. * * * ### The Record I Am Building I have already written about these problems because this is not a one-day story. On 23 September 2026, I published “The Taxpayer Mask: How Hager’s Dirty Work Rips The Smile Off Neoliberalism’s Favourite Front Group”. On 21 September 2026, I published “The Vitamin Sermon: How A White Supremacist Neoliberal Government Built The Cliff, Then Sold You The View”. Both titles appear on The Māori Green Lantern homepage I am building a record for our mokopuna. One day they should be able to look back and say: _some people saw what was happening. Some people named the people, the networks, the lies and the harm. Some people warned us._ That is what The Māori Green Lantern is for. ### Read, Listen, Watch, Remember Please click into this mahi because it contains information you can use in daily life. I have created an audio podcast that explains this kaupapa in detail. I have created a short video for whānau who want the main points quickly. And if you like reading deeply, there is a fully cited 3,000-word essay waiting for you. This is not just content. It is a record. It is a repository for our mokopuna. Find the work at The Māori Green Lantern. * * * ## What Tika And Pono Mean Here **Tika** means I must be accurate. Hager’s claims are allegations. The Taxpayers’ Union denies them. I will not turn allegations into facts without evidence. **Pono** means politicians should take responsibility for the people and groups they choose to stand beside. National and ACT can say they do not agree with every word the Taxpayers’ Union says. That does not remove their responsibility for helping the group look like a normal and trusted part of democracy. A debate stage is not just a room with chairs. The host gets power from it. * * * ## The Numbers Checked First Newsroom reported that the Taxpayers’ Union, between 1 August 2023 and election day, paid for polling, issued almost 100 media releases, hosted seven debates, published policy reports, started a petition, and drafted alternative legislation. Newsroom documented the Taxpayers’ Union’s election-period activity That is not what a neutral debate host does. That is what a political campaign organisation does. * * * ## The Taxpayers’ Union Is Political The Taxpayers’ Union has the right to campaign. It can hold debates. It can run polls. It can support certain policies. It can criticise parties. But it cannot honestly claim to be just a neutral group helping voters. The group’s own debate advertising said candidates would get a chance to put their views to voters. It also said the events would sit alongside Taxpayers’ Union–Curia polling. The Taxpayers’ Union promoted its debates together with its polling work That matters because the host gets something out of the debate: * It gets an audience. * It gets publicity. * It gets candidates standing under its logo. * It gets more media reach. * It gets to look important. * It gets to make its political views look normal. The Taxpayers’ Union says it does not set candidate questions and says its events are not party-political. The Post reported the group’s public defence of its debates That is not enough. A person can avoid writing the questions and still control the room. They can choose the brand, the audience, the livestream, the media partners, the timing, the promotion and the story told about the event. * * * ## The Deep Dive Podcast Who actually built the political stage 0:00 /977.97805 1× Listen to a lively conversation between two hosts, unpacking and connecting topics in the sources of this essay. I apologise in advance for the AI's very harsh pronounciation of reo. Please dont shoot me, :). ## Youtube Video Like video? Here is a short video suppporting the essay. Again, don't shoot the messenger please because of AI's pronounciation. :) * * * ## Koha Consideration You may ask who supports The Māori Green Lantern to write research like this. The answer is whānau like you. There are no big companies paying me to write these essays. No political party tells me what to say. Your koha supports independent research and accountability when the Crown, big business and powerful political networks fail to provide it. Every koha says we can support our own truth tellers. That is rangatiratanga too. If this essay helped you understand why the Taxpayers’ Union debate stage matters, why political networks matter, or why Māori rights must not be used as campaign targets, please consider supporting this mahi: * Koha — Support The Māori Green Lantern * Subscribe To The Māori Green Lantern * Direct bank transfer: **Ivor Jones — 03-1395-0099387-000** * Subscribe On Facebook If you cannot koha, no worries. Subscribe, follow, read, talk about the work, and share it with whānau and friends. That is koha too. Kia kaha, whānau. Stay alert. Stay connected. The taiaha is evidence. The light is Tika. The duty is Pono. * * * ## The Network Is Real I am not saying every National or ACT MP takes orders from the Taxpayers’ Union. The evidence reviewed does not prove that. But the public record shows a clear political network. National, ACT, the Taxpayers’ Union and Curia are connected through people, polling, events and shared political goals. ### The Polling Link David Farrar is a co-founder of the Taxpayers’ Union. The group says he founded Curia Market Research and was on the Taxpayers’ Union board for nearly ten years. The Taxpayers’ Union described Farrar’s roles in an interview published on its own site The Taxpayers’ Union also says Curia conducts its polling. Its September 2026 poll page says Farrar co-founded the union, used to sit on its board, and is a director of Curia. The Taxpayers’ Union disclosed the relationship between its polling, Curia and Farrar The Taxpayers’ Union itself called Farrar National’s “pollster of choice.” The Taxpayers’ Union described Farrar’s work with National Party leaders Curia says he has worked on polling for five Prime Ministers and eight Opposition Leaders, although it does not name every client or party. Curia described Farrar’s polling work 1News reported that Hager says Curia produces both Taxpayers’ Union–Curia polls and National’s internal polling. Farrar rejected major parts of Hager’s book, calling some claims “1000 percent wrong.” 1News reported Hager’s claim and Farrar’s denial The plain point is this: the man who helped start the Taxpayers’ Union also sits at the centre of its polling system, and he has a well-known polling relationship with National. That does not prove secret coordination. It does prove the groups are not strangers. ### The ACT Staff Link The ACT link is not only about shared ideas. It is also about people moving from the Taxpayers’ Union into senior ACT roles. The _New Zealand Herald_ reported that Hager’s book says former Taxpayers’ Union campaign manager Louis Houlbrooke became an ACT senior press secretary; Connor Molloy became ACT deputy campaign director; and Callum Purves became ACT general manager and party secretary. The Herald reported the staff moves described in Hager’s book People are allowed to change jobs. That alone does not show wrongdoing. But when experienced campaign staff move from a lobby group into senior party roles, they take skills, political contacts, knowledge of audiences, campaign methods and ideology with them. That is why this matters. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is how political networks work. ### The Shared Politics Link The Taxpayers’ Union regularly supports a hard-right political agenda: lower taxes, less public spending, deregulation, weaker Treaty institutions, opposition to co-governance, and cutting or reducing public services. The group has publicly supported ACT positions on issues including climate policy, property rights, infrastructure, Treaty institutions and Māori representation. The Taxpayers’ Union’s own news archive shows its policy campaigning and endorsements That does not prove ACT runs the Taxpayers’ Union, or that the Taxpayers’ Union runs ACT. It does show they share a lot of the same political ground. National is a little different. The Taxpayers’ Union sometimes attacks National. But that does not make the group neutral. It means the group wants National to go further right. It is like a business lobby attacking the Government because it wants more tax cuts, fewer rules, fewer worker protections and less public spending. The attack is not proof of independence. It is pressure from the same political direction. * * * ## The Greens Left. National And ACT Stayed. The Green Party withdrew from the Taxpayers’ Union debate series after Hager’s book was released. Chlöe Swarbrick said leaders needed to draw a line against underhanded tactics and called on National and ACT to withdraw too. The Post reported the Green Party’s withdrawal and Swarbrick’s comments The Taxpayers’ Union said the debates were for voters and that it did not set the questions. The Post reported the Taxpayers’ Union’s response The Greens made a political decision: while serious questions are being raised, we will not help this group look more legitimate. National and ACT chose the opposite. Christopher Luxon said the Taxpayers’ Union was “no fan of the National Party.” The Post reported Luxon’s response RNZ reported that Luxon said he did not care about Hager, did not care about the Taxpayers’ Union, and did not think New Zealanders cared about the issue. RNZ reported Luxon’s comments That is not a serious answer. A group can push National from the right and still be useful to National. It can pull National’s policies rightward, make extreme ideas sound normal, and keep its voters angry at the same targets. David Seymour said ACT’s growth came from other things, including euthanasia, firearms policy, Covid opposition, party organisation and his own performance. The Post reported Seymour’s response Maybe those things helped. Political support usually has more than one cause. But Seymour did not answer the main question: why does ACT still want the approval and platform of a group facing serious public allegations about anti-Māori political campaigning? * * * ## Three Simple Examples ### Example One: The Biased Referee Imagine a rugby referee who wears one team’s jersey. They sell tickets to that team’s supporters. They run polls saying the other team will lose. They write rule changes that help their favourite team. They put the match on their own channel. Then they say, “I did not tell the players what to say, so I am neutral.” Nobody would believe them. That is the Taxpayers’ Union debate problem. The group does not need to write a question to shape the event. It owns the brand, the audience, the polling, the promotion and the political benefit. Newsroom documented the Taxpayers’ Union’s election activity The group’s own debate page linked its events to its polling work **The Harm:** Every politician who attends helps the group look more trusted and more important. **The Solution:** Every party should check who is hosting a debate before attending. They should look at funding, political links, polling, question rules, audience access, livestream partners and whether the host respects Te Tiriti and opposes racism. **The Tikanga Impact:** Tikanga means proper relationships and proper behaviour. A political lobby group should not wear the mask of a neutral public forum. That damages trust and drains mauri from public debate. ### Example Two: The House Fire Imagine a landlord who blocks the fire exit to save money. Then the tenants smell smoke. They ask questions. The landlord says, “People do not care about smoke. They care about rent.” That is what Luxon’s reported response sounds like. RNZ reported that he said he did not care about Hager, did not care about the Taxpayers’ Union, and said New Zealanders did not care. RNZ reported Luxon’s response **The Harm:** Māori are told that allegations about anti-Māori political tactics are not important enough to take seriously. **The Solution:** National and ACT should pause their involvement in Taxpayers’ Union events while the issues are examined. They should publish what checks they made before choosing to attend. **The Tikanga Impact:** Leaders carry responsibility. Mana is not just status. It means taking care of people. Brushing off concerns about racism does the opposite. ### Example Three: The River Board Imagine a town that depends on a river for drinking water. The people whose ancestors have cared for that river for generations are told they should not have a real role in decisions about it. When they ask for a place in governance, they are accused of creating racial division. That is the simple version of the Three Waters and co-governance fight. Hager alleges the Taxpayers’ Union used anti-Māori racism as a tool during the Stop Three Waters campaign. The group denies it. The Post reported the allegation and denial Seymour has said he opposed Three Waters because he opposed co-governance and people being put in charge based on race. RNZ reported Seymour’s position **The Harm:** Māori relationships with wai are treated as a political problem instead of a responsibility under whakapapa and Te Tiriti. **The Solution:** Water decisions must include Te Tiriti, mana whenua, clear public rules, good infrastructure planning and honest public information. **The Tikanga Impact:** Wai has mauri. Mana whenua responsibilities are inherited responsibilities, not special treatment. Ignoring this is not neutral. It weakens the relationship between people, land, water, ancestors and mokopuna. * * * ## What Is Proven And What Is Not This is where Tika matters most. **Verified:** * David Farrar co-founded the Taxpayers’ Union and founded Curia Market Research. The Taxpayers’ Union described those roles * Curia conducts Taxpayers’ Union polling. The Taxpayers’ Union disclosed this * The Taxpayers’ Union runs political campaigns, publishes polling, hosts debates and pushes policy positions. Newsroom documented this election activity * Hager’s book alleges former Taxpayers’ Union staff moved into senior ACT roles. The Herald reported the staff movements described in the book * The Greens withdrew from Taxpayers’ Union debates, while National and ACT leaders rejected the concerns. The Post reported the withdrawal and responses **Not Proven In This Essay:** * That National, ACT or the Taxpayers’ Union have a secret agreement. * That the Taxpayers’ Union controls National or ACT. * That Hager’s allegations are already proven facts. * That all people connected to these groups share the same beliefs or take part in the same activities. * That any named person has broken the law. The network is real. The legal and factual limits of what can be claimed are also real. * * * ## Why This Coalition Must Not Return Do not vote this coalition government back into power in November. Do not reward a government that treats Te Tiriti, Māori rights, water, public services and co-governance as targets for political anger. Do not reward leaders who dismiss concerns about anti-Māori political tactics because they would rather keep a useful political platform. Do not reward parties that claim a right-wing lobby group is just a neutral debate host when the public record shows that it is a campaign organisation with strong links to their own political world. I recommend voting Green. The Green Party is not perfect. No party is perfect. The Greens also need to explain why they first agreed to take part in Taxpayers’ Union debates. But they withdrew once serious public questions were raised. The Post reported the Green Party’s withdrawal and call for National and ACT to do the same That matters. Vote Green because Māori rights are not a political game. Te Tiriti is not a culture-war target. Wai is not just a spreadsheet. Whānau are not numbers to be cut from a Budget. Vote Green—but keep every party honest. That is Tika. That is Pono. That is rangatiratanga. * * * ## Disclaimer This is political commentary in the public interest. It is not a legal finding and does not claim that any named person or organisation has committed a crime or broken the law. If documentary evidence shows a factual error, I will assess it and correct the record where needed.

After more than 40 years cooking in some of the world’s best restaurants, Peter Gordon ONZM (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa, Ngāi Tahu) says nothing quite compares to kai Māori.

UPND MEDIA DIRECTOR MARK SIMUUWE COMMENTS ON HICHILEMA’S 3RD TERM PUSH Simuuwe writes...Ngati bafuna ma Zambians, allow them to debate the term limit . Don’t stop the debate . We had no term limit initially but we debated and changed the constitution. Before we put the term limit in the constitution, there was a debate