John Robertson
It’s one thing to honour tradition: it’s another to let it write the laws. Welcome to New Zealand – where geology meets theology and sacred rocks outrank secular rights.
In 1997 parliament passed the Ngāi Tahu (Pounamu Vesting) Act, a remarkable piece of legislation that handed 100 per cent of the South Island’s greenstone – pounamu – to one tribal corporation. Not because they mined it. Not because they bought it. But because their ancestors had a “spiritual connection” to it.
That’s right. A metaphysical feeling became legal title. This is not satire.
To make it worse, the act also ensures all royalties from pounamu mining go directly to Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu – not the taxpayer. According to the official legislation:
All royalties paid to the Crown… shall be paid by the Crown to Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu.
https://legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1997/0081/7.0/DLM413606.html
Translation: everyone else pays, one tribe profits – and we’re told to shut up and call it justice.
But this isn’t just about a stone. It’s about a legal system cracking under the weight of race-based privilege. New Zealand now has over 200 laws that explicitly favour one racial group over others – often invoking ‘spiritual connections’ as justification. That’s not progressive. That’s theocratic apartheid.
And while we’re busy pretending this is harmless, Ngāi Tahu Holdings – the commercial juggernaut at the heart of this – raked in $42.4 million in net profit in 2024, with total assets surpassing $2 billion. Good for them. But when that empire is fortified by laws no other New Zealander is allowed to access, we’re not talking about culture anymore. We’re talking about state-sponsored economic segregation.
Meanwhile, here’s what nobody wants to say out loud: race-based law makes no biological sense anymore.
This is 2025 – not 1825. Humans have been interbreeding for centuries. Māori people today are genetically mixed with European, Chinese, Indian, Pacific Islander and every other bloodline you can imagine. So how do we justify a legal system where your eligibility for land, minerals or financial advantage is based on a blood quantum no one can actually measure?
Anthropology settled this decades ago: there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ race. Every New Zealander is genetically mixed to some degree. So when you create legislation based on ancestry, you’re not preserving culture – you’re fabricating a fiction. You’re using race as a political tool, wrapped in spiritual language to avoid criticism.
This isn’t reconciliation: this is regression. We are no longer operating as a modern secular democracy but as a nation where laws are drafted to serve one group’s sacred narrative, while everyone else is told they’re ‘colonisers’ for asking basic questions.
Let’s be brutally honest. If Christianity lobbied for exclusive mining rights because their ancestors ‘felt spiritually connected’ to gold, we’d laugh them out of parliament. But when it’s cloaked in Māori mythology, we bow in silence and call it justice.
It’s time to decide: do we want equality before the law, or a legal caste system dressed up as cultural sensitivity?
Because sacred rocks and sacred profits don’t belong in the same sentence – let alone the same statute book.
https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1997/0081/7.0/DLM413187.html
