John Robertson
There’s a quiet word baked into New Zealand legislation that’s been doing a lot more damage than people realise: bicultural.
It sounds harmless. Even noble. A word supposedly meant to honour New Zealand’s history. But scratch beneath the surface, and you’ll find it’s one of the most corrosive terms in our entire legal system. It’s the foundation of a two-tier framework – a system that divides citizens not by merit or equality, but by ancestry and spiritual entitlement.
The word bicultural appears in countless places – public service policy, education law, environmental regulation, and even health and heritage management. It’s the linguistic gateway for race-based privilege, mandatory consultation with iwi, spiritual red tape like karakia and “wairua health”, and culturally enforced obligations that ordinary citizens are expected to obey – often at a financial or legal cost.
This isn’t unity. It’s apartheid by paperwork. It’s not inclusion – it’s a soft form of segregation, dressed up in government branding. The state keeps pretending we are a nation of ‘two peoples’. But that’s not true. We are multicultural. Every Kiwi, regardless of background, is a mixed-race human being – not a tribal statistic.
Anthropology makes this obvious. New Zealand law does not.
That’s why removing every reference to biculturalism from legislation needs to be part of the movement to make New Zealand secular. Because biculturalism is more than just a word – it’s the policy arm of a belief system. And it’s through that word that spirituality and race-based thinking enter the law disguised as fairness.
One law for all means exactly that: no spiritual clauses, no cultural vetoes, and no more pretending that the Treaty created two legally separate species. It’s time we said it plainly – biculturalism doesn’t unite us. It divides us.
