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The recent appointment of 10 unelected iwi representatives with full voting rights onto a council committee of just six elected councillors is a stark illustration that the tribal takeover of local government in New Zealand is now well underway.
But before we examine a prominent King’s Counsel’s findings that this development as unlawful, we should first ask a more fundamental question: how on earth has it come to this in a supposedly democratic country?
To answer that question, we need to revisit the egregious betrayal of voters by Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party after the 2020 election, when they campaigned on one set of promises only to deliver something entirely different once elected to office as a majority government.
At the behest of their powerful 15-strong Māori caucus, Labour unleashed an effective tribal takeover of New Zealand – without any mandate whatsoever from voters.
The blueprint for their betrayal had, of course, been mapped out a year earlier under the guise of a plan to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. However, the He Puapua strategy to replace democracy with tribal rule by 2040 was deemed to be so radical that it was kept secret from their New Zealand First coalition partner – and from the public – until the 2020 election delivered the party the opportunity to implement it without scrutiny.
The mainstream media was even silenced, through the announcement of a new $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund that required recipients to promote the “te Tiriti partnership” fabrication – which was the central tenet of He Puapua – as a condition of their funding.
Naturally, the cash-strapped, largely left-leaning, media sector welcomed the handouts and were only too willing to facilitate Labour’s wishes.
To embed the “te Tiriti” agenda within the state sector, Labour turbo-charged the Office of Māori-Crown Relations, which had been set up in 2019 as an agency co-managed by tribal leaders, giving iwi power brokers access to the entire state sector. Over 200 staff were deployed to undertake a mass ‘re-education’ campaign, forcing government agencies to adopt “te Tiriti”, and compelling employees to sing waiata, call New Zealand “Aotearoa”, and speak the Māori language.
A key objective was to embed the partnership agenda within state sector decision-making bodies, since that gave unelected and unaccountable tribal representatives the balance of power through the right of veto in all ‘co-governance’ arrangements.
It was through this mechanism that Labour orchestrated an effective tribal takeover of our country.
As the demands of iwi leaders escalated, major public sector reforms were undertaken.
Without warning – and right in the middle of the pandemic – the country’s District Health Boards were disestablished and replaced by a centralised system co-governed by Māori that elevated race above clinical need as a deciding factor in patient health care.
Māori control of the country’s freshwater was orchestrated through Three Waters, which centralised community water infrastructure and assets to enable co-governance.
And the long-standing democratic right of communities to reject council decisions to establish Māori wards without public consultation was abolished to enable the tribal takeover of local government.
Private sector agencies were also targeted through new laws that required regulatory bodies to impose te Tiriti partnership requirements onto real estate agents, nurses, doctors, pharmacists, charities – and even re-registering societies.
As the 2023 election approached, the public became increasingly alarmed by these developments, but were reassured by pledges from National, ACT and New Zealand First that, if elected, the tribal influence would be removed.
Coalition agreements promised the Māori Health Authority and Three Waters would be abolished, local government petition rights would be restored, Treaty principles would be removed from legislation, He Puapua would be stopped, no race-based laws would be enacted, and equal rights would be restored.
But the new government underestimated just how deeply public officials had been captured. Many of the nearly 20,000 extra bureaucrats hired under Labour were committed He Puapua advocates who are now pro-actively sabotaging the coalition’s attempts to dismantle it.
While some flagship projects were axed, the ideological machinery remains firmly embedded in the state sector, which explains why so many coalition bills – even those supposedly designed to reject race-based provisions and restore equal rights – still end up prioritising tribal influence.
The much‑vaunted Fast‑track Approvals legislation is a glaring example. Despite all the tough talk, it still mandates that local Māori are notified of projects, and that ‘expert panels’ include a member ‘qualified in a Māori worldview’ – which in practice means someone sympathetic to iwi demands.
This has now resulted in a five-month delay for the Santana Minerals application for a gold mine in Central Otago – and an alleged demand from iwi for a $180 million payoff.
In other words, instead of the new legislation treating iwi the same as everyone else – the race-based privileges included in the law are now creating the same problems of delays and blackmail that crippled the Resource Management Act.
It’s the same story with the Marine and Coastal Area Act amendments that were introduced by the coalition last year. Instead of removing ‘tikanga’, or Māori custom, from the legislation – since that was the reason the law went off the rails in the first place – it was retained. The predictable result is that the coalition’s reforms are on track to make no material difference at all to case outcomes, leaving New Zealand’s coastline still likely to fall into tribal hands.
In fact, if future claims follow the pattern as the first case heard under the new law, the only option to save the coast is if ACT and New Zealand First pledge to repeal the Marine and Coastal Area Act and restore Crown ownership of the coastline – in the national interest – by reinstating the 2004 Foreshore and Seabed Act.
The RMA reforms are following the same disastrous pattern. Instead of terminating all Treaty-related agreements with iwi that councils have entered into over the years, the Planning and the Natural Environment Bills intend carrying them through into the new legislation. This means favoured iwi will still be able to demand cultural assessment reports – at the applicants’ expense – and hold out their hand for “compensation” to sooth their cultural needs, like $180 million from a mining company.
And with the draft legislation signalling all existing iwi agreements with councils will be carried forward, there’s now a rush of new arrangements being established up and down the country, ahead of the law change, as iwi engineer themselves a privileged status in local government decision-making into the future – not to mention the gravy-train of lucrative financial rewards that brings.
All of this is in spite of the 2025 High Court ruling in Hart v Marlborough District Council confirming that local councils are not part of the Crown and therefore have no Treaty obligations beyond what parliament explicitly legislates.
In other words, these far-reaching ‘partnership’ agreements between iwi and activist councils are not required by law. Yet because the coalition has failed to make this explicit, many local authorities – including activist councils like Whangarei, where voters deliberately removed Māori seats – are now about to “embed” te Tiriti partnership obligations across their entire operation.
As mentioned earlier, the latest egregious power grab involves the Far North District Council’s decision to appoint 10 iwi representatives with voting rights onto its Te Kuaka Committee for Māori Strategic Relationships, which had just six elected council members.
While appointing a majority of iwi representatives to over-ride decision making by a minority of elected councillors would appear to be undemocratic, it is, however, permitted under the law: Clause 31 (1) of Schedule 7 of the Local Government Act states “members of a committee or sub-committee may, but not need be, elected members of the local authority” and 32(1) enables the granting of voting rights.
This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator, King’s Counsel Gary Judd, argues that the appointment of those 10 iwi representatives is, however, unlawful:
The first purpose of local government, stated in s 10 of the LGA is to enable democratic local decision-making and action by, and on behalf of, communities, and the role of a local authority such as FNDC is to give effect to its purpose (s 11). A local authority must act in accordance with principles set out in s 14. The first is to conduct its business in an open, transparent, and democratically accountable manner. Another principle is that it should provide opportunities for Māori to contribute to its decision-making processes. That doesn’t mean, hand over decision-making to iwi and hapū. That runs completely counter to the requirements for democratic decision-making and democratic accountability.
He accuses councillors – apart from whistleblower Davina Smolders – of “engineering a transfer of power to iwi and hapū, no doubt in pursuance of the claim to have sovereignty over the north. The mayor and all but one of the elected members are promoting or supporting this unlawful transfer of power or are cravenly standing by and allowing it to happen.”
What’s worse, is that the Minister of Local Government, Simon Watts, has been persuaded by his public service advisors not to act: “I have received advice on the Far North District Council, and it does not meet the threshold for ministerial intervention. It is a local matter, and it needs to be handled locally…”
This is not what people voted for when electing the National-led coalition government in 2023.
Voters expected the coalition to defend democracy and prevent the iwi takeover of councils. Since the Local Government (System Improvements) Amendment Bill is currently in front of parliament, a Supplementary Order Paper amending Schedule 7 of the Local Government Act to read “members of a committee or sub-committee MUST be elected members of a local authority” could be included in that bill to fix the problem.
Furthermore, by making the change retrospective, all existing arrangements between iwi and councils would be abolished.
And to be sure that no iwi agreements are carried forward to corrupt the new Planning and Natural Environment legislation, since those bills are still in front of parliament, an amendment could be added to the effect that any iwi arrangements with councils would lapse as soon as the new laws take effect. This would ensure that activist councils cannot continue to advance an iwi power grab through the back door.
These recent attempts by iwi leaders to control local government show just how serious this tribal takeover has become. Just because the government changed, it doesn’t mean New Zealand is safe. Quite the opposite. With the framework for tribal rule already in place, iwi are now proactively hunting for every opportunity to impose their controls onto an unsuspecting public.
This is why other related election pledges, yet to be addressed – such as repealing or replacing Treaty principles in 23 pieces of legislation and overhauling the Waitangi Tribunal – need to be completed before the election.
It’s also why any party that pledges “to remove all race-based initiatives from legislation” as a bottom line during the election campaign, should be supported – because they understand that the only way to guarantee equal rights is for a nation to have colourblind statutes.
It’s what a number of OECD countries have already done – including Sweden, Finland, Austria, Holland, France, and Belgium. New Zealand now needs to now follow suit.
What this disastrous chapter in our history reveals is not only that the Labour Party can longer be trusted, but that tribal leaders have become increasingly deceptive and greedy in their relentless push to undermine democracy and grab power and public resources for themselves.
Furthermore, this saga underscores how critical courage and resolve are in any political party that claims they are defending our democracy – and it also reminds us just how vital independent voices like Gary Judd KC have become in calling out unlawful overreach and standing up for the rights of all New Zealanders.
This article was originally published by the New Zealand Centre for Political Research.
