Maori Protest Bill That Is Part of Sharp Rightward Shift in New Zealand
A year before American voters’ anger over the cost of living helped Donald J. Trump win the presidency, similar sentiments in New Zealand thrust in the nation’s most conservative government in decades.
Now, New Zealand bears little resemblance to the country recently led by Jacinda Ardern, whose brand of compassionate, progressive politics made her a global symbol of anti-Trump liberalism.
The new government — a coalition of the main center-right party and two smaller, more populist ones — has reversed many of Ms. Ardern’s policies. It has rescinded a world-leading ban on smoking for future generations, repealed rules designed to address climate change and put a former arms-industry lobbyist in charge of overhauling the nation’s strict gun laws.
And in a country that has been celebrated for elevating the status of Māori, its Indigenous people, it has challenged their rights and the prominence of their culture and language in public life, driving a wedge into New Zealand society and setting off waves of protests. On Tuesday, tens of thousands of demonstrators — including some who wore traditional Māori attire and performed hakas — converged on Parliament.
“This is nothing more than us having to defend that we exist,” Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, the co-leader of the Te Pāti Māori party, said before the protesters reached Wellington, the capital.
This rightward shift is, in a way, reflective of Ms. Ardern’s complicated legacy at home. Her coronavirus policies were lauded initially but ended up being divisive. The pandemic also left the country with a bruising cost of living. When Ms. Ardern stepped down as prime minister in January 2023, before her second term ended, inflation was hovering at 7 percent.
A few months later, voters delivered their verdict on Ms. Ardern’s tenure: Although she had guided New Zealand through multiple crises, she had failed to deliver the transformational change she had promised.
“She feels very long ago and very far away,” Richard Shaw, a politics professor at Massey University. “We feel like quite a radically different country.”
Led by Christopher Luxon of the National Party, the conservative government helped moderate inflation to 2.2 percent by reducing government spending, said Dennis Wesselbaum, an associate professor of economics at the University of Otago. But the economy has also slowed, he said.
It remains to be seen whether the government can stimulate economic growth, Mr. Wesselbaum said. But it has a much clearer plan to do so than Ms. Ardern’s government did, he added, pointing to its policies aimed at creating international investment opportunities, cutting taxes and reducing red tape.
The government is promoting a bill that would allow some infrastructure projects — like mines, roads and housing developments — to bypass the usually required environmental assessments.
It has vowed to repeal some Ardern-era measures — like a plan to tax farm animals’ methane emissions and a ban on offshore oil and gas exploration — with the argument that they hurt businesses’ bottom line. And it has expanded mining operations, which it argued could become “an attractive prospect for investors and a source of economic prosperity.”
During the eight years that Ms. Ardern’s Labour Party spent in power, some citizens grew disenchanted with government efforts to address disadvantages faced by Māori, who make up about 20 percent of New Zealand’s 5.3 million people.
To these voters, measures such as a specialized Māori health body and affirmative action for the Indigenous people were unfair “special advantages,” said Lara Greaves, an associate professor of politics at Victoria University of Wellington.
Two smaller parties, New Zealand First and Act, campaigned on those issues, advocating the “same rights” for everyone and promising to repeal “race-based” policies.
“We are watching our democracy being eroded through the enforcement of an ideological and cultural tone that exists only to serve the nation’s elite leftist cabal,” Winston Peters, the leader of New Zealand First, said during Ms. Ardern’s tenure.
These views are held by only a small portion of New Zealanders; Act won 8.6 percent of the votes in the election and New Zealand First took 6 percent. But under New Zealand’s so-called proportional voting system, the government is typically formed by a coalition. Consequently, Mr. Luxon’s Nationals, who garnered about 38 percent, needed both smaller parties to cross the finish line — and have been pulled further to the right.
In practice, this has meant abolishing the Māori health body, challenging their protected representation in local governments, and discouraging government departments from using the Māori language.
“It’s been our version of the culture wars, so to speak,” Ms. Greaves, who is Māori, said.
Mr. Luxon has sought to distance himself from some of his coalition partners’ policies, even as he has helped to advance them.
This month, the government introduced a controversial bill that seeks to reinterpret the Treaty of Waitangi, an agreement signed in 1840 by Māori chiefs and the British Crown that is often described as New Zealand’s founding document.
Over the decades, the courts have interpreted the treaty as conceptualizing governance as a partnership between Māori and the New Zealand government — an interpretation that underpins many of the unique rights Māori have now. The new bill would upend the idea of this partnership, replacing it with “equal rights for all.”
The proposal is supported by Act but not by its coalition partners or any other parties. But as part of the coalition agreement, the Nationals and New Zealand First supported the bill’s introduction to Parliament, even though they have said they will ultimately oppose it.
Last week, the bill advanced in Parliament. Mr. Luxon has described it as “divisive” and reiterated that his party would vote it down. Even so protesters marched for more than a week before congregating on Wellington on Tuesday.
Academics, Māori leaders and activists have argued that the bill’s interpretation of the treaty flies in the face of decades of progress and broad consensus, and warned that the government’s approach was already stoking racial divisions — for, essentially, no reason.
“I cannot recall a time in my adult life when there has been as much anger and hostility and emotion that has been created by central government decisions as now,” said Mr. Shaw, the Massey professor.
“It is already and will become increasingly divisive,” he added.
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