You've probably seen the video of Te Pāti Māori leading a haka in New Zealand's Parliament by now. It's close to a billion views combined at this point, and reactionary media has been quick to jump on it as some sort of "stone age" display, as if protest has never been a part of parliamentary politics before. You might even hear people say that this is about shutting down "equal rights", and what this current government wants is just an honest discussion about what the treaty means. This is all a smokescreen for what this bill is actually about: rewriting history to protect extractive capital.

Meet David Seymour, current leader of the ACT Party. He's somehow even more off-putting in person. Seymour joined Young ACT at university, the right-wing "libertarian" party founded by the 1984 Labour neoliberal reformers who thought they didn’t go far enough. They ransacked a state with large publicly-held companies, and let their friends carve it up for the highest bidder. This wave created a new oligarchy class, with key figures who cultivated mechanisms useful for their goals. Alan Gibbs was one of the most prominent, involved with the NZ Business Roundtable and the NZ Initiative. Here he is talking about gutting the New Zealand Forest Service. His deregulation of the forestry industry led to the issues with slash flooding we see today. Gibbs is "the godfather" of ACT, and it serves as a way for him to push his vision for New Zealand, shared by other likeminded ideologues. "Privatise all the schools, all the hospitals, and all the roads", he once told a party conference.

But ACT can also be seen as part of a wider push, one tentacle of the Atlas Network, a think tank incubator geared towards promoting Randian ideals of a total free market. The Atlas Network is a sort of a self-replicating virus, spreading its ideology and power further and further.

They have been described as "the predominant vehicle for fossil capital's global mobilisation against climate science and policy", helping elect far-right governments, and running astroturf / botting campaigns. They were instrumental in helping get Trump, Milei, Bolsonaro and others come to power, and essentially drafted Liz Truss' disastrous budget. They push for devastating cuts designed to play on populist messaging of "gutting the bloated state", and massive deregulation, often for extractive industry interests. They do this at whatever cost - flooding the system with whatever tactics they think will work to manufacture consent. Prospective Atlas inductees can go into the global system, intern at a few different think tanks, go to some training sessions, and meet likeminded people. They come out with experience in spin doctoring, pushing talking points, and a crash course on dirty politics tricks. They can go set up think tanks at home with initial support, quickly connecting to favourable interests. Any guesses who the current Atlas Network chair is? Why, it's Debbi Gibbs, Alan Gibbs' daughter.

The reason I lay this out is David Seymour - after seemingly trying and failing at engineering - decided to sell his soul and enter the Atlas Network. Here he is putting on a fake Canadian accent to argue against public transport in the 2000s.

Seymour worked for Atlas think tanks in Canada, one of their most active fronts for anti-climate policy. He participated in training sessions, including songwriting contests about charter schools with the then-Atlas Network CEO.

After cutting his teeth in Canada, he returns and becomes leader of the ACT party in 2014, beginning to try and worm his way into respectable discourse by debasing himself as a "meme" to paper over ACT's questionable history. He goes on Dancing With The Stars, tells Women’s Weekly “I’d give it all up for love”, visits high schools for meet and greets (also gets fond of Snapchatting students), presenting himself as anything other than a complete skinwalker. But he still pushes deeply reactionary politics, and begins to bide his time for the opportune moment. That’s where the Taxpayers’ Union (TPU) comes in.

The TPU is another Atlas Network think tank, founded by Jordan Williams a year before Seymour was made ACT leader. They can be seen as the private lobbying wing of the forces behind ACT, alongside others like the NZ Initiative they push all the same policy and soundbites. They fund a 24/7 media hotline for comment any time of the day. They're so committed to reducing wasteful government spending that they took out $60,000 in COVID wage subsidies. The TPU has also been caught astroturfing protest movements, and it reveals their deeper strategy: capitalising off reactionary anger to serve their end goals of reducing regulation and oversight for industries, and the further cannibalisation of the state.

In 2020, the Labour government told the farming industry "can you please do some planning on water usage and pollution? Nitrate readings are 30x the level where it starts affecting childbirth in some areas. Please do some planning on water usage." The farming industry said "over my dead body", and Groundswell was born. Groundswell took on the classic appearance of "the little farmer taking on the big bad state", with tractors marching through major cities demanding that they not be given the burden of looking after the environment, similar to scenes in Europe over recent years.

But Groundswell was an astroturf campaign, with a domain name registered by the TPU and initially promoted on their mailing listt. It was an orchestrated effort to protect one of the largest interest groups in New Zealand politics: animal farming. 35% of NZ land is owned by animal farmers. Cattle farming, especially dairy, has grown significantly in recent decades. 95% of dairy is exported overseas, primarily to serve as milk powder filling in chocolates. It is also, of course, incredibly destructive to the environment. Groundswell was the industry's attempt to push against regulation, using the TPU and their lobby group Federated Farmers to turn it into an off and on national news story for months. Groundswell's demands were to stop further regulations on water use, exempt themselves from climate change policy, remove the "ute tax", etc. But their biggest issue was Three Waters, the plan to bring water infrastructure under larger, publicly-owned regional bodies due to increasing costs and financing issues. Regional Māori iwi would also sit on the boards and have equal voting rights to local government. To talk about New Zealand's somewhat unique form of "co-governance" between Māori and the Crown, we have to take a brief history lesson on te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi).

To heavily simplify its history, the treaty was signed in 1840 between a group of Māori chiefs and British representatives. Māori at the time outnumbered Europeans 80,000 to 2,000. It followed a previous Declaration of Independence signed by northern iwi in 1835. The treaty (and previous declaration) were drafted due to concerns of land theft and lawlessness on the part of Europeans, and encroachment from other colonial powers like France and Russia. The British government wanted to further assert their control over the islands. The Māori version, the copy signed by both parties, agreed to let the British manage kawanatanga (governance), while Māori retained tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty/chieftainship). It outlines a system of shared authority, where Māori systems of self-governance could coexist with a British system. The English version differs, where Britain gains "sovereignty" instead of "governance", and "chieftainship" is instead "undisturbed possession of lands". These differences in meaning, arguably intentional, eventually led to the New Zealand Wars. Settler demand for land and increasing crackdowns on Māori sovereignty drove decades of conflict and land theft, followed by systemic attempts to wipe out Māori society. Turned into a segregated underclass, many Pākehā believed “the Māori question” would be solved by time".

But that never happened. A hīkoi (march) in 1975 led to the government finally recognising the treaty in law, and establishing the Waitangi Tribunal, which could investigate breaches of the treaty. In 1985 this was backdated to include historical claims up to 1840. The "principles of the treaty" started being invoked as a way for the tribunal, and other institutions, to refer to what the "spirit" of the document was, and what implementing that in a modern society might look like. The english version is only 578 words, not exactly a novel. But there in lies the problem: recognising the treaty opened Pandora's box. As claims began to come into the tribunal, and Māori began challenging the status quo, the government began to realise what actual reconciliation might look like. In 1989, after axing the Department of Māori Affairs, Labour PM David Lange laid out a loose set of principles, setting the bounds of what the government believed honouring the treaty would mean in a "practical" sense. Legal scholars argued it was a "definite and cynical attempt to redefine the treaty". In effect, these have been the "guiding principles" since (while still violated repeatedly on this very limited definition). Arguably, there has been growing cooperation with and recognition of Māori by successive governments, even if limited or non-existent in many areas. But for New Zealand's oligarchy, any Māori oversight in government decision making is bad. They're going to try stop you from polluting waterways, digging up the ocean floor for minerals, or selling mining licenses for $1 a year, (17) and they have mechanisms to actually stop you.

So the right, spurred on by ACT, TPU and others, began pushing co-governance as a political issue to manufacture consent. It started with Three Waters - fearmongering about infrastructure being taken out of the control of "New Zealanders' hands". There were a multitude of propaganda campaigns to push this further, including a "Stop Co-governance" speaking tour of the country, where former street preacher Julien Batchelor told old white New Zealand, especially first generation British transplants (Ten Pound Poms) (19), that Māori were coming to institute a new apartheid. Of course Batchelor would know - he grew up in colonial Kenya before moving to New Zealand after the British left. He somehow acquired the funds to distribute 250,000 booklets promoting his talks and spreading fears designed to tap into the psyche of this group. This was among a number of tricks used to force co-governance as an issue, that especially played well with an increasingly reactionary portion of the country looking for easy blame after lockdowns and post-pandemic economic shocks. Riding off of this, Seymour announces his Treaty Principles Bill (TPB). He says it’s about “equal rights”, in effect it would nullify any recognition of rangatiratanga or the relationship that Māori and the Crown have, pushing Māori-Crown relations back to the 1950s. It receives objections from all corners of society, including Māori, legal scholars, church leaders, and a majority of living ex-PMs.

The 2023 election became a vote partly on the "place of Māori in society". The right focused on issues like bilingual road signs and ministry names, Three Waters leading to "Māori dominance", axing the Māori Health Authority, slashing and burning the progress made in recent decades. Like in most other countries, the incumbent centrist Labour Party lost heavily. ACT only received 8% of the vote, but Seymour was able to get the Treaty Principles Bill included in the right's coalition agreement, supported by the other parties just for the first reading. National and NZ First let ACT lead them to the precipice, inciting major pushback from across society. ACT is ramping up the temperature, and their coalition partners, with their own connections to the Atlas Network and the wider lobbying octopus, are able to play dumb and say their hand was forced. This parliamentary vote was the one that was protested by Te Pāti Māori last week - after it was introduced 2 weeks earlier than expected so it would be overshadowed by the American election and get ahead of another hīkoi on Parliament.

The current coalition has spent the first year in office gutting the state and rolling back the decades - restarting oil and gas exploration, firing thousands of public servants, creating a "fast-track" consent process which seems to mostly apply to their donors and friends, hiring tobacco and gun lobbyists to rewrite laws, opening military-style "boot camps" for youth offenders, trying to privatise the school and health systems, cancelling planning reform and infrastructure projects, and of course, throwing Three Waters onto the bonfire. I'm sure private industry will be able to step in and handle water infrastructure the way they've handled the power grid. The usual backroom dealings of a National government are fully out in the open. You cannot believe them when they say that the Treaty Principles Bill is an "honest dialogue" on what the document means. It's an attempt to tear it up and sell the last they can squeeze out of Aotearoa to the highest bidder. It might not pass now, but it's not the end. ACT is now trying to turn the bill into a global culture war issue, where Western chauvinists like Matt Walsh can pick up half-baked talking points and treat it like another sideshow to throw popcorn at. Probably helps to pay for the top spot on Google.

The haka in Parliament was a protest against a government that has rejected norms, procedures, and any shambolic sense of democracy, to push through destructive policy after destructive policy, trying to bring the country back to a time where "Māori knew their place". Most people should be able to see it for what it is - indigenous people standing up against the agents of global capital and saying "we shall not let this pass".

Smith K. Stead is a writer and researcher in Aotearoa

TOITŪ TE TIRITI: The Treaty Principles Bill and the Dark Money Behind It