I never questioned that at the time.

Every letter at the office began on a notepad, attached to a file, and made its way to the typist. It came back typed. The manager read it, corrected it in pen, and back it went. Then it returned, clean, with a duplicate made on ink paper, and it was signed before being placed in the post bag, something akin to a small ceremony of intention.

My role was to place those files in the system, set up the new ones with their colour-coded stickers, and name them according to protocol so the Arrears Clerk and Manager could find them again. The other part of my job was to prepare the morning and afternoon tea trolley for our compulsory 15-minute break at 10 am and 3 pm. A practice of workplace connection and reset that does more for wellbeing and health than any allowance that supports access to health services realistically can. We were members of the Public Service Association, a fully unionised workplace.

It struck me recently that I seem to be the only person in my workplace with a strong recollection of this. I’ve been talking about it for two years as a workplace practice and nobody is taking me up on the offer of a stop work and hang 3 times a day. I find myself crafting tactics to develop this practice in my colleagues because in all honesty, we’re still going to talk about the most urgent thing in that moment and it’s still better than letting our cuppa or wee snackity snack be half finished while we are hunched over a screen and problem solving in our own heads.

There is something I have come to love about the pace of letters and the quality of calm that surrounded even the most consequential correspondence. A letter sent still had to travel. It had to sit in a post bag, ride in a truck, sometimes a plane, pass through hands, arrive on a doorstep, and finally be opened in someone else’s time and light. The reply had the same journey home.

In those gaps that the days of postage represented alongside, the time taken to sit and draft, the waiting that was built into the form, there was always room. The room that allowed the sender to have second thoughts, to reframe, and for the situation itself to shift a little before words had to be chosen in response. That interval was where perspective lived, where the first heat of something could cool into something truer, where dialogue could actually happen because each party had time to think before speaking.

We have since invented the condition of permanent immediacy and called it connection. But there is a difference between connection and presence, and what we lost when we removed the gap was the architecture of reflection.

So much of our social and relational architecture has changed, yet we yearn for the same things: a sense of belonging, connection and the capacity for love and reciprocity in its broadest collective sense.

Then one day, we got a computer, just the one; it took up residence at the far end of the room next to the kitchenette space. We actually gathered around it and watched the DOS commands unfurl in green text on a black screen. One person had been trained to use it, and they became THE person who would enter the required information. We were both reverent and a little afraid. It felt like magic because it was, in the small, honest way that tools sometimes are before they become ordinary.

I think about that computer often now. The one that linked our little Kaitaia office to Wellington, and it is still the most astonishing thing, that connection across distance. I advanced to data entry as the fourth Labour Government sold us up in the rush to privatisation. It took forty years for that introduction technology to become what it is now.

I hold a deep-seated resentment for that government; I take it out and roll around in it now and again.

Forty years was about the length of time that activists and academics agitated for a Nuclear Free Aotearoa. There’s a particular kind of cognitive dissonance that upholds something like a Nuclear Free statement while selling an entire nation into a neo-liberal future. The Rural Bank was sold, and before it was finalised, I left like so many of my generation, moving to Australia on a quest for a better life, an 18-year-old, so sure that the grass would be greener and more exciting a little further away.

The compendium of letters

In an act that is equal parts resistance and whimsy, I have started a compendium of letters and cards. Actual cards and letters with addressed envelopes. I accept that it is likely we will be sending these by courier in the near future.

By far the most challenging part is finding postal addresses. Keeping an address book was once an excellent life admin. The kind of quiet, ongoing care that made sure you knew where your people were. All those great aunts and distant family members I might send a letter to for no better reason than it was good manners.

Somewhere in that 1970s and 80s world of class and gender obligation, I mistook the rules of exchange for the thing itself. The Christmas cards were sent to every name in the address book, proudly displayed on the mantelpiece as proof of belonging, proof of being known. Those rituals were the performance of relationships, the costume-ball version, complete with obligation and social accounting. Charitable kindness is and remains a weapon of class that performs care without equity, that centres the giver and their moral comfort, that asks nothing of the structures that made the need so great in the first place.

The 2026 compendium of letters is a response to capitalism and its logic of endless consumption, and the performative demands that tell us our value is measured in output and connection metrics. AI proliferation is a symptom of this disease, one that drives fear-based worker values and has perfected the notion that organisations will be left behind, losing a race in which we have no idea who is setting the rules or making sure they are followed.

Letters resist that logic because they are genuinely inefficient in all the ways that matter in consumption and production. They take time, they go to one person, they cannot be monetised, and they leave no data trail worth harvesting. In a consumption economy that has colonised even our leisure and our grief and our love into content, the letter is almost subversive in its uselessness.

Except, of course, it is not useless at all.

It is a useful resistance that the market cannot read and AI cannot replicate. It is also so rare now that a letter has become the rarest of gifts, one that is truly intentional, has taken time and care and shows our love and connection as elevated and distant from online flower orders and boxes of mass-produced chocolate.

The truly perverse part of a system of letters is that for organisations required to have a PO Box as a registered address or for people who check their letter box, they are more commonly filled with junk mail and marketing. The most common mail at home now is real estate agent marketing - I do enjoy leaving those for the snails that shelter there in the rain.

The letters I have kept

There is another category of letters entirely, the ones I have kept for years, carefully, because they are irreplaceable.

There is a letter from my grandfather, written to me as a teenager living a long way from home. He was not a letter-writer by habit; this was one of very few he ever sent. At the time I received it, I knew it mattered. Now I understand it in terms of my relationship with this man, reaching across distance through a form that didn’t come easily to him, because I was worth the effort. That letter holds an entire relationship in its pages.

There are the little love notes from R — small pieces of paper tucked into unexpected places. A note in a coat pocket. A drawing in a lunchbox. They make my day brighter and bring me back to ground at the same moment, which is a rare and particular kind of gift. They are proof that someone is thinking of you in the middle of their own ordinary day, specifically and tenderly, without occasion or algorithm.

And there are the cards and letters from our children, elaborate and full of goodness and love, carefully produced, bursting at the edges with feeling. Hand-drawn pictures, invented spellings, the particular intensity of a child who has something important to tell you and chooses the form of a letter to say it. I have filed these away carefully. They are among the most precious things I own.

These are not the cards of obligation. They are intimate, personal, layered with a lifetime of meaning and nuance that no algorithm could generate or approximate.

This is what correspondence actually is, when it is freed from performance and expectation. It is the intention of wishing light toward another person’s soul, a sense of self and belonging through a time traveller’s connection. Unsaleable and without virality, it is addressed to one person, by name, by hand, and that is the entire point of it.

What the letter restores

There is something about the letter that restores the weight of choosing where we will place the energy of that intention, to create the words and maybe a wee pic or enclose a leaf or petal or the tiniest treasure.

A letter is a truth that carries a truthful moment over time because we always owe each other connection over the performance of authenticity. It is the sensory richness of the relationship and sustained curiosity. A letter requires you to sit down, to think, to choose your words because there is no delete key once the envelope is sealed and sent.

Writing a letter is an act of presence extended across distance, memories and history. It is nuanced and a kind of mood swimming that feels like an indulgence, a gift to ourselves, as much as to the recipient.

Writing letters is resistance, in the same way as making zines, sharing food, making good soil and loving insects are. Grounding resistance in love is simply doing the things that AI cannot replicate.

But that’s the way that it goes, and it’s what nobody knows - lyric Bizarre Love Triangle

The summer of 26 was like most of my recent summers, a time of writing, relearning something I once adored and did without thought. I am a somewhat sporadic journal writer, and one of the great joys of summer is searching for all of those precious notes and scrawled inanity written in an effort to develop a habit. Quick pics and small drawings, scribbles and exclamation marks that are reminders of moments - or not.

I have always been resistant to actually publishing in January, and then I signed up to iti te kupu The Summer Journal Club with Nadine Hura, who somehow made me realise we do not write alone, instead we write in relationship with the environment we are in at that moment. That insight helped me to give life to years of anguished verse, whimsical drawings and earnest exclamation points.

January marks life-changing events for me. It’s our wedding anniversary and this year was 10 years since we committed to helping each other follow our dreams, do things to make the world a better place and never ever cross a picket line in a summer storm that dumped 40mm of rain on the garden we were to be married in. My beautiful wife and I have been in a relationship for 15 years and this year we were a wee bit shocked to add those up. It seems unimaginable that time can pass so quickly and feel so weightless and effortless when love is constant.

That same week in January is also the birthday of two sons. James, who died in utero and was born in January 1987, and George, who died with a grade 4 glioblastoma as a young adult 35 years later. Their lives were different in length and shape and they are, for me anyway, the proof that loving fully will always cost us, and it is worth it. Their birthdays follow our wedding anniversary, so this summer again brought the opportunity to remember, and for healing.

Joan Didion wrote, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” I recognise that truth in the contrast between these two losses. James is held in mystery. George is held in detail. Both are unbearable in their own ways.

There is a sacredness in caring for a dying person that is rarely spoken about. Palliative care asks us to decentre ourselves completely. The fear, the anger, the anticipatory grief that wants to rush ahead must be set aside so their final days can be about them. Comfort becomes the work of transition, a sacred journey that passes the dying safely into the arms of ancestors. Reading aloud. Playing music. Sitting quietly. Listening. Touch. Loving without expectation of return.

A life well lived is not measured by longevity alone. It is measured by curious observation, the gift of attention and by the willingness to show up and stay present, even when doing so hurts. The intense sadness of lives cut short sharpens the meaning of those memories. Grief is the proof that love happened and also, there is a reminder to live life without waiting for permission to do so.

“Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.” Meditations 4.17, Marcus Aurelius.

We are living through a time of global climate collapse and resource wars. Entire populations are being displaced, starved, erased, and locally we are returning to conversations about food and soil and water. In this context, personal grief does not sit apart from collective grief. It is part of being in relationship with our environment and the shared ache that connects us.

My autumnal commitments to tangata tiriti practice conversations have also intersected with the summer journaling.

Waiting to be told what to do is an inherently white action. The genuine fear of wrongness, and the insistence of being good, sits as a supremacist oddity that also shapes our fear of conflict with other white people. I have come back to this idea regularly in my journal notes and recently listened to Brooke Stanley talk about love as an anticapitalist orientation. Their invitation being to look with love at what we already have access to, rather than organising primarily around what we lack.

Looking at those past notes, I realised that if we (white New Zealanders) genuinely feared conflict with tangata whenua as much as we fear conflict with each other, we would be able to acknowledge that hapū never ever ceded sovereignty. If we truly supported the aspirations of tangata whenua, returning stolen land would be a no-brainer. If we genuinely wanted to honour the articles of Te Tiriti, we would be pushing our politicians forward and dismantling the Westminster system through a constitutional transformation that is Te Tiriti-centred.

That we are not yet, at the scale required is because we are afraid of being wrong and of conflict with the people who look like us. Our expectations of each other are low, and yet we demand generous assumptions from tangata whenua while we sort through our individual anti-racism journeys, rarely acting collectively, because when we come together for the universal good, our fear of each other takes over.

All through my notes are scribbles and reminders about my grandmothers. Searching for lessons and comfort in ancestors has helped me to grow confidently in my identity, to find learning and knowledge and place, it has also set rituals and cultural practices as everyday healing. Preparing stores from summer abundance, sharing recipes and cooking with love are reconnecting us to rituals for the living.

Gaza and Palestine entered my journal and notes around 2010. I posted about Palestine in January about the unbearable weight of watching children die while the world debates semantics. I got to know a neighbour because of it. She said she thought she was alone and seeing someone else name that grief gave her permission to breathe. We share recipes now.

When we share our grief, it becomes connective tissue that builds quiet networks of recognition. It helps us opt out of the stiff upper lip and the fear that if we cry we will be given something to cry about.

There are moments when opting out is the most ethical choice we can make, refusing the demand to keep moving as if nothing is wrong. Returning means re-entering with clarity, values intact, and a commitment to care. Because love demands participation.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

But, when time pulls lives apart
Hold your own
When everything is fluid, nothing can be known with any certainty
Hold your own
Hold it till you feel it there
As dark and dense and wet as earth
As vast and bright and sweet as air
When all there is is knowing that you feel what you are feeling
Hold your own

Excerpt: Kae Tempest

While we fixate upon headlines about petrol prices, food prices and energy bills, people are dying as global powers fight to protect the flow of wealth from oil. A product and non-renewable resource that Big Oil companies need us to believe in as an ingredient essential to every element of our lives. A core component of a global economy that has never given us food, shelter, clean air, clean water, healthcare or the tools of liberation.

Our discomfort is real. Our fear of not having enough is real, and if we’re honest with ourselves both monotonously predictable and unimaginative at the same time. The crisis that is being shouted at us from the news, the one that is telling us that our systems are strained and demand is growing and food prices will continue to rise, is relaying the messages of a campaign laid out years ago by the think tanks that need us to ignore climate change, capitalism and colonialism.

What We’ve Been Living With

Back in 2021 and 2022, I delivered a couple of scenario workshops, we were working on a pilot program to build climate resilience in Community organisations and local enterprises. The opening scenario was simple and deliberate: a lone tanker from Singapore carries Aotearoa’s fuel supply. It doesn’t arrive. From midnight tonight, fuel is rationed to prioritise ambulances, fire engines, police, public transport only. Your organisation has none.

People exhaled slowly when I read it aloud. Some laughed nervously. A few said, we have been here before, it’s lockdown again.

What struck me then was that the scenario wasn’t really about fuel. It was a door into a much larger conversation about dependency and how we’ve outsourced our food systems, our health infrastructure, our sense of what’s possible without a car, and, yes, even now, we’re outsourcing our own imagination to AI assistants that exist with every app we favour. It showed us that we’ve stopped noticing what we already have.

Naomi Klein wrote it plainly and confirmed what we already knew. We’ve known it for decades, and we kept going because the alternative felt too large and too hard to break down into SMART goals and tasks.

The Foretold Future

I wrote a scenario that has become the news, and yes, it’s a wry feeling.

The fuel wars were foretold in books, in films, in the grim logic of extractive capitalism stretched past its own limits. Mad Max wasn’t a fantasy. It was a direction of travel. Elysium wasn’t science fiction. It was class analysis in a spacesuit, the wealthy literally lifting off from a planet they had bled, while everyone else made do on the carcass.

Kim Stanley Robinson spent years mapping this in The Ministry for the Future, a novel that imagines the decades ahead with brutal clarity. He wrote:

And also, with a precision that feels like a gift:

Enough as a human right, enough is a feast. It is a reframe of what abundance actually means in our day to day.

The Campaign to Make Sure We Couldn’t Imagine It

I have recently re-read This Changes Everything (Klein), and again it is a reminder that the narrative environment we find ourselves in is intentional, carefully shaped for the interests of Fossil Fuel Industries and the supply chains now beholden to them. It really changes how you read the last thirty years.

Naomi Klein walked into the Heartland Institute’s annual climate denial conference and asked its head, Joseph Bast, a simple question: how did he get interested in climate change? He told her plainly. They had realised, he said, that if the science was true, it would give governments justification for almost any regulation they wanted. So they took another look at the science.

This was not confusion. This was not a genuine scientific dispute. This was a deliberate, decades-long, well-funded campaign and as Klein concluded:

The privatisation, austerity, deregulation and extraction. The entire edifice of an economic order is built on the premise that individuals consume, markets provide, and governments both get out of the way and provide band aids for the damage. All of this is because if climate change were real, then a collective response would be necessary, and a collective response is the one thing that the privatisation model cannot survive.

So they spent fifty years making sure we couldn’t imagine it by funding think tanks that ran the conferences where, as Klein witnessed, the deniers literally laughed at the prospect of extinction. They shaped the media cycle, narrowed the Overton window, and ensured that any politician who suggested we might need to fundamentally reorganise how we live could be dismissed as a socialist, a dreamer, an enemy of freedom.

The petrol price headline is the latest chapter of that story. Keep people focused on the cost at the pump. Keep the conversation personal, economic, individual and fear-based. Keep them scrolling. Keep them angry at the price, not at the system that made the price inevitable.

Because the moment people stop scrolling and start talking to each other across fences and between organisations and in community halls with a whiteboard the narrative breaks. Community cohesion is not just a nice outcome of resilience work. It is, structurally, a form of resistance to the story that was built to keep us apart.

What Cannot Be Changed From Here

I think we need to be honest about what we cannot do.

We cannot immediately stop the wars being fought over fossil fuel routes. We cannot redirect the logic of global capitalism from our kitchen tables. We cannot compel policymakers who have consistently chosen short-term economic comfort over long-term ecological sanity to suddenly find courage.

Tina Ngata (Ngāti Porou) has named this clearly, writing that

The petrol price is one of those fires. Real enough. Worth attending to. And also a distraction from the arsonist.

The arsonist is an economic system that treats the atmosphere as a free waste dump, that extracts from communities until they break, that has built a globalised supply chain so fragile that a single tanker rerouted by geopolitics can tip a nation into crisis.

Dr Maria Bargh (Te Arawa, Ngāti Awa), one of Aotearoa’s sharpest voices on climate justice and tika transition, has argued consistently that climate change cannot be separated from questions of sovereignty, Te Tiriti, and who holds authority to make decisions about land and resources. A just response to climate change asks who gets to design the future, and whose knowledge counts.

You cannot talk about climate change without talking about land. You cannot talk about land without talking about who it was taken from, and how.

What Has Already Changed

I have watched what happens in rooms full of community workers, iwi representatives, educators, health workers, and neighbourhood organisers across the Waikato.

When you remove the question “what should the government do?” and replace it with “what do you already have?” our conversation shifts.

A retired nurse who knows about food as medicine. A kuia whose knowledge of rongoā has never formally been asked for. A block of ten neighbouring businesses that have never once spoken to each other about their shared interests. A community garden that’s been quietly running for eleven years and has never been mapped as infrastructure. A cargo bike in someone’s garage. A WhatsApp group that becomes, within seventy-two hours of a crisis, the most functional supply chain in a two-kilometre radius.

We have always been living with more than we thought, are more capable than we believe and less alone than the isolation of modern consumer life has made us feel.

Covid showed us this. Climate events confirmed it. And now, as the fuel wars arrive, we are being invited again to reconnect, test our neighbourhood relationships, look for opportunities to connect, walk down the street and greet people as we pass by. The simplest and most direct route to community cohesion.

From Sufficiency to Abundance

Most resilience frameworks stop at sufficiency by asking, “Do we have enough to get through?”

I think the more interesting question is: “what becomes possible here that wasn’t possible before?”

That’s the shift from sufficiency to abundance in the human sense that is connection, reciprocity, knowledge flowing between people who had no reason to talk before the crisis made them neighbours and peers in a local community.

It is not so much to ask and offer in community it is, quietly and subversively, everything.

We are already living with the unknown. We are already talking amongst ourselves, making amendments, adjusting how we grow food and get around and look after each other ahead of, and often despite, our policymakers.

The lessons of Covid. The lessons of climate. The lessons now arriving from the fracturing of the global economic order that books and films warned us about are all pointing us in the same direction - toward each other.

Resources:

https://tinangata.com/author/tinangata/

https://www.metuauru.co.nz/

https://matikemai.maori.nz/

https://www.goeco.org.nz/climate-resilience

Food is a category. It describes edible matter, a noun that exists independently of relationship, context, or obligation. Food is produced, distributed, purchased, and consumed. It has a shelf life, a price point, and a supply chain. In the industrial system, food is defined by what it does metabolically and what it costs economically. It is, at its core, a commodity, something that can be owned, withheld, wasted, or traded. The language of food is the language of the market: food security, food access, food banks, food deserts. Even in progressive framing, food remains a thing that people either have or lack.

The Etymology of “food” is a glorious journey into cultural knowledge. I remain a student of Gaelic food tradition, ritual and practices and will delve into these and share reflections in the future.

Kai is a relationship. It carries within it the entire web of connections through which nourishment moves: between people and whenua, between communities and awa, between the living and those who came before and those yet to come. Kai is not produced, it is tended. It is not consumed, it is received. The act of gathering kaimoana from the reef, of harvesting kūmara from the māra, of sharing from the pātaka are not transactions. They are expressions of obligation, reciprocity, and belonging. Kai exists within tikanga. It cannot be fully separated from the relationships that make it kai rather than mere sustenance.

The Commodity Problem

The global food system is not broken. It is working exactly as it was designed — to extract value, concentrate wealth, and reduce the act of eating to a transaction. Kai, in this system, is inventory, not nourishment. The land that produces it is real estate, not whakapapa.

Within this structure, calls for ethical procurement and responsible sourcing represent meaningful, but incomplete, pressure. They push corporations and institutions toward reduced harm. But they do not, and cannot, operating within capitalist logic alone, restore kai as a human right. They reform the surface of a system whose foundations remain unchanged: private ownership, surplus extraction, and the severing of people from the land that feeds them.

In this piece, I want to discuss why a genuinely transformative response to food insecurity in Aotearoa must be grounded in the obligations of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni. It must centre Māori-led kai motuhake as a structural critique, not as a supplement to the dominant food system, but as a living alternative. I hope to provoke Tangata Tiriti to understand their role as partners with specific obligations to support and resource, as an alternative to benevolent reform, so we get out of the way of Māori-led solutions.

Crucially, this is not the same as food sovereignty as it is most commonly theorised. The food sovereignty movement, rooted in European and Latin American peasant traditions, carries assumptions about sufficiency, smallholder independence, and subsistence that sit uneasily alongside the abundance, provision, and relational governance at the heart of te ao Māori.

These are not compatible frameworks dressed in similar language. They are distinct political projects, and the distinction matters.

What Ethical Procurement Cannot Do

The turn toward ethical procurement, such as fair trade certification, living wages in supply chains, local sourcing policies, and reduced food waste programs, reflects a genuine moral unease with the worst excesses of industrial food systems. It represents important work. But it must be understood for what it is: a negotiation with capitalism about the terms of exploitation, not a rejection of exploitation itself.

Ethical procurement operates within the price mechanism. It asks: Can we make this transaction less harmful? It does not ask: should this be a transaction at all? It can reduce carbon emissions in a supply chain without questioning who owns the land. It can pay farmworkers a living wage without addressing who profits from the land those workers tend. It can divert surplus food from landfill to food banks without examining why surplus and scarcity coexist in the first place.

When institutional buyers commit to ethical sourcing, they signal values. But they also reproduce the logic that kai is something you purchase — a commodity with better or worse credentials, rather than a right held by all people by virtue of being human.

This is not an argument against ethical procurement. It is an argument for epistemic honesty about its limits. The most rigorous fair trade policy cannot restore rangatiratanga. The most thoughtful local sourcing framework cannot undo the confiscation of whenua that makes food insecurity structurally inevitable for many Māori communities. To present ethical procurement as food justice is to mistake the reforming of a system for its transformation.

For Tangata Tiriti working within institutions and who hold procurement roles, in NGOs, or in local government, the question is not whether to pursue ethical sourcing. The question is whether that pursuit is held alongside a deeper commitment: to Tiriti obligations, to Māori-led food systems, and to the redistribution of resources and decision-making power that genuine justice requires.

He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti: A Framework for Abundance

Any serious engagement with food justice in Aotearoa must begin with the constitutional foundations that precede and exceed the current political settlement. He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni (1835) and Te Tiriti o Waitangi (1840), read together, establish a framework not merely for governance, but for the relationship between people, land, and kai that colonial and capitalist systems have systematically dismantled.

He Whakaputanga: Sovereignty as the Ground of Provision

He Whakaputanga, signed by rangatira of the northern iwi, declared the absolute and undivided sovereignty of Māori over their lands and peoples. It was not a document of sufficiency; it was a declaration of the conditions under which abundance is possible. Sovereignty over whenua is sovereignty over the food systems that whenua sustains. To restore tino rangatiratanga is, in material terms, to restore the conditions of food security.

He Whakaputanga also established the authority of rangatira to make decisions collectively, through hui, for the collective good. This is not the individualised property logic of capitalist food systems, nor the smallholder independence of European food sovereignty models. It is relational governance: decision-making embedded in whakapapa, accountable to community, oriented toward collective wellbeing across generations.

Te Tiriti: Three Articles, One Obligation

Te Tiriti o Waitangi, in the Māori text that rangatira actually signed, contains three articles whose combined implications for food systems are profound and still largely unmet.

Article the First - kāwanatanga - grants the Crown a form of governance, but this grant is conditional and bounded. It does not extinguish Māori authority. It does not transfer ownership of land or resources. Read alongside He Whakaputanga, it cannot be interpreted as authorising the dispossession of the whenua that sustains Māori food systems.

Article the Second - tino rangatiratanga - guarantees the full authority of chiefs over their lands, their settlements, and all their taonga. Kai is taonga. The capacity to feed one’s people, through mara kai, through pātaka, through hua parakore is an expression of rangatiratanga. A state that allows food insecurity to persist in Māori communities while those communities lack access to ancestral whenua is not honouring Article Two. An institution that displaces Māori-led food systems with its own charitable provisioning is not honouring Article Two.

Article the Third - ōritetanga - extends to Māori the rights and protections of British subjects, which in contemporary terms must be understood to include the full rights of citizenship: housing, health, education, and food. Hunger is not a personal failure. In the context of Te Tiriti, it is a Treaty breach.

When read together with He Whakaputanga, these three articles do not describe a minimalist settlement of managed coexistence. They describe a partnership of abundance or, in other words, a commitment to the conditions under which all people can eat well, live well, and govern themselves.

Kai Motuhake: The Living Critique

What moves me most about kai motuhake is that it refuses the premise. Food independence, food self-determination, the restoration of Māori relationships with kai: this is a living practice, already happening in communities across Aotearoa, and it goes to the root of how we got here. To understand what kai motuhake is restoring, I think we need to be honest about the full scope of what colonisation took. Whenua was only part of it. The deeper taking was the taiao itself, the entire living world within which kai was gathered, cultivated, and understood.

Māori food systems were woven through the full fabric of the natural world, and that breadth is something I find genuinely humbling. The awa and their tuna populations, tended through careful rāhui. The moana and its seasonal rhythms, known across generations and held in trust by kaitiaki. The ngahere, rich with huhu, berries, and birds whose populations thrived through relationship rather than depletion. And the repo, the wetlands, which were food systems of extraordinary productivity governed by deep knowledge, seasonal protocol, and reciprocal obligation. Wetlands are now among the most destroyed ecosystems in Aotearoa, drained for farms and subdivisions, their abundance erased from living memory for most of us. But that abundance was real, and its restoration remains possible.

The industrial food system works by a fundamentally different logic, and I think we need to name it plainly. It treats the taiao as a stock to be drawn down. It extracts from soil until it is depleted, from waterways until they are fouled, from ecosystems until species collapse. The cost of this destruction is pushed outward, onto communities, onto future generations, onto the living world itself. Reciprocity has no place in the market’s accounting. The awa, the ngahere, the repo appear in its ledger as inputs, as resources, never as relations to whom something is owed.

Kaitiakitanga offers a genuinely different framework, and I want to be careful here to describe it on its own terms rather than translating it into something more familiar. It is a relational obligation flowing from whakapapa, one that binds the kaitiaki to the wellbeing of the awa, the ngahere, and the repo as kin. When hāpuku are taken from the reef, when tuna are gathered from the awa, when berries are harvested from the ngahere, these acts are held within protocols of thanksgiving, restraint, and return. Rāhui are expressions of that relationship: a community understanding itself as participant in an ecosystem, accountable to its health across generations. This is stewardship in a sense the conservation-management tradition has rarely approached, because it begins with belonging rather than ownership.

Pātaka kai, marakai, hua parakore systems, seed-saving networks, and the revival of traditional gathering practices in forest, waterway, and wetland: these are active refusals of the market’s premises. They ask something more important than how to procure kai more ethically within a commodity system. They ask what it means to restore kai as a relationship between people, land, water, forest, ancestors, and future generations. And they make something clear that I think Tangata Tiriti need to sit with: you cannot restore food sovereignty without also restoring water sovereignty, forest sovereignty, and the wetland ecosystems that colonisation has so thoroughly drained and broken. Kai motuhake is inseparable from taiao motuhake.

Mainstream responses to food insecurity sit very far from this. Food banks, rescued food systems, and emergency feeding programmes address hunger in the moment while leaving its causes entirely intact. They require the ongoing existence of scarcity to justify their operation. They sort people by deservingness. I have a lot of respect for the people working in these systems, and I know the care that goes into them. And I also think we have to be honest: they reproduce the colonial logic of provision, the idea that some people feed others, rather than the deeper truth that all people carry the capacity and the right to feed their own communities in relationship with the living world around them.

Kai motuhake restores the conditions, relational, ecological, material, and political, under which communities can be truly self-determining. The goal is abundance, and I believe in that abundance. When people are in right relationship with their whenua, their awa, their ngahere, their repo, and with each other, the capacity to feed communities well has always been there. What was destroyed was the web of relationships that made that abundance possible: the connections between people and place, between communities and the taiao, between kaitiaki and the living systems they were obligated to tend. Restoring kai motuhake means restoring those relationships. Access to food follows from that. It cannot be fully achieved without it.

The Limits of Food Sovereignty: A Necessary Distinction

It is tempting, in critiques of industrial food systems, to reach for food sovereignty as the obvious counter-framework. The term has real purchase in progressive movements globally, and the Via Campesina declaration and its successors contain important insights about the right of peoples to define their own food systems. But food sovereignty as theorised and practised in its dominant forms carries significant limitations when applied uncritically in the context of Aotearoa and Te Tiriti.

Food sovereignty emerged primarily from European and Latin American peasant traditions. Its core concepts — the smallholder, the family farm, local sufficiency, subsistence as dignity — reflect particular histories of dispossession and particular relationships to land that do not map cleanly onto Māori political philosophy or onto the obligations of Te Tiriti.

Sufficiency versus Abundance

The peasant tradition emphasises sufficiency: enough. Enough to eat. Enough to sustain a household. Enough to survive the market. This is a meaningful aspiration for communities shaped by histories of extraction, but it is a diminished horizon. It accepts scarcity as the baseline condition and asks how to manage within it.

The frameworks embedded in te ao Māori, in He Whakaputanga, and in Te Tiriti are not oriented toward sufficiency. They are oriented toward abundance. Pātaka were not emergency reserves — they were expressions of mana, of the capacity to host, to feed, to share generously. Hua parakore does not describe food grown to subsist. It describes food produced in full relationship with the values and principles of te ao Māori — food that is nourishing precisely because of how it is grown, who grows it, and what relationships sustain that growing.

To import a framework of sufficiency into this context is to replace a philosophy of abundance with a lesser aspiration. It is to accept, as the goal, conditions that are merely less bad than the current system rather than genuinely good on their own terms.

Sovereignty without Tiriti

Food sovereignty discourse also frequently uses ‘sovereignty’ in ways that are detached from the specific, juridical, constitutional meaning of tino rangatiratanga under Te Tiriti and He Whakaputanga. In much of the global food sovereignty literature, sovereignty refers loosely to community self-determination in food choices — a meaningful concept, but not the same as the authority guaranteed to rangatira over their whenua and their peoples.

When Tangata Tiriti adopt food sovereignty as their organising framework without attending to this distinction, they risk substituting a general progressive aspiration for a specific Treaty obligation. They may build community gardens and call them acts of food sovereignty without addressing land return. They may support local food systems without supporting tino rangatiratanga. They may advocate for better food access without advocating for the restoration of the conditions — political, legal, material — under which Māori communities can govern their own food systems.

Food sovereignty without Te Tiriti can become another way of Pākehā-led movements setting the agenda, importing European frameworks and treating them as universally applicable, without accountability to the specific obligations and specific peoples of this land.

This is not an argument against community food organising by Tangata Tiriti. It is an argument for grounding that organising explicitly in Tiriti obligations instead of borrowed or imported frameworks and for understanding Tangata Tiriti solidarity as support for Māori-led systems, not the creation of parallel ones.

Tangata Tiriti Practice: From Procurement to Partnership

For Tangata Tiriti working within capitalist institutions — businesses, councils, NGOs, universities, government agencies — the question of food justice presents as, initially, a procurement question. What we source, from whom, under what conditions. This is not unimportant. But it is a beginning, not an end.

Genuinely Treaty-grounded practice asks more. It asks who has decision-making authority over food systems in this rohe. It asks whether institutional resources are flowing toward Māori-led kai initiatives, or whether well-resourced Pākehā organisations are competing with those initiatives for the same funding and community relationships. It asks whether ethical procurement policies have been developed with Māori partners, or developed by Pākehā institutions and then consulted on.

The Charity Trap

Institutions with genuine commitments to food justice must resist the gravity of the charity model. Charitable food provision — however well-intentioned — tends to reproduce the hierarchies it claims to address. It positions institutions as providers and communities as recipients. It creates dependency. It occupies political and social space that could otherwise be held by community-led and Māori-led systems with greater accountability, greater cultural capability, and greater long-term transformative potential.

Solidarity, as distinct from charity, means resourcing others to lead. It means Tangata Tiriti institutions transferring resources — money, land access, relationships, political capital — to Māori-led kai initiatives, and then stepping back from control over how those resources are used. It means accepting that the most important thing a Pākehā-led institution can do for food justice may be to make itself smaller, quieter, and more accountable.

Dual Pathways: Meeting Need While Building Differently

None of this means that immediate food needs can be ignored while waiting for systemic transformation. People are hungry now. The tension between meeting urgent needs and not entrenching the systems that produce hunger is real and must be held, not resolved by choosing one side.

Tangata Tiriti practice can navigate this tension by operating on dual pathways simultaneously: meeting immediate need through ethical, dignified provision while actively resourcing the Māori-led systems - māra kai, pātaka, hua parakore - that address hunger at its roots. The first pathway does not replace the second. The second pathway is what gives the first pathway its moral coherence.

This dual approach also requires Tangata Tiriti to be honest about the distinction between these pathways in their public communications. Ethical procurement and food banking are not food justice. They are harm reduction within an unjust system. Naming that distinction clearly, publicly, and consistently is itself a form of political leadership, a refusal to let institutional goodwill substitute for structural change.

Kai as the Practice of Right Relationship

The commodification of kai is not a technical problem to be solved by better supply chain ethics. It is a political problem, a consequence of the dispossession of whenua, the suppression of tino rangatiratanga, and the reorganisation of food systems around the logic of profit rather than the logic of relationship.

Ethical procurement matters. Reducing harm in supply chains matters. Meeting immediate food needs with dignity matters. But none of these, alone or together, constitutes food justice in the context of Aotearoa. Food justice here requires honouring the obligations of Te Tiriti and He Whakaputanga: restoring tino rangatiratanga, resourcing Māori-led kai motuhake, and recognising that food security and land sovereignty are inseparable.

Food sovereignty, in its dominant forms, does not provide this framework. Its roots in European peasant traditions, its orientation toward sufficiency rather than abundance, and its detachment from specific Treaty obligations make it an inadequate substitute for the constitutional and relational frameworks already available in He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti.

I recommend the Kore Hiakai 2026 Webinar series Te Tiriti and Kai https://www.youtube.com/@KoreHiakai

While the dough rested, I remembered a dream from the night before. In it I had just finished giving a presentation about resilient communities. R was there and told me it was the worst presentation of the day. Even in the dream it stung. I made a mental note to tell her about it later and laugh it off.

It reminded me of another dream she woke me from recently. In that one I was fighting Donald Trump, who was trying to steal my hazelnut tree.

Dreams are strange like that. They braid together the things we care about and the things we are afraid of losing.

Today is International Women’s Day. As I shaped the loaves on the bench, I found myself thinking about women far away from my small rural home in New Zealand. Women surviving war. Women grieving losses that no one should have to carry. Women mark each day they are still alive as a small victory.

Closer to home, I know there will also be women in my own community quietly calculating their own survival. Women and children living with violence, working out how to get through the day, how to leave, or how to stay safe until they can.

As a survivor, I know these realities never fully leave us. My healing journey has been long. My ability to compartmentalise is well practised.

There was a time when International Women’s Day meant something different to me. I organised events. I spoke loudly about the injustices of patriarchy. I felt the urgency of naming what was wrong.

But over time, I noticed something shifting. The day was slowly folded into corporate calendars. The conversation moved toward how women could compete better, negotiate better, and succeed better within systems that had always undervalued us.

It began to sound like a lesson in how to become more like our male colleagues. As if equity could be achieved by improving our individual performance inside structures that were never designed for us in the first place.

What speaks louder to me now is something simpler and closer to the ground.

It is the reality that we have to fight to protect our local food systems, even though the knowledge we carry is still dismissed as sentimental or impractical.

Many of us are relearning customs and practices that once sustained whole communities, so the food we grow, share and eat is nutritionally dense and culturally significant. So, the love and care we show with food is most holistically complete.

All around me, there are still women and children living with fear, carrying pain that rarely appears in conversations about equality. Across the world, women are dying in wars and regimes we did not create.

Women’s knowledge is still written off as folklore or mythology.
And we remain, too often, the targets of patriarchal angers.

Standing in the kitchen this morning, hands dusted with flour, I felt the strange closeness of it all, my dreams and memory, bread rising on the bench, the cat asleep on the deck, and the quiet understanding that women everywhere are still holding together worlds that were not built to hold us.

Much of that work happens in places that are easy to overlook.

Kitchens. Gardens. Community halls. Conversations that stretch long after meetings have officially ended.

It is the work of noticing, tending, remembering, and holding relationships together.

In Aotearoa, wāhine Māori have long carried this understanding through mātauranga and the responsibilities of kaitiakitanga, where care for land and care for people are inseparable. These traditions recognise something many modern institutions are only beginning to rediscover: that environmental stewardship is not simply technical management. It is a relationship.

"Women are the human counterpart of Papatūānuku." Dr Ngahuia Murphy

Environmental work, at its heart, rests on that same foundation.

It requires people who can listen deeply to communities, hold grief for damaged ecosystems, and patiently rebuild trust between people, land, and institutions.

Much of that work is relational.

And much of it continues to be carried quietly by women as we carry life, not as an optional extra for which we clock in and clock out, as a rhythm that dances through us when we connect with the earth. Our work may be to care, but first and foremost, it is to protect.

Once upon a time, the people of our Celtic nations knew that our fate is inseparable from the fate of the land we live on… There is a Gaelic word for it. In Irish, the word is dúchas; in Scottish Gaelic, dùthchas. It expresses a sense of belonging to a place, to a certain area of land; it expresses a sense of rootedness, by ancient lineage and ancestry, in the community which has responsibility for that place." Sharon Blackie

Across the environmental sector today, women make up a large proportion of the workforce, particularly in early and mid-career roles. Yet at senior levels, where authority and resources sit, representation often narrows.

This pattern reflects a wider social dynamic. Work grounded in care, listening, relationship-building, and stewardship has long been undervalued in systems that reward extraction, speed, and measurable outputs.

When an environmental educator stays after a meeting to listen to a community member worried about a river, when a Lead holds a team together through the emotional weight of ecological loss, that is leadership.

When our teams maintain relationships across iwi, communities, agencies, and organisations, they are doing governance in practice.

An intersectional lens also reminds us that this labour is not experienced equally.

For wāhine Māori, the environmental sector often draws on Indigenous knowledge while still under-resourcing Indigenous leadership. Honouring mātauranga means recognising that this knowledge carries its own governance traditions, responsibilities, and authority.

Disabled women also bring perspectives that strengthen environmental work. Many speak of a heightened awareness of interdependence — how bodies, communities, and ecosystems rely on care and adaptation. These insights sit naturally alongside ecological thinking.

Yet disabled practitioners often encounter institutional barriers: inaccessible expectations, rigid work structures, and cultures that equate value with constant productivity rather than sustained contribution.

"It's a contract you see, people and the land. You care for it, and it cares for you." Saron Blackie

Which brings us to a deeper question about how our systems are designed.

Many labour systems assume fairness is something workers must organise and struggle to achieve. If recognition is missing, people must mobilise, negotiate, and build power to change the rules.

But the rules of a system are rarely written by those most affected by them.

When justice depends on navigating systems that were never designed with you in mind, equity will always remain uneven.

In Aotearoa, the constitutional thinking emerging through Matike Mai offers one vision of this shift. It proposes governance grounded in relationship, shared authority, and collective wellbeing.

Within such frameworks, justice is not something people must struggle to extract from institutions. It is something institutions are designed to uphold.

Applied to the environmental sector, this means recognising relational labour as central rather than peripheral. It means valuing the knowledge traditions that sustain ecological relationships. And it means building organisations where care, stewardship, and responsibility to future generations are reflected not only in mission statements, but in how work itself is valued.

Because environmental care has always been relational work.

It has always required attention, patience, and responsibility carried across generations. Women have long held much of this labour — from the ecological knowledge of communities to the everyday work of sustaining trust between people and place.

Wāhine Māori continue that leadership through mātauranga and kaitiakitanga. Disabled practitioners remind the sector that care, interdependence, and adaptation are not weaknesses but strengths.

"Mana wahine is informed by tikanga, mātauranga and te reo Māori and it is through this lens that we are able more deeply come to understand issues faced by Māori women and in doing so to reclaim and reassert our place on our own lands. This is both a movement and a theory that has at its centre the resurgence and reaffirmation of the mana of Māori women, past, present and future. This is particularly critical in a context where as Indigenous women we live with the impacts of imposed colonial heteronormative gender ideologies that seek to deny the sacred standing that is inherently ours." Professor Leonie Pihama.

If the environmental sector is serious about the future it speaks of, its institutions must reflect those same values.

Because protecting the living world will always depend on the people who care for it.

And this morning, while the bread rose on the bench and Burrito slept on the deck, the trees stood quietly in the garden where they belong, a small reminder that what we tend, what we protect, and what we refuse to let be taken matters more than we sometimes realise.

A Connection to the Gaelic Hearth

Digging into the history of sourdough has added a layer of depth I didn’t expect. Long before commercial yeast existed, the traditional Gaelic kitchen relied on a “leaven” or beist (the beast). Sourdough wasn’t a trend; it was a matter of survival.

Our ancestors practised the people’s bread, often using hardy grains like oats and barley. They understood that the slow fermentation didn’t just make the bread rise; it made it digestible and kept it fresh during long winters. Reclaiming this feels less like a hobby and more like a conversation with the past.

The Unexpected Gifts of the Starter

Beyond the history, sourdough has brought some practical, everyday wins to our kitchen:

• Zero Waste: Leftover starter (the “discard”) never hits the bin. It’s been reimagined as pizza crusts, pita pockets, flatbreads, and now, these bagels. We also eat all of the bread, preserving the stale ends as crumbs or finely slicing and drying them as crackers.

• Table Variety: We’ve moved away from the store-bought monotony. Every bake brings a new texture or a different tang to the table for us to enjoy together.

• The Power of the Ordinary: There is a quiet defiance in making your own food from scratch. It’s a connection to a long class history of self-reliance—the baking traditions of the people, for the people.

• A Sense of Connection: To the long class history of sourdough, to the people who baked before industrial yeast existed, and to the everyday food traditions our ancestors relied on.

There’s something powerful about reclaiming a skill that humans have honed for thousands of years. It’s slow, tactile, and wonderfully ordinary. Every time I pull a tray of golden, chewy bread out of the oven, it feels like a small, creative victory.

We are heading into Election 2026 in a meta-crisis of multiple, overlapping crises of climate, inequality, racial injustice, ecological collapse, political polarisation, and institutional fragility. We’re also watching the proliferation of genocide and imperial resource wars. These crises act on each other, compound each other, and reveal the limits of the systems we’ve both inherited and then strengthened.

And they also reveal the limits of how we think, learn, organise, and govern.

The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has confirmed that racialised harm is escalating in Aotearoa, that Tiriti commitments are being weakened, and that centralisation is eroding community agency. This becomes even sharper when we consider that our crises are epistemic and demand new ways of knowing, sensing, imagining, and acting.

I think the challenge ahead is to become different kinds of humans together.

Many established approaches to teaching, organising, and problem-solving no longer serve the realities we face. When learning is separated from ecological, relational, and lived contexts, our capacity to respond to complex, interconnected challenges is diminished and our responses inevitably create harm.

I have been grateful for a recently published article shared and contributed to by Mike Joy. Anthropocene Intelligence centers on a shared understanding of wellbeing that arises from our deep interconnectedness with each other and the living world.

It invites us to experience ourselves as participants in dynamic ecosystems, to notice and care for the relationships that shape life, and to expand our moral imagination beyond immediate concerns. It encourages meaning-making that weaves together past, present, and future, grounding action in continuity and responsibility. At its heart, it emphasises collective agency, recognising that flourishing emerges through cooperation, shared care, and mutual accountability.

In many ways, this mirrors Māori and Indigenous worldviews that understand humans as woven into the living world, accountable to whakapapa, and responsible for future generations. For those of us from other traditions, research shows that for thousands of years these preindustrial and prepatriarchal understandings existed in our own ecologies of survival.

Colonisation, feudal land seizure, Christian patriarchy, enclosure, and later capitalist property regimes systematically dismantled these structures. Women lost land rights, legal standing, and cultural authority as power was centralised and masculinised. What survived often did so in kitchens, songs, farming practices, and family memory rather than law.

Women were the keepers of place. The household, land use, food systems, and seasonal rhythms were domains where women held practical authority. In a culture where survival depended on continuity rather than conquest, women’s knowledge of land, weather, food preservation, and animal husbandry was power.

Matrifocal authority describes societies in which power is exercised through relationship, continuity, and care, rather than through hierarchy, coercion, or centralised rule. We refer to this almost every day in cultural references around our Nans, Aunties and Mums - except that we have allowed this power to be parodied and systemically undermined.

It also mirrors my childhood memories where belonging was relational, seasonal, embodied, and shared. Where knowledge came through story, labour, memory, and reciprocity. It is an intelligence that is often pushed aside because continuity is a form of sufficiency that, in turn, rejects the consumptive power and grind of capitalist powers who want our labour to extract all there is to extract.

You can’t go on forever ignoring the laws of nature, or the laws of the universe, and expect to survive - Kay Baxter

When we bring together the CERD observations and the call for Anthropocene Intelligence, a clear moral and leadership mandate comes into view, one that speaks not only to policy or compliance but to the deeper responsibilities of relationship, guardianship, and collective care. The centralisation of power steadily erodes trust and effectiveness by pulling decision-making away from the relationships and places where knowledge is held, while racialised inequity continues to widen rather than heal under systems that were never designed to uphold dignity for all.

Ecological wellbeing and human rights are inseparable, because no community can flourish on degraded land or poisoned waters, and no future can be secured when the living world is treated as external to justice. The disestablishment of Māori-led institutions deepens structural injustice rather than resolving it, weakening the very forms of leadership that are grounded in whakapapa, place, and intergenerational accountability, while the erosion of independent monitoring diminishes transparency and collective trust.

And when political hostility toward Te Tiriti is normalised, it accelerates social, constitutional, and relational breakdown, undermining the foundations of shared authority and mutual obligation that any just and enduring society depends upon.

For too long, the social and community sector has been shaped by narrow, efficiency-driven ways of thinking and organising that mistake management for leadership and delivery for change. These approaches train us to compress crises into outputs, reduce living complexity to KPIs, protect institutional reputation at the expense of imagination, treat communities as clients rather than partners, and prioritise compliance over connection.

They ask us to endure scarcity rather than transform the conditions that produce it. In doing so, they replace political courage with technical fixes, and ecological interdependence with unfounded optimism about systems that are already failing.

It is no surprise that many programmes labelled “systems change” feel empty, and this feeling has strengthened for me over the past year as I have come to understand that they are built inside the very logics that created the harm. Leadership worthy of this moment requires us to leave these pedagogies behind and commit to ways of working grounded in relationship, courage, accountability, and collective liberation.

Systemic change can happen when we understand that no issue exists in isolation. Ecological collapse is inseparable from racism. Racism is reinforced by centralisation. Centralisation is sustained through austerity. And austerity undermines democracy, wellbeing, and land rights all at once. These forces are not separate failures; they are interlocking systems that reinforce each other, just as human and more-than-human communities are interdependent.

Anaïs Nin wrote, “You cannot save people, you can just love them.” I keep coming back to that, because it names something essential about the work in front of us. We are not here to rescue communities or fix each other from a distance. We are here to love in ways that bind us into responsibility.

A Tiriti-led, Anthropocene-informed movement begins there, with the slow and sometimes uncomfortable work of rebuilding our capacity to relate. It asks us to see communities not as service users or problems to be solved, but as living constellations of belonging, whakapapa, story, memory, and shared struggle. It invites us to remember ourselves as part of whenua, water, weather, and the breathing web of life, not above it, not outside it.

From that place, the work shifts. Survival gives way to shared agency. Imagination is a political force, one that can hold grief and hope at the same time and still dare to dream of futures worth marching for. Love without structure can exhaust itself, which is why we build organising practices that are relational, decentralised, and rooted in place to grow resilience, autonomy, and solidarity.

This is love with urgency. Love that refuses distance. Love that acts because a relationship demands it. We are reshaping who we are as community organisations, as advocates for systemic change and as community-centred practitioners and advocates.

When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too - Paul Coelho, The Alchemist.

When I think about the sector’s language of “systems change,” I find myself returning to community as lived memory. Community shaped by whakapapa, by relational knowing, by the rhythms of shared work and shared hope. A community where reciprocity guides action, and belonging is understood through connection rather than categorisation.

Whenever conversations turn technical or self-referential, I remember my grandmothers. Their stories, kitchens, steady hands, generosity, steely grit, creativity and conviction. And I remember the valley where my childhood unfolded among fruit trees, animals, harvest seasons, and people who cared for each other, laughed together, disagreed with each other, and still showed up.

These memories shape my understanding of Tiriti-led community: grounded, relational, place-based, built through mutual responsibility and collective contribution. They remind me that community thrives when people are trusted to lead, when mana is upheld, and when decision-making is shared.

This is the leadership Te Tiriti calls us into - a leadership that lifts people, strengthens connection, and honours the authority communities already hold. Leadership that cultivates trust, supports autonomy, grows capability, and creates the conditions for collective flourishing.

Austerity really means we inherit a system designed to offload the responsibility for the welfare of the people.

Over the last two years, the signals and government issue narratives have been unmistakable. Working in the not-for-profit sector means receiving direction and advice for new efficiencies.

• Government cuts.

• Centralisation.

• Downsizing.

• A narrowing of who gets funded and who is deemed “efficient”.

• We are being told to stay small, but not too small.

• Tighten belts.

Rely on others; leverage relationships, corporate and business sector for sponsorships, private donors, fundraising, diversifying income streams, invest in reserves, but do not accumulate cash, build new fund gathering Foundations and look offshore for purpose-driven investors.

• Collaborate.

• Lean on tech and AI systems to do more with less.

• Justify our existence through outcomes we cannot influence, on timelines we did not choose.

This is austerity disguised as reform, as modernisation, and as targeted investment. It is also a warning shot for the continued defunding of the social service sector while the government sells off public housing and increases prison capacity.

But here is the quiet design behind austerity: when governments centralise power and shrink their obligations, small not-for-profits get positioned as the mop-up crew, then blamed when the floor stays wet.

The sector’s view of agency has been distorted; it is one of the most misused words in the environmental and social sector. We talk about “building community agency,” yet most organisations remain structurally dependent on:

• short-term contracts

• politically vulnerable funding streams

• compliance-heavy reporting

• donor preferences

• and internal governance that often mirrors corporate boards

This is a managed dependency.

The problem is not capacity. The problem is structure. Government contracting narrows NGO autonomy, creating mission drift and risk-aversion that weaken the sector’s ability to act boldly. Research during COVID by Te Pūnaha Matatini showed that communities outperformed institutional systems because they relied on relationships, trust, and local leadership rather than contracts, and we hold this with pride.

Inspiring Communities’ long-term work confirms the same truth: community-led development succeeds when communities hold authority, not when it is delegated from above. And kaupapa Māori researchers have consistently shown that systems built around central authority cannot repair the harm caused by centralisation in the first place.

And that structure is shaped by austerity, which asks us to be grateful for scarcity rather than angry at its design.

My English grandmother never used the language of systems change. But everything she did was about power, a quiet, creative, relational power.

She was middle-class, artistic, and kind in a way that felt effortless, but she understood grit. She could cook the food of my storybook dreams: layered cakes, tarts, soft caramels, butterscotch, pastries, pies made with lard, rich with game meats, fish, and eel. She may have been a little broken-hearted when I discovered the smoked eel at our neighbours’ home, a texture and warmth that I enjoyed much more than the jellied eel she prepared.

Even the birds braced under the walnut tree felt like magic, though the walnut tree was also home to my swing. It was the place I sang whatever song had lodged itself in my small head: “Away in a Manger,” to my mother’s horror, followed eventually by “Puppy Love,” “Seasons in the Sun,” “Rhinestone Cowboy,” “Delta Dawn,” “I Am Woman,” “I Am... I Said,” “Boogie Fever,” and finally “Dancing Queen,” right about when I stopped singing out loud.

We lived in a valley where families, fruit trees, animals, and shared labour interwove into something whole. We respected draft horses for their steady plod, the first lessons in balance, sitting deep on their hindquarters. We respected bush ponies for their sharp shifts from trot to a wild, thrilling canter. We harvested and hunted and shared tools, kitchens, jars, and labour.

• Blackberries.

• Mushrooms in the mist.

• Duck eggs along the riverbank.

• Trout under the willows.

• Rotten eggs used to lure eels.

• Plucked turkeys and hens.

• Pig bristles scoured off in boiling water.

• Lamb tails crisp on the fire.

• Leather drying.

• Wool hand-twisted by our fingers, practising the movement and treating the spindle with a wariness learned from fairy tales.

• The smelting fire for transforming lead from batteries into sinkers for fishing.

It all seems romantic now; it was a community actively labouring to respect the fruits of the earth, reusing and repairing, making and mending. Imperfect in the ways of coloniality and learned behaviour, but also filled with tradition and ritual and an economic theory of enoughness. Real, messy, relational, contradictory community, the kind you can’t capture in a dataset.

And that is exactly the point - we all lose when we reduce community to data.

At the recent Social Investment Summit, I felt the weight of dissonance. In the room, “community” had become a dataset, rings of demographic clusters built for modelling, benchmarking, and prediction in the name of efficiency and targeting individuals for community-delivered state interventions.

The example of the day, 22-year-old Jack, his solo mum and his three stints in prison was an incomplete story. The story gaps in this targeted attention are where the healing lies. Neither Jack nor his mum stands alone in singularity; they are much more than the binaries of gender, role and incarceration status.

I belong to dozens of communities. I move through them fluidly, carrying memory, identity, politics, trauma, joy, contradictions. No dataset can map the cause-and-effect relationships that shape an entire life. No algorithm can measure the intensity of belonging or the sharp edge of exclusion.

I am a mother.

A queer.

A dyke married to a lesbian.

Once married to a man, now divorced without regret - just another chapter.

A would-be fashion designer who still sews crooked seams in honour of my grandmother’s tiny, perfect stitches.

An ex-drag king and sometimes queen.

I have presented as a girl, a maiden, androgenous, soft butch, feminine, non-binary and a grown woman.

A unionist.

A caregiver.

A single parent with a full time job.

A single parent on the domestic purposes benefit.

A state house tenant.

A private renter.

A landlord.

I inherited class culture - both working-class grit and upper-middle-class gentility.

A debutante at 16, offered up as eligible, groomed for roles I refused.

A survivor of sexual violence from a young age.

A person who has lived with domestic violence, who has been beaten and has fought back.

There’s more; you get the gist by now.

I live at the intersection of contradiction and conviction. I am who the system cannot neatly categorise. Binaries are lies told to keep us in our place. And I will not play along.

We belong to each other through story, struggle, relationship, and choice, not demographics. And certainly not through charity models built to soothe rather than transform.

Austerity wants us small, and community reminds us we are vast. Austerity is designed to shrink our sense of possibility. When funding is cut, when government centralises power, when contracts become tighter, the sector tends to retreat, turning our gaze inward, taking cautious steps, expressing our gratitude for the crumbs of wealth donated and choosing compliance over commitment.

My childhood taught me that we come from abundance, shared labour, interdependence, and creative resistance stitched through generations of struggle. My own lived experience has taught me that relationships matter; they test us, hold us, comfort us, keep us safe, place us in danger and frame the ways we experience living.

We are an unfinished species, a story in the middle, a succession of families, classes, clans and societies in transition to new awareness via ancient knowledges.

It felt like a season of conscientisation. Once you see the deeper structures shaping our work, you see how much possibility lives in the people who gather to challenge them. And once you see that, you begin to recognise the collective strength waiting beneath the surface of every room.

The function of freedom is to free someone else - Toni Morrison

The Warnings We Can No Longer Ignore

Every gathering carried the same truths.

Austerity is tightening.
Environmental protections are being dismantled.
Decades of restoration work are being undone.
Species are slipping toward extinction while offshore interests get priority.

And through all of it, the message to the sector is the same: do more with less. This pattern is now so very familiar to me, stretching from the late Muldoon years to Rogernomics and through the Ruthanasia era. Each time, communities adapted, innovated, and stepped up.

That history shows our resilience within a broken system, it also shows something even more important: our ability to imagine in moments designed to drain our creativity. When pressure rises, when the burden grows heavy, that is exactly when imagination becomes a form of resistance. The system may strain under its own weight, but we do not have to carry that strain as our identity.

How Do We Move From Survival to Shared Agency

Across these hui, I kept noticing something. We speak about systemic change with confidence, point to the operating system as our foundational challenge and then drift back into short-term survival. It is understandable in a tight funding environment, but it keeps us small.

Every room also held ideas, insights, and relationships strong enough to grow something new. When we remind ourselves to lift our gaze from the immediate pressures, we begin to see the agency we already hold. And when that agency is shared, it becomes a foundation for unity.

We can do so much more than “holding the line”; we can move the line forward together.

The Imaginaries That Anchor Us

In the middle of these heavy discussions, I kept thinking about the childhood spirit beings and nature protectors from the stories my grandmother read to me. The ones illustrated by Hilda Boswell in the books she gifted me. Gentle, wise creatures holding the balance of forests and rivers with quiet courage. In those stories, caring for the natural world was not a task. It was a truth.

Those imaginaries planted early seeds of responsibility and possibility. They remind me that imagination is not a luxury. It is where unity begins. When we imagine together, we build together.

Imagination is central in the formation and operation of social movements because it enables people to sustain an image of the collective Us. - Hawlina

Dignity as a Shared Political Force

One line from a hui keeps echoing:

Dignity is power.

The power that lifts people without pushing others down. The type of power that connects.

Dignity creates room for everyone to stand tall. It calls us into relationships where mana is recognised, not negotiated. When dignity shapes our sector, we stop shrinking ourselves to fit old expectations and start expanding our capacity to act together.

Recentring Tiriti Leadership as a Collective Pathway

Te Tiriti surfaced in every room as a steady compass. A Tiriti-led future offers us a model of shared power, shared responsibility, and shared wellbeing. It invites unity instead of compliance. Unity for radically inclusive collaborative climate-resilient futures shaped by relationships to whenua, whakapapa, and community.

Constitutional transformation by 2040 is a national opportunity. A chance to rebuild our systems so they reflect who we are becoming.

As a sector, we must be able to imagine governance that grows from the ground up and carries the whole country forward. It is our mantra.

A Sector With Real and Shared Agency

We often speak as though we are waiting for permission to act. But across these hui, I kept seeing something different. I saw a sector with relationships strong enough to shift the conversation. I saw expertise deep enough to influence national direction. I saw communities ready to design their own pathways.

Agency becomes real when we hold it together and back each other.
When we build connective tissue across organisations, regions, and movements, we can match critique with hope and turn both into momentum.

A Future We Shape Together

Looking toward election 2026, we have choices to make. We can allow policy to drift back to a familiar status quo, or we can support leaders who are ready to commit to constitutional transformation by 2040.

Our world is shifting quickly. Power must be shared differently if we want to meet what is coming. Local leadership supported by national courage. Community-driven decisions supported by strong governance and a public ethic shaped by belonging and responsibility. When we approach this moment collectively, it becomes an opportunity to build unity at a scale we have not seen in decades.

After two months of listening and learning, here is what rises to the surface:

We have the relationships to build unity.
We have the courage to move differently.
We have the imagination to create the futures we talk about.

We are not here to survive.
We are here to shape.
We are here to act together.

Poem and Illustration by Hilda Boswell.

The report opens with hopeful optimism:

· 97% of respondents say they recycle.

· 95% say they try to reduce waste.

· 77% say reducing food waste is important.

All these behaviours, measured as individual effort, rinsing jars, using reusable bags, checking labels, and the structural conditions that create waste, remain untouched.

Three years of tracking found that low-commitment individuals remain static and resistant to change, and that high-commitment individuals (the “good recyclers”) are already doing all they can. Confidence in recycling has improved slightly, but trust in the system remains low, and confusion persists about what can even be recycled.

This is presumably colonial psychology rendered in data: the individual is counted; the system is not. The illusion of behaviour change functions precisely to distract us from the forces that create the waste.

Counting individual acts of recycling and restraint is not collective action, it’s colonial accounting. We are measuring obedience, not transformation.

In the survey, most respondents “always” bring reusable bags (81%), recycle at home (68%), and carry reusable bottles (63%). Far fewer engage in practices like hiring, sharing, or repairing; only 14% borrow tools, and just 10% refill containers. These habits reflect a growing commitment to the waste hierarchy, yet they also highlight a narrow band of behavioural compliance. Frugality, once a common ethic of care and restraint, appears less visible, even though it offers a powerful way to reduce consumption upstream.

While these actions are commendable, they tend to be measured as individual virtues rather than collective leverage. When waste is framed primarily through personal responsibility, each behaviour becomes both a data point and a moral gesture. This framing can affirm our intentions, but it may also obscure the deeper work of challenging the systems that generate waste in the first place. Rather than choosing between feeling virtuous or powerful, we might ask how everyday actions, especially those rooted in frugality and repair, can reconnect us with systemic change.

But how do citizens come to internalise waste management as an act of personal virtue?

The answer, I think, lies in the constant, subtle influence of modern marketing as the Soft Face of Control

In their analysis of “whitened fascisms”, the capitalist, nationalist, and moral regimes that normalise domination through everyday culture, the authors of Whiteness and Education (2025) identify modern marketing as a powerful tool. It tells us that to be a “good person” is to correctly sort waste, purchase sustainably packaged goods, and perform care through consumption.

The same logic drives state campaigns like Love Food Hate Waste or Plastic Free July: public rituals of individual virtue that mask the ongoing expansion of petrochemical and agribusiness empires. It is this subtle authoritarianism that moderates modern life.

Fascism teaches obedience through fear. Marketing teaches compliance through desire. Both reduce justice to a checklist of personal behaviours.

The Whiteness of “Good Citizens” is retold in the report’s segmentation of “high, medium, and low-commitment” recyclers reproduces a moral hierarchy eerily familiar to Aotearoa’s class and racial history.

• High-commitment recyclers mirror Pākehā middle-class respectability, and their environmental virtue doubles as social status.

• Low-commitment groups are pathologised, their structural barriers (rental housing, poverty, systemic neglect) recast as “attitude problems.

• Māori and Pacific communities are statistically visible yet politically erased, treated as behaviour change targets rather than partners in systemic redesign.

These categories echo the colonial civilising project, where worth is measured by conformity to dominant norms of cleanliness, order, and restraint. The “good citizen” becomes the one who sorts properly and behaves responsibly, while the “bad citizen”, often poorer, busier, browner, becomes the site of intervention and education.

This is my understanding of waste colonialism as social science: a measurement of morality masquerading as a measurement of impact.

The report itself admits the cracks:

· Only 12% of people believe their individual efforts make no difference—a number that’s rising.

· One-third find recycling rules confusing.

· A quarter of households say they waste food because of busy lifestyles.

These are not failures of attitude; they are symptoms of a system that demands more of people while giving them less time, less control, and fewer collective options. People are tired. They are told that behavioural change is the path to salvation, but the landfill keeps growing.

The survey celebrates small shifts 6% more people moved into “high commitment”, yet national waste volumes, emissions, and extraction all continue to rise.

Counting actions without changing systems is the mathematics of managed decline.

Modern fascism doesn’t only march in uniform; it curates your feed. It defines “enoughness” through aesthetic virtue: the minimalist home, the clean pantry, the curated lifestyle that performs responsibility while depending on global exploitation. This is the new whiteness, tidy, anxious, moral. It sells the illusion that purity can be purchased and progress measured in self-discipline.

Our data dashboards mirror that same psychology. The Ministry’s graphs of 97% recyclers reassure us that order has been restored, that people are “doing their bit.” But systems built on extraction cannot be reformed through tidiness; they can only be transformed through redistribution of power.

Kaupapa Māori worldviews challenge the very premise of this research. They remind us that behaviour is not individual but relational and that every action exists within connections that include shared responsibility to land and community.

If the report measured collective repair, shared governance, or mana motuhake over resources, its findings would look very different. Rather than segmenting citizens by compliance, it could show how communities are enabled to self-determine. It could reveal how resourcing local infrastructure and honouring Māori leadership in oranga taiao allows the Crown to begin fulfilling its Tiriti obligations.

Decolonisation reframes waste as a breach of the relationship with each other – tangata whenua, tangata Tiriti, tangata me ngā mea katoa o te āo tūroa.

The task before us is to build resistance to the waste economy, to the data economy, and to the fascism of measurement itself. We must create what Jupp et al. call communities of resistance and dissent where solidarity replaces surveillance, where learning replaces guilt, and where collective care replaces compliance.

Kaupapa Māori practice already shows us how: whanaungatanga as infrastructure, kaitiakitanga as governance, whakapapa as economy. Zero waste, in this frame, is a constitutional act. It is a rejection of supremacy and a reclamation of relationship.

If official reports measured time spent in hui, mutual aid, shared composting, or community repair, our data would tell a story of abundance. But as long as we count only isolated actions, we will mistake the performance of care for the practice of justice.

The opposite of waste is not recycling. It is rematriation—returning value, voice, and vitality to the systems capitalism stole.

True zero waste is constitutional work: a fundamental rebalancing of power, time, and purpose. My thanks and gratitude to L’Rey Renata for their work Beyond the Bin: Reimagining Waste through Atua, Whakapapa, and Interconnection and the lessons for resistance and liberation within this.

Further Reading:

Aotearoa Plastic Pollution Alliance - Te Rōpu Whakakore Para Kirihou

They’re walking off the job because they’re at breaking point. And the community sector must walk with them unapologetically, out in the open, loudly and in a clear show of solidarity.

This is our struggle too

The Government is already trying to frame this as selfish, political, and unnecessary. They’ve sent out carefully worded letters blaming unions for disrupting lives. They’ve painted striking workers as villains, while ignoring the exhaustion, underfunding, and structural neglect that created this crisis in the first place.

Community sector workers and volunteers are living with the daily consequences of public systems in crisis. We work alongside whānau who can’t get a GP appointment. We support tamariki slipping through the cracks of overcrowded classrooms. We source food for families, pensioners, and disabled communities. We provide literacy support, in-home aid, and care for those in recovery within a system that no longer supports healing.

We fill the gaps when the system fails. And it is failing, every single day. It’s working-class staff who hold these systems together, often with little recognition and even less resourcing.

Under a government intent on privatisation, it is the working class Māori, Pacific peoples, migrants, women, disabled and those living on the breadline who bear the brunt when care systems collapse.

We cannot be neutral, this Government has already shown us where it stands by dismantling Te Aka Whai Ora, by cutting public services and fast-tracking ecocide.

This Government has already shown us where it stands.

When they say “we can’t afford to pay more,” what they really mean is: “We’re choosing not to.”

And when they try to cast workers as greedy, lazy or political, they’re not just attacking unions. They’re attacking all of us who believe in a world where care is funded, public good is protected, and people matter more than profit. It’s gaslighting, it’s also rule by division. Pitching the sick against the weary, the working parents against the schools, creating a nuisance narrative to distract us from standing together, because when we do stand together, we feel powerful, and that power lets us know that we can dismantle a system that no longer values the welfare of its people

Standing with striking workers is an act of justice for Te Tiriti, for the climate, and for collective wellbeing. This strike follows a year of Crown breaches. The disestablishment of Te Aka Whai Ora was a direct attack on Māori leadership in health. Māori workers remain overrepresented in low-paid roles and underrepresented in decision-making. That’s not incidental, it’s structural. Community organisations committed to Te Tiriti cannot remain silent. Neutrality is complicity.

If climate breakdown teaches us anything, it’s that systems matter. Community care, health, and education are the backbone of our collective resilience. When a crisis hits, it’s not banks or consultants who show up, it’s nurses, teachers, frontline staff and communities.

The strike on 23 October is a stand for all of us.

It’s a stand against a government that pretends there’s no alternative.

It’s a stand for public care.

It’s a stand for workers under pressure who refuse to be silent.

The Government wants us divided. They want parents blaming teachers, patients blaming nurses, whānau blaming each other. Our struggles are connected, and our solidarity is our strength.

What you can do on October 23:

Join a picket line. Bring your team. Bring your banner. Show your support in person.

Picket Locations

Share your solidarity online. Post why you stand with workers. Counter the government’s narrative.

Hold a solidarity morning tea or workplace action if you can’t leave the office.

Photo by Simon Oosterman - a family outing at the Port of Auckland Picket 2011-2012

I refuse to believe we are powerless as the shadows of our hopelessness lengthen.

I am grieving for every Palestinian child buried beneath rubble.

I am grieving for the families praying without food, without homes, without safety.

And I am grieving, too, for what it says about us and how we have watched this unfold for months, for years, for decades, and still we are here, asking for our government to see humanity.

This is about all of us.

Our lives are deemed expendable, our grief is considered acceptable

In the explosions, every second, of every day

Our truth is more bombs.

Vote for them or not - our government is our globally recognised voice.

2014 — Fifty days of bombing Gaza. Over 2,200 Palestinians killed. Entire families buried in rubble.

Silence. Nothing. No sanctions. No condemnation. No recognition of Palestine.

2016 — We co-sponsored UN Resolution 2334, condemning illegal Israeli settlements.

Israel pushed back, we folded. No action. No integrity.

2018 — During the Great March of Return, snipers picked off medics and children.

Our government responded: “restraint on both sides.”

As if a stone and a sniper rifle weigh the same.

2019 — More illegal settlements. More land theft.

And all we could say was we were “disappointed.”

2021 — Sheikh Jarrah. Al Aqsa. Gaza on fire again.

Our Government blocked BDS motions while Palestinians buried their dead.

2023–2024 — After October 7, Israel launched a campaign of destruction that genocide scholars and the ICJ have confirmed likely constitutes genocide.

Our government condemned Hamas. Repeated Israel’s “right to defend itself.”

And refused — still refuses — to name what is happening: genocide.

2025: Our Government addressed the United Nations and couldn’t even say the word “Palestine.”

We denied their right to statehood.

We denied the illegality of the occupation.

We denied genocide.

And in doing so, we denied our humanity.

To recognise Palestine is to see

that colonisation can be reversed.

That land theft doesn’t erase sovereignty.

That Indigenous people do not vanish.

Recognition threatens the entire colonial algorithm.

The gatekeeping.

The gaslighting.

The illusion of permanence.

We walk forward together

tangata whenua, tangata tiriti,

human and more-than-human,

as kin among kin.

We stand with Palestinians who call for liberation.

We boycott, divest, and sanction until apartheid ends.

We petition for Legal accountability for war crimes and genocide.

Because,

Peace is not paved with compromise.

It’s built on justice.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

At the same time, I’ve been reading the latest climate reports - sobering, urgent reminders that we are fast running out of safe operating space against the backdrop of a government that seems determined to muzzle the Climate Commission and, if given the chance, close it down altogether.

Out on the land though, the picture looks different. Farmer-led water catchment projects show there are bodies of farmers willing to step into stewardship, to plant shade along streams, to tend rongoā, to re-establish habitats and mahinga kai.

One of the highlights of my month was being introduced to the work of Eat New Zealand by walking through a Canterbury food forest, a tree farm, and a wetland restoration site. The potential of small farms feels off the charts: mixed crops, small animals, trees, biodiversity, habitat, food, all woven together. I loved seeing not only the ecological vitality, but also the ancestral inspirations for weaving resources and making small functional items to replace plastics as part of day-to-day function and mahi.

I grew up in a land where kitchens were full of aunties and grandmothers, where the air carried the steam of bottling jars and the laughter of women swapping recipes and secrets. Food was never just food, it was a form of resilience, a quiet defiance against scarcity, a way of weaving strength into families and communities. Back then, our cupboards held sacks of root vegetables and shelves of preserves, a living reminder that kai is both memory and survival.

Fast forward, and we are told our future lies not in soil, rivers, and seasonal rhythms, but in sterile factories producing “future foods.” The glossy marketing of vertical farms, lab-grown proteins, and precision-fermented powders promises salvation. But as Alf Hornborg reminds us, this is an illusion.

“unsustainable resource flows and obscene inequalities are as inherent in the use of green technologies as in the fossil fuels they are meant to replace”.

Machines displace exploitation. Cobalt mined by children abroad, coal-fired steel, and patents controlled by multinationals are the hidden ingredients in the techno-utopias we are being sold.

Meanwhile, here in Aotearoa, 83% of our grain is imported. We ship in the bread of life, while pouring billions into new dairy conversions. We talk about being the “backbone” of global food supply, but as I argued before, the myth of the backbone hides more than it reveals. Our true backbone is not agribusiness - it is the whenua, it is tangata whenua, and it is the workers and communities who have always carried the weight of feeding others.

The Planetary Health Check 2025 makes it brutally clear: seven of nine planetary boundaries are already breached, and the “window for returning to a safe operating space is closing fast”. If we keep doubling down on factory fantasies and export logics, we won’t just lose food security — we’ll deepen our ecological debt to the planet itself.

But there are threads of hope if we choose to weave them together. Eat New Zealand tells us that “our food stories are our sovereignty.” The Aotearoa Food Rescue Alliance shows us that surplus food can be lifeline or landfill, in 2024 alone, they rescued 28 million meals, quietly doing the mahi of feeding whānau and cutting emissions at the same time. Yet, funding for this lifeline is always on the chopping block.

So here’s the truth we need to face: kai motuhake will not come from waiting for corporations to engineer our diets in laboratories.

It will come from a policy that shifts land from export commodities to grains and legumes for our tables. It will come from investing in seed banks and local mills, from requiring our schools and hospitals to source local kai, from stable funding for food rescue to ensure fresh food is not wasted, and so that no edible food rots in landfill. It will come from honouring mana kai and tino rangatiratanga - because food sovereignty and climate justice are inseparable.

We are not short of solutions. We are short of political courage. Hornborg calls it “coming to our senses,” stepping away from the fantasies of transcendence and embedding ourselves again in the living biosphere. For Aotearoa, that means embedding ourselves back in the whenua, back in our food traditions, back in the responsibilities that come with belonging to place.

The choice is urgent and it is stark: factory futures, or kai motuhake. Food as commodity, or food as sovereignty.

References:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10455752.2025.2559085

https://eatnewzealand.nz/

https://www.planetaryhealthcheck.org/

https://afra.org.nz/

https://www.zerohunger.org.nz/kai-motuhake

While well-intentioned efforts like food rescue offer temporary relief, they ultimately fail to address the core problem: a system that has created an industry of hunger itself. By challenging this supermarket industry, we confront colonial power structures and the systemic impacts of whiteness within food distribution, aiming to advance decolonisation.

Neoliberal policy, with its emphasis on deregulation, privatisation, and free-market principles, has profoundly reshaped our food systems. By dismantling state-run agricultural support and opening borders to international trade, these policies have enabled multinational corporations to consolidate power, turning food from a fundamental right into a mere commodity.

This pursuit of efficiency and profit has incentivised long-distance supply chains and the mass production of cheap, low-value foods, often at the expense of local farmers and environmental health. The result is a society where the cost of a carrot is divorced from the labour of the person who grew it, and where the market’s “success” is measured by corporate profit, not by the health and well-being of the community.

Food insecurity is not a matter of individual failure but a direct consequence of these systemic issues. As Rebekah Graham's 2017 thesis, "The lived experiences of food insecurity within the context of poverty in Hamilton, New Zealand," explains, "Food insecurity is central to experiences of hardship... a symptom of broader neoliberal reforms." Her work highlights how individuals navigate "precarious foodscapes," often resorting to "practices of passing and food rationing in order to circumvent the shame and moral accusations associated with poverty."

The supermarket itself becomes a key arena for this struggle, as individuals must contend with high prices, limited healthy options in low-income areas, and the social stigma of relying on charity. This illustrates that the current food system does not just deny people access to nutritious food; it also inflicts a profound social and emotional burden, reinforcing a society that will crush people and then penalise them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

This conversation extends to the concept of Kai Motuhake, which speaks specifically to a relationship with food and land that goes beyond ownership or control. It is more about maintaining the practices and values of tūpuna and honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi. A foundation for Kai Motuhake is seed sovereignty, which ensures that communities have the right to save, share, and cultivate their own seeds and traditional plant varieties.

This control over genetic resources is a vital step toward a decolonised food system and one that is omitted in conversations about hunger, poverty and food security. By establishing local cooperative kai markets, we can create spaces where this traditional knowledge and practice are valued and sustained. Such markets would not only provide fresh, healthy food but also serve as a living expression of a deeper cultural connection to the land.

I’m a fan of Zohran Mamdani, and his recent call for city-owned grocery stores has me looking around for politicians who will support food systems policies for Aotearoa.

A small market like Aotearoa consistently demonstrates that competition from multinational corporations does little to ensure affordable, nutritious food. As Elliot Crossan argues, “We must admit that the market has failed to deliver affordable, nutritious food. A public grocery provider is the solution, based on the principle that to eat a healthy meal is a universal right, not a luxury.”

While calls for government-owned grocery providers correctly identify the market's failure, they risk a return to a centralised, top-down model that may not fully empower communities. I know that Crossan gets this, and I offer the idea that instead, we must look to the recommendations of the Matike Mai report on constitutional transformation and develop cooperative models that are developed from the knowledge already held here in Aotearoa.

This approach prioritises community-led governance and self-determination, building a food system from the ground up that is culturally resonant, resilient, and responsive to the unique needs of local communities. By doing so, we move beyond simply changing who owns the grocery store and instead transform the very structure of our food relationships. We also mitigate the risk of recolonising our food systems.

The social investment approach, which reinforces the status quo, has similarly proven ineffective by treating people as passive recipients rather than active partners in their own well-being. Social supermarkets, despite their good intentions, often fall into this trap, pathologising poverty as an individualised weakness rather than a broader systemic flaw that needs correction.

In many ways, the government already owns a significant part of the food sector—they own the hunger sector, the food banks, and the ministry that refuses to simply feed and house people because they have met a ceiling on the amount of support they can access. This mechanical, top-down thinking is incapable of solving complex human problems and fails to recognise that individuals are the true experts on their own lives.

Reform demands a courageous departure from failed models, recognising that local food cooperatives offer a powerful alternative to the supermarket's ideology. By focusing on a collaborative, community-led model, cooperatives can directly connect consumers with local farmers, fishers, and producers, cutting out the corporate middlemen who dictate prices and supply chains.

This approach ensures that farmers are fairly compensated for their labour and knowledge, while also providing the community with direct access to fresh, ethical, and seasonal goods - from locally produced meats and fisheries to vegetables and fruits. The cooperative structure inherently prioritises a localised, regenerative food system, minimising the environmental impact of long-distance transportation and eliminating the need for excessive plastic packaging common with imported, low-value foods.

I’ll wrap up by bringing us back to the promise and possibility of constitutional transformation, future discussions about land use, regenerative practices and most of all what Aotearoa could look like if we viewed our relationships with land ownership and nature differently.

All of us Tangata Whenua, Tangata Tiriti - people and living beings of the natural world as one whanau in balance and reciprocity.

Ka ora te whenua, ka ora te tangata — When the land is well, the people thrive.

A new amendment bill is on the table, and it threatens to gut local government of the very power it needs to meet our moment. The Local Government (System Improvements) Amendment Bill sounds harmless, and I’m a sucker for systems improvements.

After all, it’s an age-old part of our ancestral knowledge: observe, record, reflect, adapt - a year-on-year knowledge bank to support environmental health, life and access to nutritious food.

Behind the language of efficiency and financial discipline lies a deeply political agenda that risks locking councils into austerity, stifling community wellbeing, and undermining our collective climate resilience. This is not just a technical adjustment. It's a shift in power and purpose, and it has been language to avoid public resistance.

Planting native trees at Waiwhakareke - Photo Credit Louise Hutt

Te Tiriti o Waitangi is not optional. Any serious conversation about governance in Aotearoa must start with Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Local government plays a key role in upholding its obligations as a matter of justice, honour, and legality.

Hapū never ceded sovereignty. The vision of Matike Mai calls for a transformed, just constitutional future built on genuine partnership and collaboration. This requires local bodies empowered to work with tangata whenua to protect taonga, restore ecosystems, and ensure kai motuhake.

This Bill strips local councils of their mandate to do that work. It treats Te Tiriti partnerships as side quests, not core responsibilities. That’s colonisation by policy.

Austerity kills resilience. This bill is a recipe for austerity. By redefining the purpose of local government to focus on “cost-effective infrastructure and regulation” and by scrapping the statutory duty to promote wellbeing, the Bill locks councils into a narrow, corporate role. It’s the logic of cost-cutting over care.

Without a mandate for wellbeing, councils will be forced to slash support for libraries, accessible transport, kai initiatives, and the very programmes that hold communities together. Rural whānau, disabled people, low-income earners, the people already holding the heaviest load, will be left to carry even more.

Resilience doesn’t come from cost-cutting. It comes from investment in communities, in public services, in the whenua that sustains us all.

Raspberries all year round - In the garden, Morenawhira, July 2025

Climate change is a great amplifier, and the proposed reforms would leave councils with fewer tools to protect those already most exposed. Urban renters stuck in flood-prone housing or rural communities without public transport or access to healthy kai.

If we’re serious about building a livable, just future, then local government must be able to fund the things that keep people and the planet alive

Austerity is not neutral. It redistributes pain downward.

“Austerity is not just about numbers; it’s about people,” said one individual facing cuts to essential services. “It’s about families struggling to put food on the table, children going without proper healthcare, and the elderly being left isolated and alone.”

Resilience is relational. It grows from healthy relationships with whenua, with each other and with kai. Local food systems, mātauranga Māori-led composting projects, seed saving networks, small-scale growing and community gardens are climate infrastructure.

This Bill removes the ability of councils to support those systems. It treats waste minimisation, food sovereignty, and biodiversity protection as optional — when they should be core.

From a Tangata Tiriti perspective, wellbeing means kai sovereignty, circular economies, and decolonised relationships to land. It means trusting that the solutions we need already exist in communities, especially among iwi, hapū, and whānau.

Legislation should amplify these.

Ora and Taiao Are Not Extras.

Local government decisions should reflect the diverse needs and aspirations of our communities. When ratepayer entitlement dominates public discourse and non-voter disengagement is normalised, we erode the relational integrity of council processes. This imbalance opens the door to austerity-driven narratives that frame councils as bloated or inefficient, rather than vital sites of community care, ecological stewardship, and democratic participation.

When we peg, cap or reduce rating we are reducing the capacity of our Councils to serve communities.

Defunding councils shrinks our collective capacity to respond to climate change, honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and build inclusive, thriving communities. Resisting the politics of scarcity and reclaiming local government as a space of hope, equity, and intergenerational responsibility is a better way forward.

A climate-resilient, just Aotearoa demands local governments that are community-powered to uphold Te Tiriti o Waitangi and invest in collective wellbeing. This means keeping environmental protection, climate action, and biodiversity restoration at the core of council responsibilities; recognising waste minimisation and food sovereignty as essential infrastructure; embedding Te Tiriti at the heart of local governance; and measuring success not by cost savings, but by the health of our communities, the equity of our systems, and the flourishing of our ecosystems.

Submissions on the Local Government (System Improvements) Amendment Bill close tomorrow (27 August 2025) at 11:59 pm.

Open submission portals quick link: https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/sc/make-a-submission/

In the book, Captain Sam Vimes explains that a good pair of boots costs $50 and lasts for years, while a cheaper pair costs $10 but wears out quickly, requiring frequent replacements. Over time, the person who can only afford cheap boots spends more than someone who could afford the higher-quality pair initially.

I grew up with leather shoes, and tins of nugget and dubbin, these were conveniently filled with sand and re-purposed for hopscotch when empty. I learned to polish my shoes regularly, and up until my teenage years, these served as school shoes, church shoes and good shoes. I had a fondness for T-bars, and to this day, I still have a thing for Mary Jane shoes. Alongside this, as is normal in rural areas, I had a pair of gumboots and a pair of jandals. In the summer, I tended toward bare feet, much better than jandals for climbing up macrocapa to pick the sweet rambling wild grapes, lying on riverbanks, and keeping out of Mum's way with my siblings, otherwise known as chore avoidance by flying beneath the radar.

As I reflect on those customs, I understand this pragmatic approach to footwear was inherently working class; buy something that would last, was repairable, and look after it so that it could be passed on in good condition. We were in no end of trouble if we came home without our shoes, and even more trouble if they were not found. Hand-me-downs reflect broader class dynamics, particularly in how economic constraints shape consumption patterns. Passing along clothing and goods is necessary for families and connected communities who want to maximise resources and reduce costs.

Our clothes were homemade, sewn, knitted, and shared. The cooler clothes of older cousins were a favourite because they were sometimes store-bought and resembled the clothes we saw on TV. “Happy Days” shaped my perceptions of cool in the early seventies. I remember a denim jumpsuit I adored as a hand-me-down because in my reality, it was ‘ABBA chic’. Fifty years later, it’s easy to romanticise these seemingly simpler times. But that would be overlooking the destructive impacts of neoliberal policy, the globalisation of markets and trade deals

The stigma surrounding hand-me-downs is real. As a single mum with three small and fast-growing children, I resented the necessity of second-hand shopping and the plethora of stained children's clothes with twisted and frayed seams. Children's clothes were often $2 a bag or grab a bag, and we quickly learned that all we were doing was saving the charities from a trip to the landfill. Somewhere between the seventies and the nineties, as a society, we changed from a culture of enough, an inbuilt resilience and resourcefulness, to an interdependence on capitalism and consumerism, swallowing notions of success and hard work not as identity and place but as dreams of freedom, beauty and buying power.

We are the product of class struggle and the social mobility promised by white colonialism and neo-liberal policy. Ultimately, hand-me-downs illustrate how class influences access to resources, consumer habits, and social perceptions, shaping economic survival strategies and cultural narratives around wealth and consumption. The colonial roots of capitalism reinforced these dynamics by commodifying goods, labour, and land, shaping modern consumption patterns that prioritise newness over necessity.

I often reflect on the expression “sounds like you’re dying of consumption”, a colloquialism for a bad cough.

And here in the now:

In Aotearoa, the working poor bear the weight of our throwaway economy.

At the community recovery centre, it’s every day people on low wages sorting through kettles that broke too soon and toys discarded before they were held. It’s the volunteer—maybe retired, on a benefit - mending jeans in the corner of a repair café, their fingers carrying skills from when things were made to last, not made to fail.

In charity op shops, it's underpaid staff and volunteers; overwhelmingly women, steaming fast fashion castoffs that will be landfill within a fortnight, dressed up as charity but built on the false economy of overconsumption.

These same workers, in community-led resource recovery enterprises, are rent-burdened by landlords profiting from housing scarcity. They wait months, even years, on the public health system’s backlogged lists, while their homes grow colder, and their food bills stretch thinner. And yet they keep showing up, patching what’s broken, caring for what others abandon, and keeping the repair ethic alive in a society obsessed with replacement.

Nature has always known cycles.

We were the ones who forgot.

But the wisdom is still there

in the mycelium, in the wetland, in the whisper of compost and time.

We don’t need to innovate our way out of collapse.

We just need to remember how to live within limits.

In truth, the circular economy already exists and is held up by those with the least, while those with the most still live in linear luxury.

Beyond our shores, it’s the children in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, pulling copper from the carcasses of our electronics. The children in Bangladesh are dyeing fabric in rivers that no longer run clear. The families in Indonesia are burning imported plastic waste to cook their meals, their skies heavy with toxins.

And it happens here, too. Our backyards are not immune. From the Pacific Islands saturated with New Zealand’s plastic exports to rural Māori communities disproportionately burdened with landfill proximity, the pattern is the same: extraction at one end, disposal at the other and profit in between.

Waste isn’t just what we throw away—it’s who carries the burden of our excess.

That $10 garment is stitched into a global pattern of extraction: cotton grown with fossil-fuel fertilisers in India, spun with chemical softeners in China, dyed in toxic vats in Bangladesh, shipped across oceans in plastic, worn once, then dumped in a bin marked “donations.”

This cycle reflects waste colonialism, where wealthy nations export plastic, e-waste, and hazardous materials to poorer countries lacking safe disposal infrastructure. These shipments, often disguised as “recycling,” end up burned, buried, or polluting waterways, harming communities already stretched thin.

Aotearoa is deeply entangled in this system, exporting low-grade waste while importing goods wrapped in polymers and relying on high-impact imports like crude oil, phosphate rock, and palm oil. We outsource environmental harm while distancing ourselves from its consequences.

Meanwhile, fossil fuel giants aren’t retreating; they’re rebranding. As the gasoline era wanes, oil is reborn as virgin plastic and chemicals. Polyester, nylon, acrylic, these synthetic fibres are fossil fuels disguised as convenience. By 2040, virgin plastic production is projected to rise 66%, not by accident but by design, sustaining fossil profits while sidestepping climate accountability.

Microplastics now permeate oceans, food, and human bodies; nanoplastics embed in lungs and organs, contributing to endocrine disruption, fertility decline, early puberty, and rising cancer rates among young people. These impacts fall hardest on working-class and marginalised communities, who face environmental hazards without access to adequate healthcare.

Wealthier populations can filter their water and buy private care, while others live with toxic exposure and limited treatment, deepening cycles of health inequity. And still, we keep buying. Algorithms and advertising train us to equate worth with appearance, success with style, and love with likes. For those with less, a new shirt or phone can feel like stylish success just for a moment, but it’s a poisoned gift, wrapped in wage oppression and environmental debt that lands on someone else’s doorstep.

Nature doesn’t produce waste.

There are no bins in the forest. No packaging on the wind. No landfill in the sea. Well, not until we put it there. Everything in the natural world is part of a loop. The leaf falls, the soil absorbs, the fungi feast, the insects carry and process, and the tree feeds again.

Waste is a design flaw of the growth and extraction economy. My resistance to the plastics industry is not just about rubbish. It’s an extension of my resistance to big oil, to colonising and recolonising the whenua, to all systems that oppress healthy environments supported by thriving communities.

I resist because both industries feed on the same colonial logic, the same patriarchal structures that strip land, steal labour, and silence communities. They take without consent. They exploit without accountability. They treat the whenua, the moana, and our bodies as disposable.

Landfills are the graveyards of justice built on stolen land. We tell ourselves we recycle. That we’re doing our part. But let’s be honest: recycling is the fig leaf of a linear system that was never intended to stop extracting. Only 2% of New Zealand’s material inputs come from recycled sources. The rest is ripped from earth, air and labour.

And while we invest millions in machinery to sort our shame, we leave the real solutions underfunded, the community repair hubs, the community-owned and led resource recovery centres, the zero waste educators, the kaitiaki working in harmony with whenua. These are the places where circularity lives.

The solutions aren’t new. They are remembered.

But we need to get past scientifically documenting and commentating our own demise. There is a bulk of information, stretching back at least a decade now, that affirms and reaffirms that there is too much plastic in the ocean, and that this is not a good thing. Plastic pollution denial at this point can only sit alongside climate change denial as intellectual self-harm. (Tina Ngata, 2018).

Further reading:

https://www.genevaenvironmentnetwork.org/resources/updates/plastic-production-and-industry/

https://www.barrons.com/articles/shell-chevron-oil-chemicals-plastics-d75f8fee?

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/12/20/plastics-treaty-busan-negotiations-fossil-fuels-oil/

https://zerowaste.co.nz/

https://parakore.maori.nz/

Over recent months, I’ve sat in hui and strategy meetings where Tangata Tiriti has been treated as an identity. This sits uncomfortably with me. I already have an identity shaped by ancestry, whiteness, gender, and class. For me, being Tangata Tiriti is not a title, it is a practice of ongoing relationship with Tangata Whenua, grounded in responsibility and action.

Kai motuhake is a Māori-led expression of food sovereignty grounded in whakapapa, tikanga, and tino rangatiratanga, where food systems are centred on Indigenous relationships with whenua, whānau, and atua. Food sovereignty is a global movement for community control over food systems.

Picking chillies from the garden in June - Winter 2025, Waikato.

A Different Kind of Leadership - In the space of kai motuhake, this leadership takes a distinctive form. It is not about fixing or leading from the front. It is about being in relationship: walking alongside, resourcing without co-opting, and trusting in Māori-led solutions that restore whenua, mana, and tino rangatiratanga. Trust in the same way we have expected Māori to trust in our governance, representation and charitable systems to bring about equity and justice.

In the face of white supremacy, colonisation, capitalist exploitation, and ecological collapse, resistance leadership offers a path forward. For Pākehā, this is not about control or command. It is a moral and relational responsibility to name injustice, challenge systems that harm, and support others to lead transformative change.

Critiquing Control, Practising Relationality - Pākehā Tangata Tiriti leadership embraces a relational ethic. It means listening before responding, creating time and space for tikanga-led processes, and recognising that leadership often looks like following. This is not about stepping back out of guilt or becoming overly deferential; it’s about stepping into reciprocal relationships with intention and integrity.

Western leadership models often reward certainty, control, and output - three of the characteristics of white supremacy. These norms show up in food systems as technocratic decision-making, performance-focused funding models, and the centring of individual “leaders” rather than collective agency.

From Charity to Dignity: Bridging Urgency and Sovereignty - A resistance leadership approach acknowledges both the urgency of hunger and the long-term work of restoring food systems. Meeting immediate need is not abandoned, but it is done in a way that upholds dignity, while actively resourcing Māori-led solutions like māra kai, pātaka kai, and land reclamation. It’s not either/or. It’s both/and.

The charitable food sector in Aotearoa, while meeting real needs, often reinforces narratives of deficit and dependency. Food is given out, but people are rarely asked what dignity and control over kai means to them.

Preserving Lemons - preserving food from seasonal abundance is a skill rich in culture, history and the rituals that link us to soil and food.

Beyond Inclusion - Real solidarity means resourcing Māori leadership on Māori terms. It means asking, “What role do you need us to play?” and being prepared to support without taking over. Leadership here becomes about humility and alignment, not visibility or credit.

Even well-meaning movements can re-centre Pākehā authority by holding the purse strings, dominating the agenda, or framing inclusion as “adding Māori voices” into existing structures. This is a subtle, but powerful, form of control.

Shifting from Scarcity to Abundance - Resistance leadership reclaims the language of abundance. Drawing on values from te ao Māori, such as manaakitanga and hua parakore, it sees food as a living relationship, not a product. Pākehā can support this by redistributing access to land, tools, and kai, and by aligning with kaupapa that nourish whānau and whenua alike. If your practice is to support Māori aspirations, then first and foremost, you are supporting the return of the whenua that gives life to those aspirations.

The global food system is built on extraction, commodification, and profit. Scarcity is engineered, and our responses often mirror those logics. We ration time, energy, and funding because our systems continue to prioritise competition over collaboration and cooperative localism.

Transforming Hui Spaces: Power, Process, and Parallel Practice - Using caucus structures, where Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti meet separately before coming together, can strengthen the integrity of joint spaces. This allows people to reflect safely, understand their roles clearly, and align with the shared vision. Leadership here is about curating the process, not dominating outcomes.

I adore this as a facilitation practice. We have so much to share among ourselves, to work out in terms of practice and solidarity with each other. It helps us get out of the way while we remind ourselves of our culture, teach ourselves to decentre the story of us and navigate our whiteness and fragility.

Often, hui are structured as open, inclusive spaces without recognising the differences in comfort, authority, or cultural grounding. The result can be subtle dominance, where Pākehā speak most, decide fastest, and shape the kaupapa.

Growing and harvesting staple crops such as Kūmara is experiencing a resurgence with māra kai and community growing.

Critiquing the Charity Model with Compassion and Strategy - Leaders can hold complexity by recognising the importance of compassion in the moment, while refusing to let charity define the long-term vision. This means building systems where food is shared, not distributed; where people contribute, not just consume; and where relationships matter more than metrics.

The food charity model survives because it works in crisis, but it also creates dependence on waste, on supermarkets, and unpaid labour. It is not designed to end hunger; it is designed to manage it.

Just as we must rethink how we hold power, we must also examine how we respond to need

Right Relationship Over Right Answers - At its heart, this work is about being responsible. Resistance leadership for Tangata Tiriti is a slow, imperfect, and deeply relational practice. It is about aligning with kai motuhake, as participants in restoring balance, healing the land, and walking together toward tino rangatiratanga.

There is layer upon layer of nuance to navigate - these relationships are intergenerational, they look into the past and reach into the future to create and support the relationships that exemplify us now.

Bananas now grow easily in many Waikato locations.

Supplementary explainers and thoughts: Allyship, Solidarity and Tangata Tiriti Practice.

Class struggle brings the practice of solidarity and the individualism of capitalism introduced ethical allyship, and here in New Zealand, we have added a new practice flavour - Tangata Tiriti.

Allyship is not an identity- it is a practice. It involves learning, unlearning, and showing up consistently in ways that centre those impacted by injustice. It is built through accountability, humility, and action. Allyship can be temporary, situational, and self-defined, often emerging in specific moments of response.

Allyship is grounded in liberal, individualistic, and predominantly Western epistemologies that emphasise recognition, ethical responsibility, and support for others. It relies on the idea that knowledge of injustice comes primarily from listening to those directly affected, often through personal stories or testimony.

The ally’s role is guided by moral and ethical imperatives to do the right thing, and engagement is frequently rooted in cognitive empathy. While power is acknowledged, it is often viewed as external to the self, rather than something one is implicated in. Its epistemological roots lie in Enlightenment liberalism, humanism, identity politics, and anti-oppression education.

Solidarity goes deeper - it is a commitment to shared struggle. It asks us to recognise our interconnectedness and to act not out of charity or guilt, but from a place of collective responsibility. Solidarity requires standing beside, not in front, and following the leadership of those most affected. It is relational and political.

Solidarity is grounded in relational, decolonial, and collective epistemologies that frame injustice not as something to observe from a distance, but as a shared condition to be dismantled together. It is centred on mutual struggle, where liberation is seen as interwoven rather than separate. Knowledge in solidarity is ideally co-created through lived experience, critical reflection, and reciprocal action, emerging from doing as much as from thinking.

This approach is informed by intersectional and structural analysis, drawing from anti-colonial, feminist, and Marxist traditions. Unlike allyship, which often emphasises support, solidarity is oriented toward deep systemic change. Its epistemological roots lie in Indigenous worldviews, liberation theology, feminist solidarity ethics, and working-class struggle.

Tangata Tiriti is a relationship practice for decolonisation. It’s grounded in relational organising, in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, anti-capitalism and anti racism. It calls us to uphold and restore just relationships with Tangata Whenua through ongoing commitment and action. Honouring Te Tiriti means resisting colonialism and helping build futures where mana motuhake and tino rangatiratanga are fully realised.

In this context, the promise of biodiversity and nature-based carbon markets must be interrogated. On paper, these markets offer seductive possibilities: scalable funding for landscape restoration, incentives for stewardship, and new tools to reckon with biodiversity and climate crises. But beneath their surface lies a troubling architecture that risks repeating the injustices they claim to help repair.

Wairere Falls track - clear water and moss-covered rocks in native forest. Ngāti Hinerangi; Wairere Mahi supported by Jobs for Nature funding via Manaaki Kaimai Mamaku Trust.

The pilot of biodiversity and carbon credits in Aotearoa, through voluntary markets and Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS), has largely sidestepped the hard questions of sovereignty and redress. While credits are pitched as climate solutions, they also represent a new frontier of recolonisation by creating a currency for nature supported by land as collateral.

Biodiversity credits commodify nature, assigning dollar values to ecosystems based on market demand, not whakapapa, intergenerational ties, or history. They establish a market logic in which decisions about what is “worth protecting” are not made by matauranga or Western science but by external investors and policy architects. And they often unfold on contested lands, never ceded by Māori, wrapped in regulatory frameworks that recognise profits long before they recognise tino rangatiratanga.

So while Aotearoa has pilots underway, we must critique and observe with systemic lenses for environmental and indigenous justice. The pilot can not decide what works for the market alone; the pilot must also honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi, embedding tino rangatiratanga, kawanatanga and kaitiakitanga as the healing infrastructure.

Markets don't care about whakapapa because they’re not designed to care about anything other than exchangeable units, speculative futures, and fungibility. They are responsive not to sacredness but to scarcity.

This is why the ETS, despite its scale, has failed to reduce emissions. It has succeeded in creating paperwork, obligations, and offsets, but not in curbing climate harm. Its most significant impact has been the threat of regulation, not the mechanics of trading. Emitters have learned to “play the game” while nature remains unhealed.

When we apply this same logic to biodiversity and try to offset extinction or ancestral loss through spreadsheets and credit flows, we risk creating a system where restoration is transactional, not transformational. A system where “indigeneity” becomes a token of legitimacy, a marketable asset rather than a sovereign foundation for ecological justice.

Like all market-based solutions, biodiversity credits should be approached with deep suspicion unless grounded in a constitutional reckoning that begins by honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi as a binding political truth in Aotearoa.

Access to Te Waihou walkway, showing staged planting for reforestation, a partnership between Pokaiwhenua Catchment Group and Ngāti Raukawa.

Yes, the idea of market funding for nature is humming sweet tunes right now, but I have to decentre my white self and consider tangata whenua. We do not need a new white environmentalism dressed in green finance. We need constitutional reform, we need to honour Te Tiriti, and we need to support the return of stolen land.

Prioritising these actions is how biodiversity credits could become authentic tools for healing, rather than potential new instruments of harm.

You have a responsibility to smash settler colonial power, to cross the floor, to use your privilege to stand in solidarity with Te Pati Māori.

“The committee stated the consideration of the question of privilege was not on the performance of the haka itself, but the "time and manner in which it was performed."

RNZ

This recommendation is not about upholding Parliament's dignity. It is about suppressing dissent that comes from outside the accepted norms of settler politics.

Parliament has yet to debate the Privileges Committee’s recommendation to suspend three Te Pāti Māori members of parliament for performing a haka during the first reading of the Treaty Principles Bill. This bill threatened to fundamentally redefine Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The delay is more than procedural. It’s strategic. Wait for the news cycle to shift, wait for public outrage to wane, then impose the most severe penalties Parliament has ever seen.

The recommendation of a 3-week suspension is wildly out of step with precedent. The same committee found Tim van de Molen, a National MP, to have threatened another MP during a select committee hearing in 2023. He admitted it and issued a public apology. Julie Anne Genter, a Green MP, was also found in contempt after a heated exchange with Matt Doocey. She, too, was told to apologise. There were no suspensions.

But in this moment in time, precedent is simply a red herring.

Because for Te Pati Māori MP’s expressing their identity and communicating through haka, something that has long been part of our welcoming, farewelling, challenging and debating inside Parliament, we see recommendations for expulsion. This is not proportionate justice. This is targeted political punishment.

And it’s not happening in a vacuum. More than 100,000 people marched across Aotearoa last year to defend Te Tiriti and challenge a government that has shown nothing but contempt for it. This recommendation to silence, to shame, to punish is a textbook white settler colonial tactic. When power feels threatened, the system doubles down. It wraps itself in procedural language and governance rituals to reassert dominance.

Let’s also name what is happening here: governance is being used as a weapon of politics. Politics is about who gets to decide. Governance is supposed to be about how decisions are made and implemented with integrity, transparency, and fairness. But right now, governance is being used not to uphold justice but to punish resistance.

Parliament's Privileges Committee tells us that Māori expressions of truth are now considered too dangerous for the halls of power, even in the language and forms Parliament claims to honour.

The speaker tells us there will be a debate on the one hand, but the votes will be by party, so there will be no conscience vote. In other words, they will display pearl clutching and feigned distress in the face of resistance and anger before closing ranks to vote. It’s performative clickbait politicking aimed at driving division and permitting hatred while pulling representatives into line across parties.

So here’s my challenge: to every MP who believes in justice, democracy, and honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi, cross the floor. When this suspension recommendation comes before the House, vote against it. Reject this attempt to weaponise parliamentary procedure against Māori. Stand in solidarity; tangata whenua and tangata tiriti together.

This is a moment to choose what kind of Parliament we want to be, one that punishes Māori for daring to resist or, one that honours being in relationship. Silence now is complicity. Let your conscience lead, not your party.

Kia mau ra, kia mau ra Ki te mana motuhake Me te aroha. . . . .

I’m a mother, a queer, a dyke married to a lesbian. I once married a man and then divorced him. I have no regrets, just chapters. I once wanted to be a fashion designer, but now I know I love to sew. I’m not great at it, but I keep going. I cherish my grandmothers’ needlework, tiny stitches, quiet resistance, and I try to honour it with my crooked threads.

I’m an ex-drag king, a unionist, a caregiver, and a single parent. I come from both working-class grit and upper-middle-class gentility. People are sometimes surprised that I was a debutante -presented as ripe for marriage at 16. I am happy we no longer normalise this. I’ve seen the tensions between polite polish and survival. I live at the intersection of contradiction and conviction.

Trans women are women. Queer people are parents. And binaries, gendered, racial, and social, are lies told by white supremacy and patriarchy to keep us in our place. I won’t play along. I believe in messy truths, chosen family, and building futures stitched with care, not control.

Remembering

Back in the '90s, I chose the solo mum life, or maybe it chose me. Survival came first. I had no long-term plans, just the next rent and our next meal. I worked part-time in a florist shop on minimum wage. I answered phones, scribbled order cards, and prepped blooms for people who could afford gestures I couldn’t.

We sold teddies, trinkets, and tiny luxuries. But the real work was emotional labour. Everyone on the team was a mother. Some were grandmothers. Two of us were single mums, all Pākehā, all raising Māori children or grandchildren. That intersection, colonialism lived quietly, mainly went unspoken. We were busy holding space for others. For the secrets of small-town life: weddings, deaths, affairs, regrets. Grief came in big, smelly, white lilies, and joy in daffodils. No one questioned it. We just wrapped the flowers.

On the big days, Mother’s Day and Valentine’s, my dad helped with deliveries. It was all hands on deck. We couldn’t raise prices in a town where everyone knew them by heart. But wholesalers did. Profitability shrank. The irony was sharp: the busiest days were barely worth it. But we did it anyway, for dignity. For each other, and an unwritten community obligation.

"As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day..."

In 1991, the National Government gutted our foundations. The Employment Contracts Act swept through, erasing unions, wage protections, and the idea of work as something you could build a life on. We didn’t have language for systemic betrayal, but we lived it.

Before that, our working-class mothers and grandmothers had unions, strong, unwavering forces that fought for dignity in labour.

"Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses."

Our foremothers knew this. The song Bread and Roses came from the 1912 textile strike led by immigrant women in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Working-class women demanded more than subsistence, beauty, respect, and rest. Their fight echoed in our gardens, kitchens, and picket lines in Aotearoa.

Much like the Labour Party’s Employment Relations Act, pay equity laws dangled promises but built bureaucratic labyrinths. Unionists, especially Māori and Pasifika women, had to swim through red tape, rebuild from near-extinction, and fight for justice inch by inch. The rules are never made by those forced to play the game.

Equal Pay is an organising challenge and an affront to capitalism.

Our grief isn’t just personal. It’s political. It’s generational. It's the ache of unpaid care work, labour invisibilised, grief for Mother Nature, and constant giving. And yet, we keep showing up.

We ask for bread, and we ask for roses, too.

Not charity.

Not pity.

Just the right to live,

And to love,

Not merely survive.

Women are still mothering communities everywhere, growing kai in community gardens, running housing collectives, social services, community centres, protecting nature, teaching, nursing, caregiving, and protesting. The roses come in many forms. We are not soft; we are keeping resistance alive.

Our working-class ancestors came here with hope for food, dignity, and peace. They built unions so we wouldn’t be crushed by the empire again. We inherited that fight and the flame of solidarity.

This Mother’s Day, I honour not just mothers, but mothering.

The daily acts of justice.

The quiet organising.

The grief carried like a backpack.

The love given freely.

So talk to your people. Organise. Learn. Join a union. Join a hīkoi. Support Toitū te Tiriti and Matike Mai. Be the roses and the bread.

Because if we can still deliver flowers with tired hands and broken hearts, we can still deliver change.

Being presented to the Archbishop Reeves in 1983.