New Zealand’s mainstream media has finally named the elephant in the room. Late last month, the nation’s biggest newspaper, the New Zealand Herald, published an opinion piece that claimed a coup is under way in New Zealand by the Maori tribal elite.

The article, written by former Labour minister and ACT Party leader Richard Prebble, was widely circulated and commented on, including by the state broadcaster RadioNZ.

His column focused mainly on the government’s plan to confiscate the water assets of the nation’s 67 councils and hand their governance to an equal number of unelected tribal members and council representatives.

The deeply unpopular asset-confiscation program is known as Three Waters – drinking water, stormwater, and wastewater.

The headline of Prebble’s read, Three Waters is a coup – an attack on democracy.

Unfortunately for the government – and Nanaia Mahuta, the Minister of Local Government who is driving the legislative change – the former Minister’s views cannot be easily dismissed. As an influential member of Cabinet during the revolutionary Labour government led by David Lange in the mid-80s, he has a unique political insight and his views carry weight.

Prebble noted that New Zealand is a ‘liberal democracy’ in which ‘individual rights and freedoms are officially recognised and protected … by the rule of law’. Governments, he said, are therefore ‘accountable to the people by a system of one person, one vote’.

‘Liberal democracy is incompatible with co-government by tribes,’ he concluded.

While he believes there may be some logic to the use of co-governance as a pragmatic solution to historic claims for the ownership of disputed public assets such as national parks, there is none for public services such as Three Waters:

‘It is ratepayers – Maori and non-Maori – who paid for the pipes, dams, stormwater drains, and sewage plants. The Government’s Three Waters legislation is a coup. It is replacing liberal democracy with co-government with iwi.’

Another voice that cannot be easily dismissed is that of Kaipara Mayor Dr Jason Smith, who was appointed by Minister Mahuta as a member of a working group established to mollify opponents of the reforms. He described Three Waters as ‘a Trojan Horse for ending democratic rights’.

The iwi elite driving the takeover are seeking comprehensive tribal rule by 2040. The plan to achieve this goal is outlined in a radical document called He Puapua, which was mapped out by the government in 2019, under the guise of enacting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The declaration was signed secretly in 2010 under the conservative National government of John Key, who assured the nation it was ‘non-binding’ and had largely symbolic significance.

Knowing how explosive He Puapua was, Jacinda Ardern barely mentioned it in Labour’s 2020 campaign manifesto. Even her Deputy Prime Minister, Winston Peters, knew nothing about it before the election. It was only revealed after Ardern won a landslide victory.

By failing to gain the consent of voters for what looks like tribal rule (as they were never asked), Jacinda Ardern has no mandate for He Puapua co-governance agenda. It is completely illegitimate.

The government’s Office for Maori Crown Relations clarifies on its website where this tribal ‘partnership’ agenda is leading:

‘Maori decide and the Crown assists in implementing the decision made by Maori. The Crown’s role is as enabler and implementer, not a decision-maker.’

Hiding in plain sight, the website confirms for anyone still uncertain about the extent of the coup currently underway that the ultimate goal of the so-called ‘co-governance’ partnership agenda is, indeed, tribal rule.

As a result, the Prime Minister is embedding racial preference throughout our regulatory and legislative framework – from the Public Service and the conservation estate to schools and the entire science and research sector.

Enabling iwi to control health required new legislation to abolish the country’s 20 district health boards just as giving them control of water involves a bill to confiscate water infrastructure and services from all 67 councils.

That piece of legislation, the Water Services Entities Bill, passed its first reading in June with more than 88,000 public submissions lodged – most in opposition. Showing a deep disdain for democratic convention, the government is refusing to hear from most of the thousands of submitters who asked to be heard in person.

The scale and speed of the government’s cultural takeover is breathtaking, and it is reshaping democracy as we know it before our very eyes.

Professor Elizabeth Rata, the Director of Knowledge in Education at Auckland University, outlined the threat posed by this tribal coup in a recent address entitled In Defence of Democracy.

‘I want to talk about democracy – about what it is we are in danger of losing and what we need to do to retain our nation’s remarkable 170-year legacy of democratic governance…

‘The question we must ask is this: How has a small group of individuals, both Maori and non-Maori, managed to install a racialised ideology into our democracy?

‘The corporate tribes have already acquired considerable governance entitlements – the next and final step is tribal sovereignty. It is a coup d’etat in all but name, accomplished not by force but by ideology – enabled by a compliant media.’

And that’s the point.

The Prime Minister is using a well-orchestrated public media campaign to justify the transfer of control of major public resources and services from the Crown and thus, out of the hands of the people.

Using a $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund, that’s only available to media who agree to ‘acknowledge’ and ‘promote’ the fabrication that underpins co-governance – that Maori are Treaty ‘partners’ with the Crown – without the full scrutiny of New Zealand’s Fourth Estate, this tribal coup is being progressed at pace.

Dr Muriel Newman is a former New Zealand Member of Parliament, who runs the public policy think tank the New Zealand Centre for Political Research at www.nzcpr.com