One Law for All, One Future Together

The Haps

Parliament was in recess last week, but politics continued. ACT celebrated David Seymour’s reforms to school attendance with record numbers (11,579) of Not Enrolled students returned to school in the first half of this year. Charter school enrolments, meanwhile, increased 18 per cent in six months. Many charter schools are now looking for bigger buildings because space is their constraint. Giving communities a chance to compete for education funding is ACT philosophy in action, and it’s transforming lives let down by the state system.

The Party also released new policy that was welcomed as ‘a breath of fresh air and common sense.’ The Local Tourism Dividend would give a Council one dollar for each bed night tourists stay in the Council’s area.

It would help Councils support tourism without a new tax to administer. Councils and tourism operators have been braying for a new tax for years, ACT strongly opposes any new tax, because once they’re in, they always grow. The policy, and five reasons why it’s better than a new tax, are here.

One Law for All, One Future Together

The current Government was elected to fix the rampant and deliberate racism that grew up under its predecessor.

Since November 2023 it has: removed the separatist Māori Health Authority, given communities a referendum on Māori words, cancelled Three Waters with its co-governed boards, replaced the ‘Aotearoa Histories Curriculum’ with a balanced view of human history in New Zealand, issued a Cabinet Circular that services must be delivered on need, not race, so things like diabetes medicines and bowel cancer screening are no longer funded along racial lines… We could go on, but the point is a lot has been done.

For all the progress that has been made, though, there is a niggling feeling that the public service has carried on its merry way, giving a big fat finger to the Government of the day. It shows up when karakia are required at the start of meetings, job ads advertise for knowledge of te ao Māori (but no other culture), and people lose out because they didn’t ‘demonstrate their commitment to te tiriti in the home.’

Last week’s Free Press argued that Treatyism has become New Zealand’s new religion. Colonisation was the original sin, but if you wear the adornments around your neck, practice the rituals before your meetings, and smite non-believers as ‘racist’ then, maybe, you will be saved.

The Public Service has become the church of New Zealand’s new religion, and if you doubt that you only need to look at the Ministry of Education’s Tātai Pou Competency Matrix. A workers’ competency is ranked from ‘unsatisfactory’ to ‘high.’ You don’t just need to promote Treatyism to move up the matrix, you need to promote it to others to be highly competent.

If you are not a believer, even not practicing in your home, you may not get a job in the public service.

Missionaries would be proud, but our country was built on secularism and tolerance. The Treaty says every New Zealander should have the ‘same rights and duties’. In 1847, between the Treaty and the first Parliament, Governor Grey issued an education ordinance requiring school instruction to be secular for parents who demanded it, while acknowledging many parents would want religious instruction. Parliament’s 1877 Education Act also demanded education be secular.

Not long after that, Kate Sheppard, perhaps the greatest New Zealander and a devout Christian, said “All that separates, whether it be of race, class, creed or sex, is inhuman and must be overcome.” A century later New Zealanders protested en masse against apartheid, even at the expense of seeing the ABs.

New Zealand is a society founded, at least in part, on secularism and racial equality. What is happening in the Public Service, in spite of the elected Government, is counter to the foundations of secular tolerance this country is built on, and must be overcome.

That’s why the ACT Party has launched policy to remove Section 73 of the Public Service Act 2020, the section that requires the Public Service carry out discriminatory hiring. The Party pledges to upgrade its successful Need-not-Race Cabinet Circular to law enforceable in Court. It will ban taxpayer financing for cultural practices. It pledges to separate spiritual rituals from government work.

The full policy is here, but one question remains. Wasn’t this done already? Yes, ACT negotiated to reform the Public Service Act, and improvements were made. The roughest edges of that law made under the Labour-Green-New Zealand First Government in 2020 have been knocked off. The new Section 11A says Chief Executives should focus on performance first.

But, even Free Press underestimated the religious fervour that drives Treatyism. Learning from this term of Government, ACT has refined its plans to tackle the high church of Treatyism in its next term of Government.

A way to help

If you like what ACT has been saying and doing, and want to see us return after the election with an even stronger team, here’s a good way to help.

Friends of ACT, Grace and Jonathan Ayling, have generously donated a special run of ACT Pinot Noir, with all profits going directly towards ACT’s 2026 election campaign.

Click here to buy yours now and support the campaign to Unlock New Zealand’s potential.