JOHN MCLEAN: WRECKING RACE HUSTLER GETS A FREE PASS

A new low from New Zealand’s criminal injustice system

On 10 March 2026, the Wellington District Court dismissed all criminal charges that had been laid against a man named Te Wehi Ratana. The charges Ratana was facing were for his role in the vandalism of an exhibit at New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa, on 11 December 2023. The charges Ratana was facing included intentional damage, obstructing police, and breach of bail. Ratana’s breach of bail charge evidences that, when he was busy vandalizing, he was already facing other criminal charges. Ratana is a career criminal.

The exhibit that Ratana vandalized was a wooden panel repeating the precise wording of the English language version of the Treaty of Waitangi. It was a team effort. Ratana and is co-vandals cooperated to wreck the display with paint and an angle grinder. Ratana abseiled down from Te Papa’s ceiling, personally conducting the vandalism and painting on the exhibit the words “No. Her Majesty the Queen of England is the alien. ration the Queen’s veges”.

Ratana and his three other co-vandals each claim membership of an activist group named “Te Waka Hourua”. The four, and their accomplices and co-conspiracists, were motivated to wreck the panel by a bonkers belief that the chiefly Maori signatories to the English and Maori language versions of the Treaty of Waitangi did not want, or sign up for, a central New Zealand government for all New Zealanders, including Maori. Their belief, either mistaken or disingenuous, is indisputably ahistorical and incorrect. Two of the other vandals were also on bail for criminal charges at the time of the vandalism.

Te Papa leadership and staff allowed and enabled the vandalism. Te Papa’s Chief Executive at the time of the vandalism was, and still is, Courtney Johnston. Te Papa’s “Māori Co‑leader” was and still is Dr Arapata Hakiwai.

Aiding and abetting the vandalism of the exhibit was part of a broader plan formulated by Te Papa. Within a few months of the vandalism, Te Papa loaned the vandalized exhibit to Victoria University of Wellington’s Adam Art Gallery, where it remains. The Gallery celebrates the “redaction”, in the following glowing terms:

Te Waka Houra is a tangata whenua led group of activists and artists. They formed in Paekākāriki in 2019, as an offshoot of the Aotearoa branch of Extinction Rebellion. The rōpū are known for their ongoing engagement with Te Papa Tongarewa, resulting in their action on December 11 2023, when they redacted a display panel in the Te Tiriti o Waitangi: Ngā tohu kotahitanga Treaty of Waitangi: Signs of a Nation exhibition. Te Waka Hourua went on to host an exhibition called Whītiki, Mātike, Whakatika! at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space in 2024, and to publish a book with the same name with 5ever Books. While they are primarily concerned with Te Tiriti, social and climate justice, Te Waka Hourua encourages everyone to gain an understanding of our collective past, current and future conditions – including Te Tiriti – and what role we want to play in solving the collective challenges we face in society.

Victoria University’s celebration of the vandalism encourages public participation. Fellow Travelers are invited to pop in and create their very own screen prints of the vandalized panel. The Adam Art Gallery’s website includes this cheery content:

(Left click on image to enlarge)

(I’ve covered joint facilitator of the celebratory screen printing, Valerie Morse, in an earlier Substack)

In addition to clothing screen-printed with evidence of his criminality, Ratana also naturally relishes and wears the keffiyeh, a scarf worn to indicate support for the Palestinians and their brutal overlords, Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas.

I’m told the District Court Judge who dismissed the criminal charges against Ratana is Noel Sainsbury and that the Crown Solicitor who withdrew the charges is Grant Burston of law firm Luke Cunningham Clere. We don’t know the particular reasons why the Crown prosecutor withdrew the charges or why the Judge dismissed them. Those reasons have all been kept secret.

It’s important, Dear Readers, to understand the difference between simple withdrawal of criminal charges, and withdrawal and dismissal. Withdrawal of charges, without dismissal, allows the charges to be re-laid later. When a judge adds dismissal, the charges cannot be re-laid. The defendant is blessed with a perfect get-out-of-jail free card. Ratana is now free as a bird to romp on with his criminal activism.

Integral to Ratana’s escape from justice was his uncle, Te Ururoa Flavell, an ex-Maori Party MP. We don’t know exactly why the Court let Ratana off the hook. We do know that Flavell provided “expert” “tikanga” evidence in support of Ratana’s defence, bollocks that the Court was evidently all too keen to take on board. Flavell came up with some sort of nepotistic advocacy in favour of his annoying nephew, which the Court clearly gulped down.

The remarkable features of this sick subversion of New Zealand’s justice system are the brazenness of the actors, and how concerted their activities were. This sorry saga has laid bare what we’ve all strongly suspected. The neo-Marxists are operating in lockstep, with a great ground game…

We have our national museum working with anarcho-activists to wreck an exhibit. The “redacted” result is then whipped off to an art gallery run and funded by a State-funded tertiary institution to celebrate a bogus notion that a nascent nation of people with Maori ancestry is about to germinate. Neo-Marxists like Morse tag in and suck on the tertiary education tit. Political partisan State prosecutors dismiss the charges, deferring to tikanga twaddle trotted out by the vandal’s uncle. The Court laps it all up and dismisses the charges. And a supplicant mainstream media reports this nasty nonsense as another marvelous and wonderful chapter in the subversion of New Zealand’s Western democracy.

Consider, if you will, what would happen if a white skinned New Zealand nationalist were to waltz into Te Papa tomorrow and vandalize the Maori language version of the Treaty exhibit. We know, full well, don’t we, exactly how that’d pan out. The perpetrator would be imprisoned within a year. Self-evidently, New Zealand now has a Two Tier police and justice system, and a Government with no genuine appetite to do anything about the parlous predicament in which we find ourselves.

Working feverishly to bring all this together was, no doubt, ex-Solicitor General, Crown Law CEO and Critical Race Theorist, Una Jagose. The Ratana fiasco reeks of Jagose. I’ve commented before on this disgraceful woman, whose term as Solicitor General ended in February 2026.

The Ratana judicial system debacle is much more than an unfortunate aberration, to be criticised but quickly forgotten. Ratana’s evasion of culpability represents a complete and abject failure of New Zealand’s rule of law and criminal justice system.

In these dark days, it’s not at all clear what can be done to right the ship. The lunatics may well have successfully taken over Asylum Aotearoa. With a Labour/Greens/Maori Party Government after the next election, the New Deal will be done and dusted. God help us.

John McLean is a senior lawyer who writes at John's Substack

ENDS

For balance we sought a view on the above from a former curator at Te Papa and received the following:

"The blog you sent me is fairly robust - and I feel that 'Neo-Marxist' is an unhelpful description (some Neo-Marxists like Eric Hobsbawm can be very good). Peter Williams has written rather more decorously about it in Breaking Views [and Brash & Mitchell]. I also think that Courtney and Arapata, both of whom I know and like, never condoned the vandalism as such, though their willingness to lend the panels with no apparent comment to the Adam Art Gallery does seem rather feeble. They (and I) were perfectly happy with the panels being up and representing the Treaty fairly and accurately for some 25 years before the vandalism - and Arapata was there all of that time. I’d be interested to know what my former colleague - and friend - Dame Claudia Orange thinks about it, as her knowledge of the Treaty is unsurpassed. However, it’s perfectly understandable if she pleads advancing years and prefers others to sort it out.

Surely the point about this case is that vandalism from tangata whenua is somehow okay, and the logic of this is that we have a racially divided legal system. Were I to smash up the vandalised panels as a protest against the vandals, I’m pretty sure I’d be fined! I have a passionate belief in something called the rule of law, where all people of all ethnicities and backgrounds are equal before the law. Sadly, it is being abrogated here."

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