RODNEY HIDE: The Maori Electorates: Racist Relic That Must Go

The Maori electorates are a 19th-century anachronism that should have been abolished twice—first when universal suffrage arrived in 1893, and again when MMP was adopted in 1996. They are racist by design, divisive by operation, and the breeding ground for the ethnic grievance industry now dominating our politics.

Created in 1867 as a temporary bridge for Maori men excluded by the property qualification, the seats lost all justification the moment every adult New Zealander gained the vote on equal terms. Parliament, addicted to patronage, kept them. MMP promised genuine proportionality—every vote counting without gerrymandered fiefdoms—yet the seats survived, sustained by a separate Maori roll and the rule that lets a party retain list seats after winning just one electorate. This is not democracy; it is a state-subsidised racial quota.

The result is balkanisation: the deliberate fracturing of the nation into rival ethnic enclaves. Instead of one sovereign people bound by shared citizenship, we get parallel systems—separate electorates, co-governance boards, race-based funding, and creeping demands for separate law. Trust collapses as politics becomes a zero-sum contest between ancestral tribes rather than a contest of ideas for the common good.

These seats institutionalise the deeper poison of group rights. Individual liberty demands that the state treat citizens as sovereign individuals, equal before the law, with rights to life, liberty and property irrespective of bloodline. Group rights invert this: they allocate power, resources and outcomes by ancestry, turning the state into an ethnic arbiter. That is incompatible with freedom. It replaces the rule of law with the rule of the tribe and breeds clients who demand patronage instead of citizens who demand justice.

We now have unelected chiefs with big budgets and vast power not by merit but through Maori funding and the patronage and corruption of the body politic that is the inevitable result. Newly minted chiefs get to decide which projects get the go ahead and what policies make it into law. 

Te Pati Maori exists solely because of these seats. Its MPs are not statesmen building a united nation; they are race hustlers whose business model is to inflame division, stoke extremism, and harvest resentment from a captive, race-defined electorate. Race-baiting is not a bug—it is the predictable feature when survival depends on keeping the ethnic pot boiling.

New Zealand was founded on the liberal promise of equal citizenship under one law for all. The Maori seats mock that promise. Abolish them. Place every voter on the general roll. Force every candidate to appeal to New Zealanders irrespective of their ancestry.

Equal rights or ethnic division—there is no third way. The time for deference and soft talk is finished. Scrap the seats.

Rodney Hide is a former Minister and leader of the ACT Party