RODNEY HIDE: The model you can’t read
My earlier column was motivated by a Seek ad. This one is what that ad named and DOC will not publish.
A “new DOC Treaty Operating Model.”
Type those words into the department’s own website. Nothing. Search the last annual report. Still “Treaty Relationships.” Scoop, Beehive, Cabinet papers in the public domain: blank.
What you get instead is a hiring wave. Role descriptions dated 7 April 2026. Kaihautū. Principal Advisors. Business Partners into Biodiversity, Heritage and Visitors. Relationships and Engagement managers. All of them told to lead, steward, implement, or “give effect to” the Treaty Operating Model.
So the model is real enough to recruit against. It is not real enough for the public to read.
That is not an accident of filing. That is design.
The owner is named. Sheridan Smith, Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu, Deputy Director-General Iwi Strategy and Partnerships since August 2025. DOC’s own blurb: she leads Treaty strategy, relationships, and Treaty system performance and oversight. She arrived from Justice as Deputy Secretary Strategy, with Te Arawhiti Partnerships and the Public Service Commission behind her. Crown–Māori system performance, not trapping stoats.
Under her watch the ads arrived. Under her watch the invisible model got a brand.
What do the role papers say the model does, when they bother to talk?
Integrate Treaty settlement commitments. Integrate Section 4 of the Conservation Act. Integrate “iwi aspirations.” Integrate “partnership expectations.” Give effect to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. Embed te ao Māori, mātauranga and tikanga. Coach leaders. Assure performance. Align the whole organisation.
Settlements are statute. Section 4 is statute. You can argue about how far either reaches. You cannot pretend they are secret.
“Iwi aspirations” are not statute. “Partnership expectations” are not statute. “Principles” are the fog Parliament spent a year fighting over, and lost.
An operating model that bundles the lawful with the invented, then hides the bundle, is not settlement administration. It is policy by intranet.
If the model were only “keep the Treaty deeds,” DOC would publish a checklist and go home. Instead it builds Tier 3 kaihautū, enterprise business partners, capability oversight, monitoring and assurance, and a vocabulary of mana-enhancing engagement. That is a permanent parallel management system for how the Crown behaves toward Māori inside conservation, written for officials, sold in job ads, withheld from voters.
Ministers still talk as if co-governance and undefined principles are being wound back. DOC still hires as if the opposite is the work programme. The bridge between those two stories is a document the public is not allowed to see.
Ask the simple question.
Where is the DOC Treaty Operating Model?
If it is harmless, put it online. If it is only settlements and Section 4, say so in plain English. If it embeds aspirations and principles the coalition told the country it was ending, then the election campaign just found its next exhibit.
A democracy can live with hard arguments. It cannot live with operating models that rewrite the relationship between Crown and citizen in the dark.
Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT Party leader
And all this gives one great confidence that DoC soundly and appropriately reviewed all the submissions and chose without bias the correct party to manage Molesworth Station. Yeah right!
What a corrupt, racist, divided little backwater we have become.
What a joke.The name Sheridan reminds me of Hyacinth Buckets (Bouquet) bludging son in the funny Keeping up Appearances program. Still sucking on mummies & daddies bank account to keep his lifestyle as a so called Student goings on.Doesnt that ring some bells why do we keep these people in high paid roles who preach rubbish.
This stuff is getting boring. That a Govt is so gutless that it cannot deal with ToW in a pragmatic fashion because a few sunburnt Irishmen might protest for a few days is gutwrenchingly hopeless in a country where we have always been proud of strength of body and character. ToW claims are now all done except the excruciatingly greedy ones from the north. Do what Seymour says and close down the WT after putting an absolute end date on the last settlement after which they take what they are given and can piss off for good. Then get rid of the ToWAct as it was only in place for land settlements after the Privy Council decided the ToW was…
rodney, fear is blinding you to third and equally as valid way to interpret this job advertisement.
conservation land is often close to maori land, and is often of special interest to maori, being the remnant of forests once used for life in its entirety. there is also a treaty that many and possibly most new zealanders assign some level of relevance to in their lives and beliefs.. the treaty has principles, regardless of the associated problem of principle proliferation, there are still some basic principles that any one who can read, can easily deduce from the treaty. if you are having problems with reading 8 short paragraphs and deducing the obvious principles, get Ai to do it for…
Thanks Rodney for the follow on piece. I couldn't find anything on the new DOC operating model either, but when Potaka the Minister for DOC is on record as saying the Treaty Principals Bill should be cremated and buried then we should take seriously that the smoke is likely to be hiding a fire.
Here is what I was able to find...
DOC's own leadership page confirms Sheridan Smith holds the role of Deputy Director-General, Iwi Strategy and Partnerships. She joined in August 2025 from the Ministry of Justice (Deputy Secretary, Strategy), with earlier stints at Te Arawhiti and the Public Service Commission. So her background is Crown-Māori systems and machinery-of-government, not conservation — it fits the "system performance" framin…