RODNEY HIDE: We stopped believing. The rulebook got religion

New Zealand is no longer a religious country. That's not my opinion. It's the census.

In 2023, for the first time since the question was asked, more than half of us, 51.6 per cent, said we had no religion. Christians fell to 32.3 per cent, down from 36.5 per cent five years earlier.

As a Christian, I note that with sadness. As a columnist, I note it with interest. Just as the majority stopped believing, the state started believing on our behalf.

Look at land-use planning.

Planning used to be dull. Gloriously, usefully dull. The Town and Country Planning Act 1953 told councils to promote "the health, safety and convenience, and the economic and general welfare" of residents. Zoning, drains, roads, and keeping the piggery away from the school. Nothing mystical.

Then came the Town and Country Planning Act 1977. Late in its passage, after submissions from the New Zealand Māori Council, Parliament added section 3(1)(g). It made "the relationship of the Maori people and their culture and traditions with their ancestral land" a matter of national importance. It looked modest. It was a seed.

It sprouted fast. In 1978 the Planning Tribunal used it to stop Māori land being taken for a public esplanade. In 1987 the High Court decided that "ancestral land" included land Māori no longer owned. The same year, Parliament gave "tangata whenua" a guaranteed seat on regional plainning committees, probably the first time that phrase appeared in general legislation.

The Resource Management Act 1991 grew it into a tree. Section 6(e) requires decision-makers to recognise and provide for "the relationship of Māori and their culture and traditions with their ancestral lands, water, sites, wāhi tapu, and other taonga". Section 7(a) demands "particular regard" to kaitiakitanga. Water conservation orders can protect waters outstanding "for recreational, historical, spiritual, or cultural purposes". Every consent application must assess effects on resources of "spiritual" value.

Spiritual. In a resource consent. Passed by a Parliament that would never let a Presbyterian elder block a subdivision because it offended the Almighty.

The Te Urewera Act 2014 made a forest a legal entity. The Te Awa Tupua Act 2017 made the Whanganui River a legal person, "an indivisible and living whole" incorporating "all its physical and metaphysical elements". Metaphysical. In statute.

Cultural impact assessments by iwi and hapū are now commonplace. Accidental discovery protocols stop the diggers. Councils must consult iwi authorities on their plans, and iwi share governance of the Waikato River and Te Urewera.

It even reaches the sewer. A 2025 report for Taumata Arowai, the water regulator, explains that mixing waters can damage mauri and that Māori "as a general rule" do not support discharging wastewater, even treated, into fresh or coastal water. Mana whenua told the authors that contact with land before discharge was "essential to avoid any negative cultural or spiritual impacts to water". At Rotoiti–Rotomā, Ngāti Pikiao would not support discharge to water, and the scheme went to land. To be fair, at Cambridge mana whenua agreed to move from land to water. But the direction of travel is clear, and ratepayers pay.

Then there are the courts. In 2002 the Environment Court heard evidence about Takauere, a taniwha said to travel beneath the site of the proposed Ngāwhā prison. The judges were admirably clear: the Act and the Court "are creations of the Parliament of a secular State". Disputes about a taniwha "are simply not justiciable". The prison went ahead.

That same year Transit New Zealand halted work on the Waikato Expressway at Meremere after Ngāti Naho said the road crossed the swamp lair of Karutahi, a one-eyed taniwha. No court ordered it. Transit steepened an embankment, at an extra $15,000 to $20,000.

Two decades on, that line has blurred. In 2023 the Environment Court said it need not stick to Western science in deciding whether Te Waikoropupū Springs were in their "natural state". It could use a mātauranga Māori lens.

The same year, Hawke's Bay farmers Peter and Caroline Raikes, both Christians, tried to stop part of their land being declared wāhi taonga. They argued, in part, that the evidence rested on beliefs contrary to their own faith. The Court of Appeal refused them leave. No finding on the "correctness" of spiritual beliefs was required, it said: "it is the existence and significance of the beliefs that a court can, and must, consider." Nor was any physical trace on the land required.

So the state won't ask whether a belief is true. It will weigh how much it matters, then limit what a family may do with its own land. The owners' faith had no statutory hook to hang on.

I don't blame Māori. Iwi used the law Parliament wrote, as anyone would. The fault lies with a largely secular political class that finds it easier to write "mauri" into a council report than to say "God" out loud.

The costs are real. When housing or renewable energy is weighed against a spiritual harm nobody can see, test or disprove, the applicant faces delay, expense and uncertainty, and can't know the answer until the judge delivers it. A green hydrogen project at Kapuni was fought to the Court of Appeal, partly over its wind turbines' effect on hapū's spiritual relationship with Taranaki Maunga. It survived. Others won't bother.

The coalition's two replacement laws for the RMA passed their third reading on 22 September. Yet the Natural Environment Bill still lists the identification and protection of sites of significance to Māori, wāhi tapu included, among its goals. The new law is leaner. It isn't neutral.

I'm not asking the state to believe in God. I am asking it to stop believing in gods.

Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT Party leader