The Māori Pronunciation Is Perfect: But Māori are Missing

Nov 9, 2026

(This essay is developed as part of a broader collective of essays from our work at CARE on institutional racism. The writing is drawn on composites emergent from the fieldwork and is not intended to refer to any particular institutional structure in Aotearoa)

The vowels are right. The senior leadership meeting opens with a mihi from a Pākehā deputy vice-chancellor who has done three years of evening classes and holds the long vowels with a care that would have been unthinkable in that room fifteen years ago. A whakataukī sits on the title slide, white text on the institutional blue. Item four of the agenda disestablishes two of the four Māori academic positions in the faculty, on the grounds that the programme they teach into has missed its enrolment target for two consecutive years. The meeting closes with a karakia. Nobody present experiences the morning as a contradiction, and in the terms the institution has built for itself, nobody is mistaken.

He means it, and that is the part worth sitting with. The classes were his own evenings and, for the first two years, his own money. The pronunciation took work that his peers did not do. Reading him as a hypocrite, as a cynic wearing a mask, flatters the reader and lets the building off. His sincerity is the mechanism rather than a cover for it. A manager who has learned the words, who opens correctly and closes correctly, who can tell you whose land he is standing on and say it without stumbling, has acquired something the restructure cannot take from him and the two disestablished colleagues have no standing to dispute. He has become a man who honours te Tiriti. Having become that man, he is relieved of the question of what te Tiriti might require of the budget line, and the relief is total, because the question now looks like an attack on his character rather than an audit of his decisions.

Across universities, ministries, councils, funders and the large NGOs, te Tiriti has been absorbed into the register of organisational culture, where it sits as an attribute the institution possesses rather than an obligation the institution owes. Culture is the safest category available to a settler institution under pressure, because culture can be learned, displayed, certified and reported without any transfer of money, land, appointment rights or decision-making power. An institution can hold a Tiriti framework, a reo strategy, a values statement with five Māori words in it, a mandatory module completed by ninety-four percent of staff, and a Māori academic workforce that has shrunk in absolute terms over the same period during which all of that was built. The two facts live together comfortably because the first has been constructed in such a way that it never has to answer to the second. Whiteness here is not being concealed. It is being renovated, and the renovation is what the performance of te Tiriti has been put to work to do.

The Tiriti you can declare

Read the first page of almost any strategy document produced in Aotearoa in the last eight years and you will find a sentence in the present tense with no counterparty in it. We are a Tiriti-led organisation. We are committed to our obligations under te Tiriti o Waitangi. We honour the partnership. The grammar is worth slowing down over, because institutions do not write their other obligations this way. A construction contract names the parties, the deliverable, the date, the sum, the remedy when the sum is not paid. A health and safety obligation names the hazard, the control, the person accountable, the consequence of failure. A Tiriti commitment written in the declarative names an identity the organisation has assigned itself, with no counterparty who can hold it, no date by which anything happens, and no state of affairs that would count as breach. It is a sentence that cannot fail, which is the property that made it attractive.

The declarative also quietly rewrites who is in the relationship. Te Tiriti was signed by rangatira and by the Crown, and the obligations that flow from it are obligations of the state and of the institutions that carry state authority and state money. Institutional speech substitutes Pākehā for the Crown and goodwill for obligation, which converts a constitutional relation into an interpersonal one. An interpersonal relation can be satisfied by feeling. It can be repaired by apology, by a hui, by an acknowledgement of hurt, by the assurance that nobody meant any harm. A constitutional obligation cannot be satisfied this way, which is why the conversion is so useful and why it is performed again every time a Pākehā manager speaks of the relationship rather than of the duty.

What follows from that conversion is an organisation that grades itself. Having declared what it is, the institution assesses its progress toward being what it has declared, using a framework it wrote, scored by staff it employs, reported to a council it appoints. Māori staff are asked into that process as advisers, which means their labour is drawn into producing the rating while the authority to set the rating stays where it was. The paperwork grows, the score improves, and the question of who decides what happens to the money is never formally raised, because the framework was never built with a place to put it. Recognition arrives on schedule every year. Redistribution has no schedule at all, and nobody has to say out loud that it was never going to have one.

Manaaki without the paepae

A staff member raises, in a faculty meeting, that the three Māori appointments made in the last five years were all at the lowest step of the lecturer scale while the four Pākehā appointments came in above the bar. The chair thanks her for her passion and says that the way we do things here is with manaakitanga, that we look after each other, and that she might think about how her delivery lands on her colleagues. The word has done a full day's work in one sentence. It has established that the chair holds the cultural high ground, it has reframed a question about salary steps as a question about tone, and it has told a Māori academic that she has fallen short of a Māori value. Nobody has to deny the salary figures, because the figures are no longer what the room is discussing.

Manaaki inside its own infrastructure is a demanding thing and a dangerous one for the host. The obligations run toward the manuhiri, the host's own mana is staked on meeting them, and the failure to meet them is visible, nameable and remembered by people with the standing to name it. That standing is built: the paepae, whaikōrero, the order of speaking, the kaumātua who can correct a speaker in front of everyone, the whakapapa that means the failure attaches to a house and not only to an individual, the long memory that carries it. The word draws its force from a communicative infrastructure that decides who speaks, in what order, with what authority, and to whom the speaker must answer. Manaaki is enforceable because that infrastructure exists, and it binds the powerful because the infrastructure was built to bind the powerful.

Lift the word out and leave the infrastructure behind, and every one of those properties inverts. Inside the institution there is no paepae with authority over a chief executive, no kaumātua who can stop a vice-chancellor mid-sentence and be obeyed, no forum where a failure of the host is spoken aloud and attaches to anything. What remains of manaaki after the extraction is a requirement of pleasantness, and the requirement comes to rest on whoever has least power in the room. The obligation that belonged to the host gets handed to the guest. A Māori staff member who names racism is told she is being unmanaaki. A Pacific colleague who asks why the Pacific strategy has no budget line is told the kōrero needs to stay mana-enhancing, where mana-enhancing has come to mean that senior Pākehā should not be made to feel accused. The institution has acquired a vocabulary of accountability and has used it to build a vocabulary of silence.

The theft is precise and it should be named precisely. The concept is taken from the communities who hold it, stripped of the relational architecture that gave it teeth, fitted with a new function inside white institutional governance, and then issued back to those same communities as a standard they are failing to meet. Māori staff are asked to teach the word, to validate its use in the values statement, to sit on the group that writes the plain-English gloss for the intranet, and then to live under the version that comes out the other end. Their labour is used to manufacture the instrument that is turned on them. That is the condition of the thing: the words of the colonised, circulating at speed through the structures of the coloniser, performing the work of keeping those structures intact.

The certificate economy

The workshop runs two days. There is a facilitator on a day rate, a venue, catering, a slide deck that moves from He Whakaputanga through the two texts of 1840 to the wars, the confiscations, Bastion Point and the settlement era. There is a session after lunch on the second day called what this means for my practice, and a reflection sheet. There is a certificate. The completion rate goes into the annual report under the heading of Tiriti capability, and the figure rises each year, and the council notes it with satisfaction. Everything in that description is real and much of it is good. The history taught in those rooms is history most Pākehā were never taught at school, the facilitators are frequently serious people, and staff come out of it shaken in ways that matter to them. The question is what the institution does with the two days, and the answer is that it banks them.

A sector has grown up around this, and it moves money. Crown-funded organisations pay consultancies, some Māori-led and some not, to deliver capability. Careers have been built in that space by Pākehā who are fluent, well read, genuinely committed, and structurally positioned as the authority on Māori-Crown relations in front of audiences who find the material easier to receive from one of their own. The figure recurs across the sector: the Pākehā Treaty educator who has become, through study and sincerity, the person the organisation trusts on this, while Māori staff down the corridor carry the same knowledge as a condition of their lives and are consulted about room bookings. The market rewards the translation of Māori knowledge into forms that white institutions find comfortable to purchase, and it rewards the translators.

What the training reliably leaves out is the organisation itself. Two days on Parihaka, nothing on the appointment data. A moving account of raupatu, no mention of the land the institution sits on, how it came to hold it, what it earns from it, or who was dispossessed to provide it. Procurement, salary bands, promotion rates, research overheads, the composition of the senior leadership team, the three decisions made last quarter that cut Māori provision: none of this is on the slide deck, and its absence is not an oversight in the design. A training built around institutional history and institutional data would produce demands. A training built around individual awareness produces reflection sheets. The unit of analysis has been moved from the structure to the person, and once it sits there, progress can be counted by how many people have been made aware, which is a number the institution can grow indefinitely without changing anything it owns.

The certificate does further work after the room empties. It functions as insurance, so that when a racism complaint arrives the organisation can point to ninety-four percent completion and establish that it is not that kind of place. It functions as licence, because a Pākehā manager who has done the two days now speaks on the kaupapa with confidence and will tell a Māori colleague what te Tiriti does and does not require. It functions as closure, because the obligation has been scheduled, delivered, attended and reported, and an obligation that has been discharged is no longer outstanding. Treaty education at its best opens something. Treaty education as the sector has industrialised it closes the file, and the closing of the file is the service being bought.

Counting the room

Tara McAllister, Joanna Kidman, Olivia Rowley and Reremoana Theodore counted the academic workforce of the eight universities and found Māori at around five percent of it between 2012 and 2017, with no progress across those six years. Sereana Naepi's companion study put Pacific academics at 1.7 percent and found the number static over the same period. At the top the figures thin out to the point of absurdity: thirty-five Māori among 1,045 professors and deans in 2017, and five or fewer Pacific academics at that level at both the start and the end of the period. The later work with Jesse Kokaua on promotions and earnings found Māori and Pacific academics substantially less likely to be promoted into the professoriate across fifteen years of data. Those studies are now several years old and the sector has had time to move, so the current figures are worth pulling before this goes further, but nobody working in a New Zealand university believes the shape has changed.

Set those six flat years against what else was happening in those six years. That is the period in which Tiriti statements entered every strategic plan, in which reo courses filled up, in which the mandatory module arrived, in which signage went bilingual, in which the karakia at the start of the meeting became standard practice rather than an innovation, in which job advertisements began to ask for demonstrated commitment to te Tiriti o Waitangi. One curve climbed steeply and the other stayed flat, and the two curves belong to the same institutions in the same years. Reading them together is the whole argument. The performance expanded in exactly the period in which the composition of the workforce did not, and it expanded without encountering any obstacle, which tells you what kind of thing it was. A practice that threatened the distribution of positions would have met resistance. This one met budget.

The explanation offered is the pipeline, and the pipeline argument deserves to be met directly rather than waved off. Universities say they cannot appoint Māori professors who do not exist, that the doctoral numbers constrain the professorial numbers, and that time is required. The reply is in the same data. Promotion gaps are not pipeline gaps, because the people being passed over are already inside the institution and already hold the qualification. Clustering is not a pipeline problem either: Māori academics concentrated in Māori studies units while the rest of the faculty stays white describes a hiring pattern, not a shortage. And the pipeline framing hands the institution an obligation with no end date attached, which by now should be a recognisable shape.

Count the Treaty work separately and the picture sharpens. The people sent on the two-day training are the people who hold the roles, which means the training is delivered overwhelmingly to Pākehā because Pākehā hold most of the roles. The people asked to review the framework, advise the working group, bless the opening, check the translation, sit on the panel and mentor the cohort are the small number of Māori staff, who do that work on top of their contracts and largely without recognition in workload or promotion. Fluency in Tiriti language accrues fastest to those with the most time, the most seniority and the least at stake, and then that fluency becomes a qualification for speaking about the kaupapa. Migrant and Pacific staff of colour sit outside this accounting almost entirely. Many institutions do not disaggregate them in any usable way, which means a serious claim about their position cannot be made from the published data, and the absence of the count is itself a piece of evidence about who the institution considers itself to be in relationship with.

Two chairs at the table

Te Tiriti was signed by rangatira and by the Crown. Institutional language has replaced the Crown with Pākehā and called the result a partnership, and that substitution does a great deal of work beyond letting individual Pākehā feel personally implicated in something honourable. A partnership has two parties. Once the frame is built with two chairs in it, everyone who is neither Māori nor Pākehā is standing. The Samoan cleaner, the Indian radiographer, the Filipino aged care worker, the Chinese doctoral student, the Somali family in Mount Roskill, the Bangladeshi lecturer: all of them live under the same Crown, in the same housing market, under the same immigration regime, and none of them has a seat in the diagram the institution has drawn of its own moral life.

What follows in practice is a sequencing argument, delivered gently and almost always by a Pākehā. In this country the first relationship is the Māori-Pākehā relationship, and once that is sorted we can come to the other conversations. A migrant academic who raises the pattern in her own appointment is told that her concern, while valid, risks cutting across the Tiriti work. She has been handed a position in which pressing her case appears to be an attack on Māori. She will usually stop pressing, because she is a decent person and because she holds a visa. The Pākehā manager who delivered the sequencing keeps the chair, keeps the salary band, and has just used te Tiriti to close down a complaint about white hiring without once having to defend white hiring.

The category of Pākehā, meanwhile, is operated with a flexibility that its users rarely notice. A white South African who arrived in 2019, a British academic three years off the plane, a white American on a five-year contract: each of them is folded into the partner position almost immediately, invited to do the training, encouraged to learn the reo, welcomed into the work of honouring te Tiriti. A Fijian Indian family in their third generation in Aotearoa remains tauiwi, outside the frame, with nothing the frame offers them. Whiteness is granted the standing of a Treaty party on arrival while brown settlement is held permanently in the waiting room. This is the same logic by which the settler state has always distributed belonging, running now through the vocabulary of decolonisation.

The arrangement is also producing exactly the outcome that should worry anyone who cares about te Tiriti. Migrant communities who are given no place in the constitutional story, no language for their own racialisation, and a steady signal that Māori claims are the reason their concerns must wait, become available to anyone who offers them a different story. Hindutva organisations offer one. The far right offers one, in which Māori are a privileged interest group and hardworking migrants are the real victims of favouritism, and that story is doing real work in Indian, Chinese and Pacific communities right now. The foreclosure of solidarity is manufacturing the resentment it will later point to as proof that migrants are the problem. Solidarity between tangata whenua and tauiwi of colour has to be built, politically and with care, around the common structure that organises all of our lives, and the two-chair diagram was built in a way that makes that construction look like a betrayal. Whiteness holds the chair at the head of the table while the two groups it has racialised are encouraged to dispute the seating.

What would have to be given up

Anything proposed as a test will be absorbed, written into a framework, assigned an owner and reported to a committee, because that is what these institutions are good at. The tests that survive absorption share one property: they cost something that cannot be recovered. Publish appointment, starting-step, promotion and remuneration data by ethnicity and by level every year, unredacted, with the previous five years beside it so the trend is visible and the gap cannot be presented as a snapshot. Say who signs off capital expenditure, and whether any Māori person holds that signature in their own right rather than through advice. Say what the institution owns, how it came to own it, and what it earns from it. Say what proportion of research overhead, contract revenue and philanthropic income is held by Māori-led units and whether those units can spend it without permission from a white committee. Say whether the cultural labour performed by Māori and Pacific staff appears anywhere in workload allocation and promotion criteria, with money attached. Each of those is checkable by someone outside the organisation, which is the quality that makes them different from a maturity rating.

The one that matters most is authority, and it can be put as a single question: where in this institution can Māori say no and have the no hold. An advisory group cannot say no. A reference group cannot say no. A kaihautū reporting to a deputy vice-chancellor cannot say no to that deputy vice-chancellor. A framework consultation cannot say no, because its outputs are advice that the executive may weigh. Rangatiratanga in any usable sense means decision rights over resources and over who is appointed, held independently and exercisable against the preference of the senior leadership team. Every institution in this country that calls itself Tiriti-led has arranged its governance so that this one thing is unavailable, and the arrangement is the thing the performance exists to cover. When a Māori body in a university is finally given real authority over a budget and over appointments, the vocabulary will have stopped mattering, because the structure will have changed.

For those of us who are tauiwi of colour there is a specific discipline in this. Our position is not improved by taking the chair we are offered, which is the chair of diversity, available on condition that we perform gratitude and keep our politics within the limits of the training module. It is improved by refusing the sequencing, by declining to let our racialisation be used as a reason to defer Māori sovereignty and declining to let Māori sovereignty be used as a reason to defer our own claims, and by building relationships with tangata whenua that the institution did not broker and cannot evaluate. Those relationships are made at pickets, at tangi, in community halls, over years, and they are not legible to any framework, which is their protection.

The deputy vice-chancellor will keep going to his classes, and that is fine. His reo is a gain for him and will one day be a gain for his grandchildren. The question to put to him has nothing to do with whether he means it. Ask him what the institution has given up. Ask what left the building, which budget line moved, which appointment right now sits somewhere it did not sit before, which asset was returned, which decision was taken out of his hands and put into someone else's and cannot be taken back. In most institutions in Aotearoa the honest answer is nothing, and the nothing is the reason the mihi had to get so good.

Sources for the workforce figures. McAllister, Kidman, Rowley and Theodore, "Why isn't my professor Māori? A snapshot of the academic workforce in New Zealand universities", MAI Journal 8(2), 2019; Naepi, "Why isn't my professor Pasifika?", MAI Journal 8(2), 2019; McAllister, Kokaua, Naepi, Kidman and Theodore, "Glass ceilings in New Zealand universities: Inequities in Māori and Pacific promotions and earnings", MAI Journal 9(3), 2020, doi:10.20507/MAIJournal.2020.9.3.8. The DOIs for the two 2019 articles need completing against the MAI Journal record before this goes anywhere formal, and the workforce figures are from 2012 to 2017 and should be refreshed against current Education Counts and university equity reporting.