Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays: WAI 9, 10 and 11

31/07/2025

Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays is not just a catalogue of claims. It is a personal inquiry into the state’s policy advisory system under pressure: who is heard, what counts as expertise, and how legitimacy frays when the Crown is challenged. This week, I pause the timeline deliberately before WAI 9 and WAI 10, because the next claim changes the frame. WAI 11, the Te Reo Māori claim, doesn’t excavate past breaches, it interrogates colonisation as a living system. It is here that the Tribunal is first asked to evaluate the contemporary performance of the whole of government. That shift marks a turning point in the Tribunal’s role, and in this series.

It has been my hypothesis that the early Tribunal reports show us, sometimes more clearly than any official review, how the state responds to challenge. Who is heard. What is treated as expertise. Where legitimacy is sourced. And how quickly the state’s position frays.

So I want to pause here, deliberately, before WAI 9 and WAI 10. Not because Orākei and Waiheke are unimportant. Far from it. But because they sit differently in the timeline I’m following.

WAI 9 and WAI 10 offer fewer insights into the contemporary policy advisory system and are more transitional cases, using post-1975 events as jurisdictional hooks to surface deeper, historical grievances.

Make no mistake, they are foundational to our national reckoning. However, the claim I want to address next is WAI 11, the Te Reo Māori claim, because it marks the first time the Tribunal is truly asked to evaluate the living performance of the whole of government.

This is a structural shift in the Tribunal’s role. And it’s a turning point in this series.

Since 1975, Aotearoa has undergone a profound transformation in how public policy advice is produced, filtered, and acted upon.

We began with a Weberian bureaucracy: hierarchical, rules-based, and closed. Inclined to ride a silly idea to a fiscal or constitutional crisis. It really wasn’t the nirvana some make it out to be.

New Public Management (NPM) disrupted that system in the 1980s and 1990s, dismantling departmental authority, introducing market logic, and disaggregating the public service into contract-managed fragments. It introduced the idea that policy advice was a product: it was measurable, contestable, transactional and designed to support ministers as primary customers.

In response to the damage NPM caused to coherence, trust, and institutional memory, New Public Governance (NPG) emerged in the mid-1990s and early 2000s. It didn’t replace NPM. It sat uneasily beside it.

Where NPM prized contracts and competition, and specificity, NPG emphasised networks, shared outcomes, and collaborative delivery. It acknowledged that much of the state’s delivery work was now being done by non-state actors. The policy advisory system evolved from one focused on central control to one that emphasised navigating relationships across agencies, sectors, and, increasingly, constitutional lines.

But even NPG wasn’t enough. A fourth orientation, often referred to as the New Public Service, began to emerge. Based on the Public Service Act 2020, it placed public value at the centre of the public sector operating model and assumed officials would always be motivated to do the right thing and that they have a role in serving the democratic dialogue, not just ministerial preference.

However, the rhetoric of this new orientation has proven far more robust than its practical implementation. Despite its ambitious theoretical foundations, New Public Service has struggled to translate its ideals into substantive institutional change.

In short, it has failed to materialise as a system. It is evident in speeches, internal statements, and the margins of best practice. But it has not displaced managerial logic, nor altered the terms of constitutional engagement with Māori. If anything, it has provided cover: a language of “relationality” without institutional redistribution.

A veneer of public value, with little structural change underneath.

The Te Reo Māori claim (WAI 11) cuts through all of that. The Te Reo Māori claim sits precisely at the fault line between these four paradigms.

Lodged in 1985, it doesn’t describe a past wrong: it documents a living breach. It asks why te reo Māori is absent from public broadcasting.

Why is it marginalised in the education system? Why do state agencies fail to uphold their obligations under the Treaty, not in 1840 or 1940, but right now?

It is a claim about systems. It names the silence embedded in statute and the inertia built into public service culture.

The absence or silencing of te reo Māori, not just from policy outputs, but from the very categories that structure what counts as policy work and who counts when outcomes are delivered.

And crucially, WAI 11 triggers a response. In the weeks ahead, I’ll trace that response: not just the official findings, but the shifts they catalysed.

The creation of Te Taura Whiri. The struggles over kōhanga reo funding. The slow, reluctant recognition of te reo Māori as potentially a living public and private good. And I’ll ask what all of this tells us about the advisory system itself. What kinds of evidence count? What institutional reflexes remain? What it takes to move a state that was not built to hear te reo spoken, let alone respond to it.

So August will focus entirely on the Te Reo Māori claim. Not because it’s the most symbolic. But because it’s the most systemic.

So for those of you following my journey through my favourite trip-hop, Mezzanine’s on now: full volume. Not ambient, not background. This is now my writing music.

Trip-hop tuned for structural analysis.