Indigenous Lives Matter: Aotearoa’s Shame

by ELV

Created in Aotearoa to honour Māori and all Indigenous peoples whose voices are being silenced. Te Tiriti o Waitangi lives in our classrooms, our whānau, and our hearts.

When a government chooses erasure over equity, the world must listen.

A teacher folds away a classroom poster of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

A child asks why it’s gone.

That is where this story begins — in the quiet acts of erasure happening across Aotearoa New Zealand.

The pain and onslaught on our tamariki and our profession continue.

Yesterday it was the Teaching Council.

Today it’s the Treaty.

Each day brings another decision that feels more like disappearance.

Those of us in education are left trying to make sense of the senseless — to look into the mind of policy that dismantles everything we’ve built and still hope to find reason.

We know this government bows to the boardroom.

We know “international benchmarks” and “global competitiveness” are their new gospel.

We know they want to drive the economy and parade Aotearoa as a “world-class” brand.

They point proudly to OECD tables, China’s honours, and our universities’ global rankings. Yet those same audiences admire nations that honour their Indigenous peoples — Canada, Australia, the Nordic countries — not those who silence them.

International outlets are beginning to echo what educators here have been saying for months — that these reforms are not reforms at all, but retreats.

Even The Guardian today has begun reporting on our government’s direction, warning of the global fallout:

“Other countries looked up to New Zealand for reviving Indigenous language and culture, and the change would put the country completely out of step as global leaders,” she said. — The Guardian, 4 November 2025*

So why, in their rush for prestige, are our leaders making us look like racists on the world stage?

Do they not see that the more they bow to apartheid-thinking movements like Hobson’s Pledge — a group that opposes Māori rights and the Treaty of Waitangi — the more the world looks on in disbelief?

Once, Aotearoa was admired for compassion, cultural intelligence, and Treaty partnership.

During the pandemic, people wanted to live here.

Our Prime Minister was celebrated as the conscience of the world. 

Now, in just two years, a one-term government has dragged us from hope to humiliation — rewriting Te Tiriti out of the very system built to uphold it.

Let the world know that the majority of Aotearoa do not accept that story.

Let’s make the world watch.

Let’s remind them that Indigenous lives matter here, too — that the heart of our nation was not written in English alone, and that educators, parents, and rangatahi will not stand silent while the ink of Te Tiriti o Waitangi is scrubbed from our classrooms.

If it takes international eyes to hold a mirror to our leaders, then so be it.

Because the world once looked to us for courage.

Let them look again — and see that courage still lives, not in the Beehive, but in our classrooms.

Where we were once celebrated for compassion and cultural wisdom, we’re now being whispered about in the same breath as Trumpism — a government that trades empathy for ego and partnership for power.

A Warning from the South Pacific

International journalists are beginning to ask the same question we ask in our staffrooms: How did a nation that gave the world Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the haka, and the world’s most humane pandemic response become the one rolling back its own soul?

The world’s markets are listening too. 

Because make no mistake — global investors, universities, and trading partners read more than balance sheets. They read the moral temperature of a country. They trade not only in goods, but in trust.

A government that normalises racism and dismantles its own Indigenous frameworks sends a message far louder than any trade mission can fix: that Aotearoa is no longer the safe, ethical, future-minded nation the world once admired.

Multinationals who partner here will ask: Can we invest where the founding Treaty is being erased from law? Can we recruit talent to a country that silences its first peoples? Can we promote study-abroad programmes when teachers are punished for protecting culture and truth?

Our global reputation was built on partnership, on courage, on care — values that drew students from Asia, investors from Europe, researchers from Canada and the Pacific.

If this government continues to bow to racism dressed as “reform,” those relationships will fracture.

No boardroom wants to be associated with apartheid-thinking in the twenty-first century. No ethical company wants its brand alongside a government that chooses erasure over equity. 

And when reputation falls, trade follows.

They refuse to listen here — to educators, to iwi, to the families who know what’s at stake. But perhaps the world will listen.

Perhaps when our allies abroad hear what is being silenced, they will understand the depth of the wound.

Because if moral integrity no longer moves this government, maybe economic consequence will.

Yes — this might cost us in trade, in image, in short-term markets.

But if it saves our tamariki from the cost of erasure — if it means the world knows what’s being done in their name — then so be it.

Now is the time to tell our allies, our trading partners, our international media — to speak the truth of what is happening in Aotearoa before it is rewritten.

Let them see that teachers, whānau, and rangatahi are not the silent majority.

Let them see that we are standing, even as the system collapses around us.

Because one day, history will ask who spoke up when the ink of Te Tiriti was scrubbed from the blackboards of our nation.

And we want the world to know — it wasn’t the politicians.

It was the teachers.

If our leaders refuse to listen, the world must.

Aotearoa’s teachers are speaking for truth — not just for our children, but for every nation that still believes education should heal, not harm.