Why Movements Like Hobson’s Pledge Still Exist in a Supposedly Educated World — and Why Te Tiriti in Education Is Non-Negotiable
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
by ELV
I didn’t go looking for it — it wandered straight into my newsfeed.
A Facebook page with a cheerful name and a grim pulse, dripping with racist slander about tikanga, reo, Māori media, Māori achievement — anything that didn’t fit into its tiny, trembling worldview.
Ironically, the page tried to post on DisruptED, convinced it had found a captive audience of teachers ready to applaud its confusion.
The page calls itself Make Your Voice Count.
If you’re in the mood to be horrified, you’ll find them turning Māori stories into caricatures and flattening Te Tiriti into a threat.
But it wasn’t the ignorance that stopped me.
It was the pattern.
When I checked who follows them, it was predictable — the usual anti-equity echo chamber, the anti-Māori commentariat, the people who call anything vaguely modern “woke.”
But then I checked who they follow.
Māori pages.
Māori journalists.
Kaupapa Māori educators.
The Hui.
Unions.
PPTA.
Advocacy groups.
Public sector pages.
Equity initiatives.
At first it made no sense.
Until the algorithm whispered the truth.
They’re not following to learn.
They’re following to harvest.
To surveil.
To screenshot, distort, and feed their 500 followers a steady diet of crisis and imaginary danger.
This is how radicalisation works in 2025: you follow the people you claim to hate so you can mine them for content and manufacture fear for those who find safety in outrage.
And that — right there — is why thousands of New Zealanders are signing the petitions to keep Te Tiriti obligations in the Education Act.
Not as ornament.
Not as opinion.
As protection.
Some people scoff and say, “It doesn’t matter — schools can include Te Tiriti if they want.” But that’s exactly the danger.
Because laws aren’t written for the brave — they are written for the unsure.
The confident schools will honour Te Tiriti regardless.
The openly racist schools will try to erase it regardless.
It’s the vast middle — the uncertain, the overwhelmed, the quietly stretched — who drift wherever the legislative tide pulls them.
And when the law stops naming Te Tiriti, silence starts filling the gaps.
When Te Tiriti becomes optional, it becomes avoidable.
When avoidable, it becomes ignorable.
When ignorable, it becomes erasable.
People are signing because they understand what the current law holds back:
the slow drift toward monocultural schooling
the empowerment of fringe groups who feed on division
the erosion of Māori identity from curriculum
the rise of pages like Make Your Voice Count
the quiet rewriting of Aotearoa’s story
the old ghosts of colonisation waking up to stretch their legs
It never starts with a headline.
It starts in classrooms — in tiny shifts no one notices at first.
A pepeha unit trimmed to make space.
A pōwhiri postponed because ‘we’re too busy’.
A mural painted over.
A class novel swapped for something ‘less political’.
This is how erosion always begins — not with a bang, but with a quiet reshaping of what children no longer learn.
This is the drama.
This is the fight.
This is precisely what Te Tiriti in legislation protects us from.
But why do movements like Hobson’s Pledge even exist in a supposedly educated world?
On paper, they shouldn’t.
We are the most informed generation in human history.
We teach critical thinking, cultural responsiveness, and the history of harm.
Our tamariki learn about whakapapa, identity, and interconnectedness.
We have neuroscience, data, Te Tiriti scholarship, and global knowledge at our fingertips.
Our kids are digital natives — raised on TikTok, Insta, global friendships, born into a world without borders.
They carry the world in their pockets yet we still expect them to sit in 1950s-style classrooms while adults cling to narratives smaller than a school desk.
And still —despite everything we know —the human race circles back to the same fractures.
Why?
Because, as Yuval Noah Harari warns, humanity is now hackable.
Not by machines — by narratives.
In Nexus, Harari recounts how Myanmar once banned Facebook, then let it in.
Within months, misinformation went viral, hate speech exploded, and the Rohingya were targeted at scale — not because people became cruel overnight, but because fear spread faster than truth, and emotions beat evidence.
The psychological architecture is the same everywhere:
Fear + misinformation + identity panic + algorithmic reinforcement = extremism.
Aotearoa is not Myanmar.
But Hobson’s Pledge thrives in exactly that formula.
If David Seymour sounds like Hobson’s Pledge, it’s not because he’s signed up —it’s because their narratives have seeped into the walls of Parliament.
Our leaders aren’t hacked by technology; they’re hacked by story.
And once a story rewires the way a politician sees the world,
the whole nation feels the ripple.
You can hear it now in Erica Stanford’s scripts on “knowledge-rich” reforms,
in the health system where equity is being treated like an optional accessory,
in the education sector where Te Tiriti is recast as a “debate” instead of a foundation.
And Luxon — steady, smiling, managerial — watches it spread with the calmness of someone who thinks stability is the same as silence.
Narrative capture doesn’t announce itself.
It drips.
It echoes.
It infects.
And if we don’t name it, it becomes the air our tamariki breathe.
Who Hobson’s Pledge Really Is
Hobson’s Pledge was founded in 2016 by former National Party leader Don Brash, built around the belief that recognising Māori rights or Treaty obligations creates “division.”
The historical record is clear:
they oppose Māori wards
they oppose co-governance
they oppose Treaty clauses
they oppose Māori electorates
they oppose iwi involvement in decision-making
they oppose the Waitangi Tribunal
they oppose anything that acknowledges Māori as Tangata Whenua
They claim neutrality.
They promote nostalgia.
They market sameness as equality.
But sameness is not justice.
And nostalgia is not history.
Hobson’s Pledge is not built on scholarship — it is built on emotional reassurance for people who feel unsettled in a bicultural nation.
Don Brash — Harari’s Nostalgia Merchant
Don Brash is the living embodiment of Harari’s “nostalgia entrepreneur” — someone who promises: a return to a past that never existed.
When people feel culturally disoriented, they cling to stories that offer comfort.
Brash’s slogans are soothing in their simplicity:
“One law for all.”
“We are one people.”
“Māori don’t need special rights.”
“Co-governance is separatism.”
These are not historical facts — they are emotional pacifiers.
And in an age where misinformation spreads like wildfire, they become rallying cries for those desperate to feel centred again.
Harari warns that societies crumble when influential voices reduce complexity to slogans.
Brash does exactly that — and pages like Make Your Voice Count echo it.
And this is why Te Tiriti in education is non-negotiable
Te Tiriti is not a threat.
Te Tiriti is the safeguard.
It prevents:
the return of monocultural thinking
misinformation replacing real history
fringe groups shaping public understanding
Māori identity becoming optional
the erasure of stories that hold us together future generations inheriting old hatreds
Te Tiriti stops imagination from turning Māori into monsters.
Te Tiriti grounds us in relationship, not rumour.
Feeling often beats fact —especially for those who have never sat in a Māori whānau hui, never stepped into marae learning, never understood Te Tiriti as an agreement of protection and partnership — not a threat.
Without proximity, imagination fills the gaps.
Usually with ghosts.
Sir Ian Taylor reminds us that Aotearoa’s strength lies not in shrinking our stories, but expanding them.
That knowledge didn’t begin with textbooks; it began with people.
With whenua.
With whakapapa.
And that the real danger is not teaching Te Ao Māori — it’s removing the structures that protect it.
Te Tiriti doesn’t divide this country.
It protects us from becoming the kind of country that movements like Hobson’s Pledge are trying to drag us back into.
And if safeguarding our future from their past is “political,”
hand me a pen —
I’ll sign that petition twice.
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