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When analysing Indigenous public policy, crisis is best seen as the moral crisis of an enduring idea rather than the crisis of sporadic and unconnected instances of policy failure. In Australia and New Zealand, states use manufactured crises of Indigenous personal deficiencies to justify colonial authority. A justification which may be countered by positioning colonialism itself as the point of crisis. From this perspective, the crisis in Indigenous public policy is not resolved by the state becoming better at policy-making or more attentive to the egalitarian distribution of public resources. Instead, it is in the non-colonial possibilities of Indigenous self-determination that paths beyond crisis may lie. In practical terms, by ensuring spaces of independent Indigenous authority alongside spaces of distinctive culturally framed participation in the public life of the state. The potential for such arrangements in Australia is discussed with reference to a proposed First Nations’ Voice to Parliament and possible treaties between First Nations and the state. For New Zealand, their potential is discussed with reference to te Tiriti o Waitangi’s affirmation of independent Māori authority (rangatiratanga) and substantive state citizenship.

This research examines the settler colonial legacy of Aotearoa New Zealand. It shows that biculturalism has emerged as a discursive byproduct of neoliberalism and settler colonialism. Simon’s recent work and the Te Paparahi o Te Raki Waitangi Tribunal decision aligns with the view of a significant paradigm shift since biculturalism suppresses affirmation of and mana motuhake. Biculturalism can be viewed through Moreton-Robinson’s white possessive lens as well as Beck's zombie concepts, which are used to prop up deteriorating and/or fictional social institutions. As a zombie concept in Aotearoa New Zealand, “biculturalism” supports settler/invader power structures. Indigenous communities disproportionately experience the destructive consequences of neoliberal policies and statecraft. Aotearoa New Zealand’s collective future requires abandoning biculturalism; to that end the author recommends revising common historiographic thought concerning Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi) and the concept of “settling”.

In 2010, the Electoral (Disqualification of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill marked a significant change in prisoner voting rights policies in New Zealand, disenfranchising all prisoners regardless of sentence length. A decade later in 2020, the Electoral (Registration of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill re-enfranchised prisoners serving sentences of less than three years. Over this time, a Waitangi Tribunal Inquiry and a number of Māori politicians and public figures highlighted the disproportionate effects of prisoner disenfranchisement for Māori given over-representation of Māori in the prison population. However, less attention has focused on the specific effects of disenfranchisement for wāhine Māori (Māori women) in prison, and what this reflects about the relationship between wāhine Māori and the state. While women make up a significantly smaller percentage of the general prison population than men, wāhine Māori made up 61% of the women’s prison population in 2021 (Office of the Inspectorate, 2021). Additionally, wāhine Māori had a drastically different experience of colonisation to tāne Māori (Māori men). Colonial actions worked to destroy traditional Māori social organisation, which disrupted the balance between men and women and confined wāhine Māori to a social position that falls behind Pākehā men and women and Māori men. This thesis takes a Māori-centred, Mana Wahine lens to draw on the content of interviews with key informants and analysis of parliamentary readings of the 2010 and 2020 bills in order to explore how prisoner disenfranchisement in the 21st century reflects broader patterns regarding the treatment of wāhine Māori by the state. Disenfranchisement is likely to uniquely affect wāhine Māori due to their importance in te ao Māori as nurturers, the managers of households, and their centrality to the intergenerational transfer of knowledge. This not only presents barriers to voting and re-enrolment on the electoral roll post-release from prison, but also serves to practically disenfranchise the whānau and communities that wāhine Māori belong to. The lack of consideration of the needs and experiences of wāhine Māori in state discussions of prisoner voting rights mirrors the ongoing invisibility of wāhine Māori in state policy. The state has framed prisoner voting rights around male and tāne Māori norms, which cannot account for wāhine Māori. Moving forward, if prisoner voting rights policies are revisited in the future, an intersectional approach must be taken that effectively addresses the needs of wāhine Māori.

This chapter examines settler colonial crime control and its impacts on Indigenous women. High rates of victimisation and high levels of over-policing and over-incarceration mark Indigenous people’s experience of settler colonialism. This chapter explores the historical and contemporary conditions of colonialism through a gender lens, exploring in particular the impact of prison on Indigenous women’s lives. The chapter is based on an interview with and subsequent written notes by Professor McIntosh in 2020 discussing women, incarceration and settler colonial control in the Aotearoa New Zealand setting.

This chapter looks at the impact on Māori that colonial and neo-colonial practices of dispossession and immiseration have had on elevated family violence rates in Aotearoa New Zealand. In reflecting on interpersonal violence, it seeks to locate systemic forms of violence, such as legislative violence, institutional violence, and economic violence, and their relationship with family violence. It draws on David Nixon’s (2011) notion of slow violence to look at the intergenerational harm of poverty, racism, and entrenched negative social issues. The focus then moves to Indigenous solutions to family violence that demonstrate the power of lived experience and social and cultural expertise to support healing and transformation in Māori communities.

This article theorises the question—what is the role and nature of Indigenous environmental defenders in Aotearoa New Zealand? We explore Māori—the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand—who act as environmental defenders of their lands and waters despite the perpetual insecurity of their constitutional rights and imbalances in power and resources compared with state and corporate actors. The environmental defence of Aotearoa New Zealand by Māori began with the arrival of European explorers’ intent on overturning Indigenous institutions of environmental management that has sustained their peoples for a thousand years. Stemming from case study analysis of Māori environmental defenders at Ihumātao in Māngere and Ōroua River in Manawatū, we propose whenua (land) resilience theory to explain the concomitance of environmental defence and development from an Indigenous perspective.

In Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa NZ), Māori (the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand) have long been objects of surveillance by state institutions and agents. State representations have centred on constructions of difference and deviance, on understandings of Indigenous peoples as dangerous, and on the management of Indigenous resistance to colonialism. This chapter considers how contemporary state surveillance practices in Aotearoa NZ, enabled by the expanded use of big data and linked government datasets, function to regulate and manage Māori. Through this lens, we explore continuities of current data practices for Indigenous peoples with the racialised logics and social orders set in place as part of global systems of imperialism and colonialism. Recognising that resistance has always been a part of Indigenous responses to colonialism, we also explore how Māori Data Sovereignty (MDSov), as part of broader Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS) movements globally, provides opportunities to counter and disrupt prevailing data relations and to imagine alternative futures.

In 2014, the Internet Mana alliance unsuccessfully ran in the New Zealand general election gaining just 1.42% of the party vote and failing to secure an electorate seat. The leaders of the alliance attributed their poor election result to the narratives constructed by the mainstream media, which they believed negatively influenced the public?s perception of Internet Mana. This study agrees that the mainstream media was complicit in the alliance?s poor election result, and drawing upon the discourse dynamics framework for metaphor analysis, it shows how these potentially damaging public narratives were predominantly constituted through complex sets of systematic metaphors which together created broader schematic frames or conceptual scenarios and carried certain evaluative and attitudinal perceptions. This analysis shows how systematic metaphors such as the internet mana alliance is a marriage of convenience and the internet mana alliance is a colonial trade were used to construct a negative public narrative.