Speeches and lies

This week I submitted on the Budget Policy Statement for 2026, and I pulled together a range of statistics around poverty, disability, nutrition, and education.

The stats are grim. They haven’t changed much over the last decade. I was planning to write a post about this but then I watched the speeches at Waitangi.

It was pretty galling to see politicians whose very policies and tactics and approaches have made things worse for so many families and whaanau big themselves up and make false claims about what they’ve achieved.

The Atlas Network actors that operate in Aotearoa New Zealand are having a big push this year. They know that Te Tiriti protects both people and the environment and makes it harder to exploit and profit from both. Those persons who are affiliated with ACT, TPU (Tax Payers Union), Groundswell, and FSU (Free Speech Union) will be awash with money from wealthy interests and pushing hard with opinion pieces, news headlines, and media to shift our attitudes (and votes). There’s a piece by Johnathon Ayling (previous head of FSU) in the NZ Herald today that attempts to do just that.

I’ve written previously about the Atlas Network, ACT, and their tactics:

These groups are extremely well funded by wealthy persons who have a vested interest in being able to extract and exploit New Zealand’s natural resources. They are also well supported by the Atlas Network, which provides a structure through which resources are allocated, ideas are spread, and power aggregated. Together, ACT and Atlas have a combined commitment to individual liberty, property rights, limited government, and free markets. Bills such as the Fast Track Approvals Bill, the Treaty Principles Bill, and the Treaty referendum are all aimed at removing constraints on individuals and corporations to exploit our land and our people.

The Atlas Network and its supporters, including ACT, are organised, well-funded, and unflinching in their attack on Indigenous rights and peoples across the globe. Indigenous groups, with their shared resistance to extractive and exploitative practices to both people and to the land, along with their collectivist approach and established organising tactics, present a clear and present threat to all that ACT aim to achieve.

As we gear up for election year, bear in mind how ACT and their associated groups work, look out for their tactics, which tend to include:

• a firehose of memes, half-truths and lies, and easily shareable soundbites flooding social media.

• bigging themselves up and making unsubstantiated claims.

• endless astroturf accounts and bots commenting across every instance of certain key words/hashtags, denigrating Maaori and repeating certain lines ad nauseum.

• enormous amounts of (paid) airtime whereby ACT share their ideas, make it all sound Extremely Reasonable, and herd the public to agree with their ideas.

• a never-ending supply of opinion pieces across print and online media, all expressing Extremely Reasonable Ideas that just somehow seem to end up supporting ACT.

There will be an almost endless undermining of Te Tiriti, and an almost endless stream of online negative comments about Māori. Don’t be fooled by the mealy-mouthed words and pretence of support. ACT, Atlas, and the very wealthy do not have the interests of everyday New Zealanders at heart. Stripping us of Tiriti-based rights is the start of sweeping away legal opposition to exploitative practices in order to implement unfettered extraction of this country’s resources.

I grew up in Te Aroha, where the abandoned Tui mine leached heavy minerals into the waterways for decades. The tailings killed everything they touched, leaving a scar on the hillside and the Tui stream toxic. It was left this way by Norpac Mining in 1973, who left behind seven years worth of tailings. They never paid to clean it up. It ended up costing the NZ government (aka the NZ taxpayer) over $20M to clean up just this one site. There are over 20,000 more sites like this, left over from mining companies who took the money and left us with the waste.

image of the tailings at Tui mine. Source: https://envirohistorynz.com/2010/05/02/a-tale-of-mining-in-new-zealand-and-the-tragic-tailings-of-tui-mine/

I’ll share the stats about poverty, another legacy of exploitation and extraction by the wealthy, in tomorrow’s post.

In the meantime, vote for Te Tiriti.