It was the year of making good in the new abnormal. “Acclimatising”, one of the north’s most revered leaders said to me, describing Māori-Crown relations in the third year of the coalition Government.
It was the year of Waitangi as a gravitational force – so many different groups pulled into its orbit.
It was the year the Prime Minister returned. When Aperahama Edwards welcomed Christopher Luxon and his Ministers to the National Iwi Chairs Forum, there were moments when the Nats looked like Americans trying to understand cricket. But the Wednesday, in particular, went better than many people had expected.
Of course, this is all in the eye of the beholder. The PM asserted "it was incredibly positive". Bayden Barber, the chairman of Ngāti Kahungunu, told 1News, "it’s election year, and they’ve got very slick lines coming out of their mouths.” But Luxon’s return did mean the vacuum his absence left last year wasn’t filled by David Seymour. "Incredibly positive" may be over-egging it, but it felt less like it was about to burst.
It was the year of Labour’s Peeni Henare announcing he was leaving. And the year of no-one really understanding why. (Even with NZ First deputy leader Shanes Jones playing Inspector Clouseau.)
As an aside, Labour keeps losing senior Māori MPs: Henare, Adrian Rurawhe, Nanaia Mahuta, Kelvin Davis, Kiritapu Allan – all gone (or about to go) in the past three years. Sure, there’s been some misadventure in there, plus the swing to Te Pāti Māori in 2023, but Labour’s relationship with Māori may actually require Labour to have more Māori in senior caucus positions. He tāngata.
It was the year of Mariameno Kapa-Kingi asserting her right to not leave. Waitangi is in her Te Tai Tokerau electorate. Having been expelled from Te Pāti Māori and appealed that expulsion in court, the contest for her electorate looms as one of the most compelling individual stories in this year’s election. If Labour put up Willow-Jean Prime and the Greens put up Hūhana Lyndon (Ngātiwai, Ngāti Hine) that contest will be a humdinger. (All the Māori electorates look varying degrees of wow!)
It was the year of Labour and the Greens being seen out together. Chris Hipkins affected a kind of "we do this all the time" air. They don’t. Labour have never given the Greens a seat inside Cabinet. Marama Davidson and Chlöe Swarbrick were good sports – playing along without discernibly (and I apologise for this) turning green. Later, when asked on TVNZ's Breakfast whether Labour could work in a coalition with the Greens, Hipkins wouldn’t say a clear "yes". Labour – fair weather friends in a time of climate change.
It was the year of smaller crowds who seemed to have travelled further. Buses and minibuses arrived from throughout Te Ika-a-Māui (the North Island). They were everywhere, almost impossibly crammed into spaces too small for so many of them. I met people who’d bussed from Taranaki and Hawke’s Bay, over 10 hours away; from Masterton, after braving a 12-hour journey; from Tauranga; and from Tāmaki Makaurau (as nearly everyone at Waitangi calls our largest city).
It was the year of extraordinary oratory, which no-one admits is competitive, but is competitive. Sometimes, when the best speakers are in full flight, it feels like even the sparrows in the pōhutukawa have stopped to listen.
It was the year of mana motuhake (autonomy, self-determination) manifesting itself in balance sheets. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) estimates the "Māori asset base" was at somewhere in the region of $126 billion in 2023. This is complex because assets aren’t cash. But something is happening, fast. The Kotahitanga Fund, for example – a Māori-led investment platform announced late last year by Te Arikinui Kuini Nga wai hono i te po, the Māori Queen – is electric with expressions of interest.
During its launch, the Kuīni called it a "declaration" that Māori are ready to invest in "ourselves, in our brilliance, and in the future we choose".
Yes.
That mode, that felt and articulated belief, that palpable sense of possibility, was as evident at this Waitangi as almost any I can remember. And that made Waitangi 2026 feel different.
But that’s not the whole picture.
There was a kind of ennui evident, too. The most curious thing when Seymour was speaking wasn’t that people were as angry as they were in 2025, it’s that they weren’t. Not nearly as many people. They just seemed over it.
Moment David Seymour’s Waitangi dawn service address disrupted – Watch on TVNZ+
It was the year of Waitangi feeling two-toned.
To a greater extent than I can recall, both confidence and exhaustion took the Crown out of the picture. The Government and its various agencies were there, of course. And there were moments when they were intensely, heatedly under the spotlight. But that historic binary framing felt inadequate to accommodate the breadth of it all.
Trying to make sense of it, I phoned documentary maker Whatanui Flavell, whose admired and immersive work has seen him up close at Waitangi, on the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, at Ihumātao, and on it goes.
"What’s different this year, Whatanui?" I asked.
"For some people, I think it’s fatigue. And sadness," he replied.
After 2024, after the hikoi, after last Waitangi, people are spent.
And the unity of recent years, which was a nourishing and galvanising force, has been fractured by what many in the north, in particular, regard as the devastating split within Te Pāti Māori.
"I think that’s why fewer people went this year."
Protesters face off with security as politicians welcomed at Waitangi – Watch on TVNZ+
Yes.
But also, at the time, the balance sheets.
Of course, the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti (2024’s Toitū te Tiriti hikoi), which Flavell has documented, was a youth-led movement arising predominantly out of the north. (And the biggest northern iwi, Ngāpuhi, has yet to settle with the Crown.) While the balance sheet, mana motuhake iwi, Tainui and Ngāi Tahu in particular, settled with the Crown in the 1990s.
This is simplistic. And few things involving groups of people are that clear-cut. But in broad terms, it speaks to how the 2026 Waitangi could contain Māori fatigue and Māori confidence at the same time.
Different stages of the same response.
Walking down the Treaty Grounds on Thursday afternoon, I made a new friend, Dot Tunstall-Ashley.
Dot and I clicked immediately. When she laughed, I felt like everything was going to be OK.
I asked her how long she’d been coming to Waitangi. Roughly 25 years. Because Te Tiriti matters.
What’s changed in that time?
"Well, one thing is my shirt. Twenty-five years ago, I started on the kaupapa and it was a size small, then I take off to a size medium, then size large, and here we are at a 2XL. So, for 25 years I have been growing. And that’s how it’s been. Boots and all.”
And if you’re boots and all, sometimes the issue is how to fit it all in?
It was the year of boots and all and 2XL.
None of this is easy. And it’s not homogenous, either. We sometimes seek to describe Māori politics as a singularity. And in recent years there has been a striking unity. But that’s not quite the same thing. And it doesn’t speak to the difference in iwi circumstance.
Early on Wednesday morning, as I was heading up to the Treaty grounds to go on Breakfast, I met someone out walking who has a deep knowledge of his iwi’s finances.
"Tell David Seymour he’s too late to stop us," he said, chuckling with delight.
That person wasn’t Ngāi Tahu, but Ngāi Tahu know about settlements.
And it was the year of Ngāi Tahu – rare visitors to Waitangi – arriving from the south whose presence signalled it was also the year of kotahitanga. Again.
The k word.
Kiingi Tūheitia’s now famous speech has simply not stopped circling in the air above Māori strategising since he delivered it in January 2024.
"We should use this time to build kotahitanga," the Kiingi said at Turangawaewae two years ago. "Today is about kotahitanga. We need to be united first and then decide our future."
The Māori King said he had received calls from all over the world regarding the national hui and that indigenous nations were supporting the cause. (Source: 1News)
"We were there," Ngāi Tahu’s Edward Ellison told me. "We heard him."
To say that Ngāi Tahu don’t often attend Waitangi, as opposed to commemorating it at home in various parts of the South Island, is to suggest they attend it at all.
I asked Ellison, one of the almost beloved negotiators of Ngāi Tahu’s remarkable and transformative Treaty settlement with Jim Bolger’s National government back in the 1990s, when he last attended Waitangi.
"Never" was his reply.
This is a man whose understanding of, and successful experience in, Māori-Crown relations is as meaningful as almost anyone’s alive. For him, Waitangi hasn’t been about the place but the Treaty itself.
And now?
"The call from Kiingi Tuheitia’s in relation to the headwinds we are facing around the Treaty has made us think, contemplate our roots, our connections, and our relationship to the Treaty and to its birthplace and so we thought it very important to make the move."
North they came.
Last year, not entirely without the obligations of manaakitanga, Ngāi Tahu found themselves hosting the PM in Akaroa.
That the iwi came to Waitangi this year may not be entirely unrelated, although Ngāi Tahu are far too diplomatic to say so.
I asked Ellison about Luxon.
"His vision needs to be broader than it currently is. It’s very narrow. It’s not inclusive. It’s creating division, and that is not the way forward for New Zealand. We’re not built on that basis."
And in 1840, a future on a better basis was the promise of Te Tiriti – 500 Māori chiefs signed the Māori language version, only 39 signed the problematically different English version.
And here we are, 186 years on, still wrestling with honouring an agreement the Crown repeatedly promised to honour.
"This Government has stabbed us in the front," Eru Kapa-Kingi declared, in one of those speeches that starts spreading out through social media even before it’s over.
Remember, Kapa-Kingi was one of the organisers, and perhaps the lead organiser of the Toitū te Tiriti hikoi, with its extraordinary conclusion in Wellington, in which 40-50,000 people marched on Parliament in opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill.
His capacity to mobilise is proven.
Not long after he spoke, I put his description of being stabbed in the front to Luxon. And I suggested that many of the young people who follow Kapa-Kingi on social media, and who went on the hikoi, may feel the same way.
What does the PM say to them?
"That’s what we’re actually working incredibly hard to do," the PM replied.
"If the young people here actually see a future in New Zealand they can participate in it. And if they actually get involved in the political process as well and help contribute to it... that’s great.
"What’s the best that we can do for young people when we’ve had the same conversation over and over and over for the last 50 years, under successive governments of different colours? Have we actually achieved results and outcomes for them? And the short answer is 'no, not enough'.
"And so that’s why we’ve got to set them up much better, with better education, and better health outcomes, and safer communities, and more economic opportunity for everybody."
Is that answer persuasive? Yes, said the National caucus, who nodded in enthusiastic agreement while surrounding their boss as he spoke.
But at Waitangi? To the young Māori leaders emerging out of the fatigue, sadness, anger, hope, determination, and pride that’s all somehow beating in a giant heart under a 2XL shirt?
Sometimes, during the official periods at Waitangi, I just drift. You know whether speeches are working by watching the reactions they receive. And it was while doing this, that I bumped into Te Rawhitiroa Bosch.
That photo of him is by me, by the way. It’s taken on my phone. Clearly, this is ridiculous. There haven’t been many people who’ve photographed Waitangi as well as Bosch since the great Gil Hanly and John Miller. But, you know, God loves a trier.
Anyway, Bosch has pointed his lens at so much of what’s happened in and around the blooming of young leadership in Māoridom, particularly in the north. Indeed, he’s part of that blossoming.
"What I’m really loving seeing", he tells me, "is my generation starting to move into those spaces of influence, those spaces of responsibility. It’s really cool to see our elders, our kaumatua and kuia supporting that next generation coming through and us realising that we’re the adults now."
So, is he excited or fatigued?
At times like these, maybe you can be both?
"The Government need to sharpen up, eh? They’re not even trying.
"So, there’s still that stuff we’ve got to deal with. And we do have to deal with it. We’re still not living up to the promise of Te Tiriti. So, it’s not to ignore what’s going on, because we still need address that and we need address it head-on. But also, let’s not spend all our time fighting. Let’s also be planting seeds.”
It was the year of seeds.
In leadership terms, what does that mean?
“We didn’t want the hikoi to just be against something, we wanted it to be for something. For kotahitanga, for tino rangatiratanga, for mana motuhake, for standing in our power, for standing in our beauty, in our joy, and all those things.”
Circles.
Remember what Kiingi Tūheitia said in 2024?
“Just be Māori. Be Māori all day, every day. We are here. We are strong.”
And his daughter, the new Kuini, talking of investing in "ourselves, in our brilliance, and in the future we choose".
Waitangi morning passed without much incident. It was a beautiful morning. Similar, if we are to rely on William Colenso’s reports, to the morning of February 6, 1840, on which Te Tiriti was signed.
The crowd was smaller this year than last, and smaller last year than in 2024, the year the Treaty Principles Bill year galvanised an entire movement.
But the people who came still experienced the magic of walking up the hill in the dark, then finding themselves, hushed and wide-eyed, surrounded by other New Zealanders as the sun rises out of the Pacific Ocean to reveal they’re standing in exactly the same place the very first chief signed the Treaty 186 years ago.
That first chief’s name, by the way, was Hōne Heke Pōkai. Within four years he felt so betrayed by the promises he’d been given not being kept, that he was chopping down the British flag.
It's been a long-time chopping.
Some of my TVNZ colleagues and I were sharing a car. And not having it and not wanting to be a nuisance by asking anyone to come get me, I hitched a ride into Paihia.
Kiri Leach picked me up.
If you look at the photo and think Leach looks kind, that’s exactly what she was like. The bridge was closed, so we went the long way, via the Haruru Falls Rd.
Although she's from Whāngārā-mai-i-Tawhiti, north of Gisborne, on the East Coast, she works for Te Kahu o Taonui – the Te Tai Tokerau Iwi Chairs Collective, which is very much of the north.
She and a friend also created Whare Hau Tutū, a kaupapa Māori vision "grounded in whanaungatanga" (relationships, kinship) to provide safe spaces for adults to go and make art, as expression, as therapy, as a release, as joy, as time out.
What a lovely driver she was.
“My mum’s Pākehā and my dad’s Māori.”
You’re a Tiriti baby?
"I am! I am!"
What’s the Treaty mean to you?
"Good relationships with each other. Kindness. And living together."
It was the year of fitting everything you can into a 2XL shirt. Boots and all. Fatigue. Sadness. Anger. Confusion. Politics. Mana motuhake. Kindness. Hope. Beauty. Seeds.
We drove along the coast to Paihia. It was warm and sunny, just as it was 186 years ago.
Leach talked about her children and grandchildren. More Tiriti babies. Her face was alive with light.
"The Treaty was a way to live together, you know? To find a way to live together. And there’s nothing stopping us doing that still. With aroha, right? Just give it a go, you know? Get out of your box and give it a go."
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