Iwi heritage claims on private land are a racist rort

If you thought co-governance was bad, wait until you hear about this latest racket. Across Auckland, iwi are quietly working with councils to declare random chunks of privately owned land “culturally significant” and homeowners aren’t even told why.

ACT MP Simon Court exposed this shocking new front in the ongoing war against private property on The Platform last week, where he revealed that iwi are using so-called “heritage provisions” to muscle in on land they don’t own, under the flimsiest possible pretence of “spiritual connection.”

Court explained that iwi claim mana whenua status over large swathes of Auckland, then sit down with council bureaucrats to decide which bits of private land should be marked as “significant to Māori.” Once that label is slapped on, the actual property owner suddenly loses key decision-making powers over their own section. They can’t develop it, alter it, or even dig a fence post without getting permission from people who don’t own it.

Councils, terrified of being called racist, are rolling over and allowing this nonsense to go unchecked. And the landowners, ordinary Kiwis who’ve saved for years to buy a piece of Auckland, aren’t even told what the claim is based on. They’re just handed a bureaucratic notice saying, “Congratulations, your land has been deemed significant to Māori.”

Because from that moment, part of their property rights are gone. Eroded. Handed over to another group purely because of their race. It’s apartheid in the planning department and it’s happening right now.

Court hit the nail on the head when he said ACT will fight to restore property rights and strip this racial favouritism out of the system. New Zealand’s laws should protect ownership, not undermine it based on who once walked across the land two hundred years ago.

And yet, here we are, councils colluding with iwi, homeowners left powerless, and an entire bureaucratic apparatus built around appeasing cultural grievance instead of protecting citizens.

The idea that a council can designate private property as being “of significance” to a particular group based solely on ethnicity is both morally wrong and fundamentally racist. It divides New Zealanders into two classes, those who own their property outright, and those whose ownership now comes with iwi oversight.

As Michael Laws bluntly put it during his interview, this is a standover tactic dressed up as heritage. It’s another form of cultural extortion, another way for a small elite to assert control while ordinary Māori and Pākehā alike get nothing.

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We are fast approaching a point where land ownership in this country will mean little if you’re not connected to the right tribe. That, in a supposedly modern democracy, is shameful.

The government’s promised reforms to the Resource Management Act can’t come soon enough. It’s time to restore one simple principle, that private property belongs to those who own it, not those who claim ancestral feelings about it.

New Zealanders should be deeply alarmed. This isn’t about preserving culture, it’s about rewriting ownership along racial lines. If that doesn’t wake people up, nothing will.