Peace deal signed in Palestine

Will the Greens and Te Pāti Māori finally protest the Māori babies being killed here in NZ?

After years of “Free Palestine” protests filling our city squares, a peace deal has finally been reached. The war that fuelled so much outrage online has almost ended. You’d expect celebration, or at least a moment of reflection from the people who spent their weekends chanting about injustice. Instead, we’re met with silence. Not a word. Not a post. Not a single megaphone in sight.

The Green Party, who could always be counted on to appear front and centre at every rally, have gone strangely quiet. Te Pāti Māori, who love to connect every overseas conflict to their own struggle narrative, have disappeared too. For months, they were everywhere, waving flags, posting hashtags, and giving fiery speeches about oppression. Now that peace has broken out, they have nothing to say.

That silence is more than just awkward. It’s shameful.While these self-proclaimed defenders of justice and professional grifters were screaming into microphones about suffering 16,000 kilometres away, children were being murdered right here in New Zealand. Māori babies, beaten to death by the very people meant to protect them.

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It happens again and again. A baby dies. Police launch an investigation. The community expresses outrage. Politicians like the Greens and Te Pāti Māori stay silent. Then everyone moves on until the next one. It’s become routine, a cycle of horror that we’ve somehow normalised.

Where are the fiery speeches outside Parliament demanding accountability for the endless stream of tiny coffins being lowered into the ground? You won’t find them. Because fighting for those children means getting your hands dirty. It means confronting poverty, meth addiction, and violence in our own communities. It means having uncomfortable conversations about the breakdown of whānau, about neglect, about what’s really going wrong behind closed doors.

It’s not glamorous. There are no flags to wave, no foreign villains to blame, and no social media points to score. There’s only the hard, ugly truth that Māori children are dying, often at the hands of their own whānau, and that the people who claim to represent Māori voices are too scared or too lazy to face it.

For the Greens, it’s easier to cry about injustice overseas than to talk about the violence happening right here. For Te Pāti Māori, it’s easier to rage about colonisation than to acknowledge the generations of harm now being inflicted from within.

You can shout “Free Palestine” all you want, but it doesn’t mean much when Māori babies are dying in state houses while mum spends her entire benefit on meth. You can talk about systemic oppression until your throat runs dry, but what about the systems of silence protecting abusers in your own backyard?

The truth is brutal, and it needs to be said. Māori babies are being killed. The politicians who claim to care most about Māori lives are nowhere to be found. Their voices vanish the moment the issue requires them to do more than shout slogans or pose for photos.

Justice isn’t something you yell about for an hour on a Saturday. It’s something you fight for every single day, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it’s close to home. If the Greens and Te Pāti Māori really care about injustice, they can start with the most innocent victims in this country, the Māori children who never got the chance to grow up.

If you can’t stand up for them, then all your protests and speeches don’t mean whāk all.

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