The Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) used to represent educators. Today, it’s a political pressure group masquerading as a union, and its latest stunt confirms just how far it’s drifted from neutrality.
The PPTA is now selling Toitū Te Tiriti merchandise through its website - complete with slogans, banners, and talking points straight from political activism. This isn’t about education. It’s about ideology. When a union openly campaigns against government policy and pushes one side of a divisive constitutional debate, it abandons its duty to represent all teachers, regardless of their political beliefs.
Their so-called Toitū Te Tiriti campaign is “centred in Te Ao Māori” and aims to oppose the Treaty Principles Bill, oppose removal of Te Tiriti references in legislation, and build union cultural capacity. In other words, it’s a political manifesto disguised as professional development. The PPTA isn’t just lobbying for teachers - it’s lobbying for a particular leftist worldview, and doing so under the banner of education.
When they’re not busy printing merchandise, PPTA members are on the streets waving rainbow flags during strikes - strikes that leave classrooms empty and parents scrambling for childcare. Those same flags appear in their Rainbow Resources section online, where teachers are urged to make schools “more inclusive” for “students of diverse sexualities, gender identities and sex characteristics.”
Inclusion has been twisted into indoctrination. Instead of focusing on literacy and numeracy, teachers are being encouraged to play amateur psychologists, guiding children into complex identity politics that have no place in the classroom. Kids don’t need ideological grooming - they need reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Parents have every right to feel frustrated. When schools become battlegrounds for political causes, education suffers. When teachers’ unions become campaign headquarters, trust evaporates. And when the people paid to teach our children spend their time marching with banners and selling political merchandise, it’s not just unprofessional, it’s a bloody insult to every taxpayer who funds the system.
The PPTA loves to talk about “building cultural capacity” and “affirming diversity.” What they never talk about is academic performance, discipline, or preparing students for the real world. Perhaps because those things don’t fit neatly on a t-shirt.
Who exactly do they work for - our children, or their own ideology?
Wow, why is the Govt not stepping in and putting an end to this madness?
PPTA is just like the Green Party who are supposed to be all about the environment, we never hear them boasting figures on how many tree they ha planted in the weekend or how much rubbish they prevented from getting to the ocean, the only time we see them getting wound up is when they are wrapped in a tea towel waving a Palestine or LTGBQ+ flag.
If only every NZer read your posts every day, maybe that would help people realise how messed up this country really is.
OMG.....I heard Brian Roche venting his frustrations on ZB and wondered what it was all about and now we know.....except this wasn't mentioned on ZB. Why? The Racist tag again. All we can say is thanks again for your research, your work which should of course be more widely disseminated.