THE ALLIANCE between the Māori elites and New Zealand’s professional-managerial class (PMC) grows stronger with every passing year. The fortifying bond between the Judiciary and tangata whenua is reshaping New Zealand law in ways that will be difficult to unravel. The Public Service’s determination to align itself with those determined to decolonise and indigenise “Aotearoa” has so far withstood the National-Act-NZ First coalition’s best efforts to reimpose administrative neutrality. In New Zealand’s schools and universities the political gravity of “te Tiriti” has become all but irresistible.

New Zealanders alarmed at what they rightly judge to be a concerted push for unmandated constitutional change will search the mainstream media in vain for anything resembling a critical analysis of this Māori-PMC alliance. New Zealand’s journalists, like their professional colleagues in Law, Medicine, and a host of other professions, have gulped down the “progressive” Kool Aid by the cupful. The effort to insulate the Treaty of Waitangi and the settlement process it spawned from what Sir Geoffrey Palmer loftily dismisses as “the ravages of extreme opinion” has been extraordinarily successful.