"Coalition of Cruelty: When Neoliberal Vultures Feast on the Vulnerable" - 8 September 2025

Mōrena koutou,

In the ancient whakataukī, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata" - it is people, it is people, it is people. But this coalition government has forgotten that fundamental truth of te ao Māori. Instead, they treat tangata as mere statistics to manipulate, commodities to exploit, and barriers to their neoliberal wet dreams. The latest quarterly report from RNZ reveals what we already knew - Christopher Luxon's government of corporate cronies is failing spectacularly across every measure that matters to working whānau.

This is not mere incompetence. This is deliberate colonial violence dressed up as "fiscal responsibility." Every failed target represents thousands of tangata suffering while millionaire ministers pat themselves on the back for "tough decisions." This essay will expose the hidden connections between these policy failures and the systematic targeting of Māori communities through what can only be described as state-sanctioned cruelty.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/572372/missing-targets-govt-risks-falling-behind-in-four-key-areas

Background: The Corporate Coup of Aotearoa

When Christopher Luxon was sworn in as Prime Minister on 27 November 2023, he brought with him the mindset of a corporate raider who had spent years extracting wealth from Air New Zealand while ordinary workers faced job cuts and wage freezes. As CEO of Air New Zealand from 2013 to 2019, Luxon earned millions while positioning himself as a "sustainability champion" - the classic neoliberal trick of greenwashing exploitation with feel-good corporate speak.

The coalition arrangement with ACT and New Zealand First created the first three-party coalition under MMP, giving extremist voices like David Seymour unprecedented power as "Minister of Regulation" - a portfolio designed specifically to destroy worker protections and environmental safeguards. This is not democracy; this is corporate capture of the state apparatus.

The government's nine targets, supposedly designed to "focus the public sector on priorities," reveal themselves as nothing more than political theatre - carefully chosen metrics that allow them to claim success while the material conditions for Māori and working-class communities deteriorate. The mana whenua principle of kaitiakitanga demands we expose this deception for what it truly represents: a systematic assault on the social fabric of Aotearoa.

The Anatomy of Deliberate Failure

The September 2025 quarterly report exposes four critical areas where the government is failing catastrophically: health, education, employment, and housing. But this framing misses the deeper analysis - these failures are not random but follow predictable patterns of colonial violence and neoliberal extraction.

Chart showing the massive gaps between National-led coalition government targets and actual performance across critical public services

The numbers tell a story of systematic abandonment. Emergency department wait times remain at a dismal 74.2 percent against a 95 percent target, while elective surgery performance has actually deteriorated to 57.3 percent. These are not abstract statistics - they represent tangata waiting in pain, whānau watching loved ones suffer, and communities bearing the brunt of decades of deliberate underfunding.

Most damning is the explosion in Jobseeker benefit numbers to 216,000 - a staggering 76,000 above the government's own target of 140,000. This represents not policy failure but policy success from a neoliberal perspective: creating a desperate reserve army of unemployed workers to suppress wages and maintain corporate profits. The traffic light sanctions system introduced by Minister Louise Upston is designed not to help people find work but to humiliate and punish those pushed into poverty by the system's own contradictions.

The Hidden Architecture of Colonial Violence

Corporate Colonialism Masquerading as Leadership

The connection between Christopher Luxon's corporate background and his government's failures is not coincidental. During his tenure as Air New Zealand CEO, Luxon perfected the art of extracting maximum profit while maintaining a veneer of social responsibility. His $4 million salary and $12 million shareholding in Air New Zealand revealed his true priorities - personal enrichment through corporate exploitation.

The same extraction mindset now governs Aotearoa. The 2023 election represented not Labour out and National in, but neoliberalism winning either way, as Toby Boraman astutely observed. Both major parties agreed with the Reserve Bank's brutal interest rate rises designed to create unemployment and suppress wages - a "crude market discipline likely to cause redundancies, suppress wages, and increase debt and inequality."

The Louise Upston Cruelty Machine

Minister for Social Development Louise Upston represents the acceptable face of state violence against the vulnerable. Her traffic light system for beneficiaries is deliberately designed to create maximum humiliation while providing minimum support. The system handed out 13,000 sanctions in the latest quarter alone, targeting the most vulnerable with clinical precision.

The data reveals the true target of this state violence: Māori with children represent 76 percent of sanctions for people with children, while women with children represent 69 percent. This is not accidental but represents the continuation of colonial strategies designed to break up whānau structures and force Māori into compliance with capitalist exploitation.

Chart revealing how welfare sanctions disproportionately target Māori women with children, exposing systemic colonial violence

Simeon Brown: The Health System Destroyer

The appointment of Simeon Brown as Health Minister in January 2025 represents perhaps the most cynical move by this government. Brown's previous role as Transport Minister was marked by decisions that actively harmed public health, including reducing funding for pedestrian and cyclist safety infrastructure, increasing speed limits around schools, and ignoring the pleas of health professionals about preventable injuries and deaths.

(see the generated image above)

Brown's major overhaul of the health system includes "partnering with the private sector" - neoliberal code for handing over public assets to corporate profiteers. His criticism of Health NZ for "poor leadership and lax controls" conveniently ignores the systematic underfunding and ideological sabotage that created the crisis in the first place.

The health targets legislated by Brown are designed to fail, creating justification for further privatisation. When only 74.2 percent of emergency department patients are seen within six hours, and only 57.3 percent receive elective treatment within four months, the system becomes ripe for corporate plunder under the guise of "efficiency."

The Housing Horror: Manufacturing Homelessness for Political Gain

The government's housing policies represent perhaps the most nakedly violent aspect of their agenda. While celebrating the reduction in emergency housing numbers from 3,141 to 501 households, they deliberately obscure the human cost of this "achievement." The tightened emergency housing criteria introduced in September 2024 has created a homelessness crisis of unprecedented proportions.

Chart showing dramatic increases in homelessness across New Zealand regions following National's emergency housing policy changes

Auckland has seen a 90 percent increase in rough sleeping since the policy changes, with outreach providers now working with 809 unsheltered clients compared to 426 in September 2024. Taranaki has experienced a staggering 250 percent increase in rough sleeping, while Whangārei District Council reports a forecast of over 1,200 homelessness-related reports in 2025, up from 680 in 2023.

This is not policy failure but policy success from the government's perspective. Creating visible homelessness serves multiple political functions: it disciplines the working class with the threat of destitution, justifies increased police powers and surveillance, and provides moral justification for blaming individuals for structural problems. The fact that MSD rejections citing that people had "contributed to their own homelessness" have risen 386 percent reveals the deliberate cruelty embedded in the system.

(see the generated image above)

Education Apartheid: Entrenching Racial Hierarchy Through Academic Failure

The education failures documented in the government targets represent the continuation of colonial education policies designed to maintain Māori as a subordinated class. With only 23 percent of Year 8 students achieving expected mathematics levels, 24 percent in writing, and 47 percent in reading, the system is producing exactly the outcomes it was designed to create: a stratified society where Māori remain locked out of economic opportunity.

Education Minister Erica Stanford's rejection of claims that the Treaty is being removed from education documents while simultaneously reducing Māori language and Treaty references reveals the government's strategy of cultural erasure through administrative means. The systematic underinvestment in Kura Kaupapa Māori, with less than 3 percent of the Ministry's property budget allocated over five years, demonstrates the continuation of colonial policies designed to destroy indigenous education systems.

(see the generated image above)

The Waitangi Tribunal's confirmation that the Crown has systematically underinvested in kura represents a legal finding of Treaty breach, yet the government continues these policies with impunity. This is not neglect but active sabotage of Māori educational aspirations.

The Whakapapa of Systemic Racism in State Policy

The patterns revealed in these policy failures connect to deeper whakapapa of colonial violence that stretches back to the first systematic attempts to destroy Māori society. The colonial health policies imposed on Māori from the mid-19th century established patterns of marginalisation and cultural suppression that continue today through modern neoliberal policies.

Research on colonial health policy from 2006-2016 identified five key themes in how Māori are represented: silence about Māori health, portraying Māori as "especially at risk," Crown unresponsiveness to Treaty obligations, token recognition of Māori approaches, and superficial utilisation of mātauranga Māori. These exact patterns appear in the current government's policies, demonstrating the continuity of colonial administrative practices.

The Waitangi Tribunal's WAI 2575 report on health found that despite over $200 billion spent on health since 2012, there has been "little measurable improvement to Māori health outcomes." Only $167 million (less than 0.1 percent) was allocated for primary care of Māori patients, with just $28.7 million going to Māori primary health organisations. This represents systematic discrimination embedded in funding formulas designed to maintain colonial hierarchy.

Implications: The Endgame of Neoliberal Colonisation

These policy failures are not aberrations but represent the successful implementation of a neoliberal colonial project designed to:

Discipline Labour: High unemployment and benefit sanctions create a desperate workforce willing to accept poverty wages and dangerous working conditions. The 216,000 people on Jobseeker benefits represent a reserve army of labour that keeps wages low and workers compliant.

Destroy Collective Solidarity: By pitting employed against unemployed, housed against homeless, and healthy against sick, the government fragments potential resistance to their corporate agenda. The targeting of Māori women through welfare sanctions specifically aims to destroy whānau structures that provide alternative models of collective support.

Justify Privatisation: Systematic underfunding of public services creates crises that justify handing public assets to private corporations. Simeon Brown's health "reforms" follow the classic neoliberal playbook of creating problems that require market "solutions."

Entrench Racial Hierarchy: The disproportionate impact on Māori is not accidental but represents the continuation of colonial strategies designed to maintain Pākehā supremacy through administrative means. When 76 percent of benefit sanctions target Māori families, this represents policy design, not policy failure.

Extract Wealth: Every failed public service creates opportunities for private profit. Emergency housing contracted to motels, health services outsourced to private providers, and education resources sold to corporate publishers represent massive wealth transfers from public to private hands.

The material impact on Māori communities cannot be overstated. When Māori children are disproportionately represented in the housing support system and young Māori parents face benefit sanctions that push them into homelessness, the government is deliberately manufacturing the conditions for cultural destruction that colonisation has always required.

The Māori Green Lantern Fighting Misinformation And Disinformation From The Far Right

Resistance and the Path Forward

The evidence is overwhelming: Christopher Luxon's coalition government represents not incompetent administration but successful corporate colonisation. Every failed target, every increase in homelessness, every Māori child pushed further behind in school represents the profitable exploitation of tangata for the benefit of corporate elites.

But the principles of manaakitanga, kaitiakitanga, and tino rangatiratanga provide us with both the analysis and the tools for resistance. The whakapapa of struggle that connects contemporary housing activists with the original signatories of Te Tiriti reminds us that our tūpuna never accepted colonial domination without resistance.

The path forward requires more than electoral politics. It demands the building of alternative economic structures based on Māori values of reciprocity, collective care, and environmental stewardship. It requires international solidarity with indigenous peoples facing similar colonial violence worldwide. Most importantly, it requires the courage to name neoliberal capitalism as an inherently colonial system that cannot be reformed but must be replaced.

When this government finally falls, as all colonial administrations eventually do, let it be remembered that they chose cruelty over compassion, profits over people, and corporate power over indigenous rights. Let it also be remembered that te iwi Māori never stopped fighting for a different world - one where "he tangata, he tangata, he tangata" means more than empty political slogans.

The resistance continues. The whakapapa of justice flows through us all.

Kia kaha, kia māia, kia manawanui.

Nāku noa, nā
Ivor Jones
Te Māori Green Lantern

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