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“Justice for Sale: How Colonial Courts and Complicit Media Perpetuate the Criminalisation of Tangata Whenua” - 31 July 2025

Exposing the Ōpōtiki District Court's Role in New Zealand's Apartheid Justice System

Ivor Jones The Māori Green Ltn

31 Jul 2025 — 15 min read

Kia ora whānau - The Māori Green Lantern here once again shining the green light of truth on another dark corner of Aotearoa's colonial apparatus.

Today we dissect the toxic symbiosis between our settler-colonial justice system and its media enablers, using the Eastern Bay Beacon's court reporting from Ōpōtiki District Court as our case study. This supposedly objective journalism reveals itself as nothing more than sophisticated propaganda that normalises the criminalisation of Māori while sanitising the very system designed to cage us.

Through examining one court session's proceedings and the media coverage that amplifies them, we expose how these twin pillars of colonial control continue their 180-year mission to destroy Māori autonomy and dignity.

https://easternbayapp.co.nz/news/articles/68898ae280a872f72cee4f08

Background

The story begins with the Eastern Bay Beacon's routine court reporting from Ōpōtiki District Court, where Judge Louis Bidois presided over a litany of cases that reads like a colonial fever dream. Nathan Collier sentenced to home detention for strangulation. Multiple Māori men cycling through a system that offers them nothing but punishment dressed up as justice. Meanwhile, the Beacon dutifully reports these proceedings with the detached professionalism that masks deeply embedded colonial bias.

To understand why this matters, we must contextualise it within Moana Jackson's seminal work He Whaipaanga Hou, which exposed how our criminal justice system is not broken - it is working exactly as designed2. Jackson's research with 4000 Māori revealed that 90 percent believed structural racism, intergenerational trauma and colonisation were the reasons why there are more Māori in prison than non-Māori3.

The numbers tell a devastating story. While Māori comprise just 17.8% of the general population, we represent 52% of the prison population4. For Māori women, the situation is even more catastrophic, with 64% of female prisoners being Māori5.

The Ōpōtiki court report reveals a microcosm of New Zealand's judicial apartheid. In a single session, we see Nathan Collier, a 22-year-old receiving home detention for strangulation charges, alongside multiple other defendants cycling through a system that offers punishment without healing, incarceration without restoration.

This matters to Māori because it represents the continuation of what Jackson identified as the settler-colonial state's use of criminalisation and imprisonment as tools of colonisation 6. As Pacific scholar Dylan Asafo notes, "The settler-colonial state cannot be relied upon to liberate Pacific peoples and our Māori whanaunga from racist police and prison violence."

The media's role in this process cannot be understated. As demonstrated by Stuff's 2020 apology for 160 years of racist coverage7, New Zealand media has consistently functioned as the ideological apparatus that maintains Pākehā dominance over Māori8.

The Colonial Justice Assembly Line: How Courts Process Māori Bodies

The Eastern Bay Beacon's court report reads like a colonial conveyor belt designed to process Māori through predetermined pathways of punishment. Nathan Collier's case exemplifies this machinery at work - a young Māori man facing strangulation charges, receiving home detention while being processed for additional charges that ensure his continued entanglement with the system.

This is no accident. Research reveals that Māori are seven times more likely to be charged as first offenders compared to Pākehā9, and when convicted, face dramatically harsher sentences. Studies show Māori men convicted of assault face imprisonment at 26.3% compared to just 13% for Europeans for identical crimes10.

The Domestic Violence Act has become a particular weapon against Māori men, with research showing conviction rates for Māori running 10 times higher than Pākehā, while custodial sentences can be 15-18 times higher11. This isn't justice - it's ethnic cleansing through mass incarceration.

Media as Colonial Accomplice: The Beacon's Sanitised Violence

The Eastern Bay Beacon's clinical reporting style serves a crucial ideological function - it presents this systematic criminalisation as natural, inevitable, and just. By reducing complex stories of colonial trauma to simple crime statistics, the media shields readers from understanding the deeper structural violence at play.

This follows patterns identified across New Zealand media. Research shows that 79% of Māori report that non-Māori media negatively portrays Māori all the time or often12. Media representations function as symbolic annihilation that seamlessly reproduces hegemonic discourse against Māori13.

The Beacon's coverage follows classic colonial media patterns: individual pathology over structural analysis, crime over context, punishment over healing. It presents Judge Bidois's courtroom as a neutral space administering impartial justice, when research shows our courts function as sites where "the monocultural myopia of the Western way" dismisses Māori legal systems as inferior14.

The Strangulation Charge: Weaponising Violence Against Our Whānau

Nathan Collier's strangulation conviction deserves particular analysis because it represents how the colonial state weaponises legitimate concerns about violence to expand its carceral reach into Māori communities. While opposing intimate partner violence is crucial, the way strangulation charges are applied reveals troubling patterns of discrimination.

New research on fatal strangulation15 highlights how domestic violence cases often involve complex power dynamics and "blurred lines between sex and violence." Yet our justice system reduces these complexities to simple criminal categories that inevitably capture more Māori men than Pākehā.

The timing of Collier's case is significant, coming as the Coalition Government scraps cultural reports that provided crucial context for Māori defendants 16. Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith dismissed these reports as a "cottage industry costing taxpayers millions," ignoring their role in addressing the systemic racism that drives Māori overrepresentation.

Tikanga Versus Colonial Law: The Suppressed Alternative

What's missing from both the court proceedings and media coverage is any recognition of Māori approaches to justice and healing. Before colonisation, Māori lived according to complex systems of customary law based on mana, tapu, utu, and muru17. These systems emphasised restoration over retribution, community healing over individual punishment.

The colonial state deliberately destroyed these alternatives. As documented in Te Ara, early attempts to incorporate Māori customs were temporary measures, with officials assuming Māori would eventually assimilate into settler society18. The Tohunga Suppression Act 1907 criminalised traditional Māori spiritual practices, while the Native Land Court systematically dismantled collective ownership structures.

Today's criminal justice system continues this cultural genocide by design. Modern "restorative justice" programs, while better than purely punitive approaches, often co-opt Māori concepts without truly embracing tino rangatiratanga. As Māori criminologist Juan Tauri argues, restorative justice as currently practiced is not Māori justice and exaggerates how much input Māori had in its development19.

The Numbers Don't Lie: Statistical Evidence of Judicial Apartheid

Māori overrepresentation in New Zealand's prison system has remained consistently high over four decades, with Māori comprising around 52% of the prison population while representing only 17.8% of the general population in 2024

The data reveals the systematic nature of this injustice. Between 1980 and 2016, while Māori imprisonment rates grew by 170%, the population of wāhine Māori in prison increased by approximately 300%14. This explosion corresponds directly with neoliberal policies that decimated Māori communities while expanding the carceral state.

Research by the Waitangi Tribunal found that over 16,000 Māori males between ages 20-29 have Corrections Department records - over 30% of all Māori males in that age band4. At any given time, 3% of Māori males aged 20-29 are imprisoned - six times the rate for non-Māori.

These aren't just statistics - they represent the systematic removal of an entire generation of Māori men from their whānau and communities. As Moana Jackson noted, this constitutes "a catastrophe both for Māori as a people and for New Zealand as a whole"4.

Media Silence on Structural Solutions

The Eastern Bay Beacon's court reporting exemplifies how mainstream media systematically ignores structural solutions to violence and crime. There's no discussion of how poverty, colonisation, and trauma create the conditions that lead to offending. No analysis of successful Māori-led healing programs. No criticism of a system that processes the same people repeatedly without addressing root causes.

This silence is not neutral - it's complicit. By presenting the current system as the only option, media coverage forecloses discussion of alternatives. It reinforces what Aboriginal scholar research calls "the postcolonial churn" - the reiterative and disruptive process where colonial institutions continue to operate through contemporary forms 6.

The Coalition Government's recent attacks on Māori programs reveal the political stakes. Treaty provisions have been scrapped from the Corrections Amendment Bill20, eliminating requirements for equitable rehabilitation outcomes for Māori. Meanwhile, prison reforms and reduction targets have been ditched 16 in favour of expanding prison capacity.

Implications

The broader implications of this colonial court-media complex extend far beyond individual cases. This system functions as a key mechanism for maintaining settler dominance by systematically removing Māori from their communities, breaking up whānau structures, and normalising the idea that Māori are inherently criminal.

The impact on Māori communities is devastating. Research shows that imprisonment fundamentally conflicts with Māori concepts of mana, tapu, and mauri21. For a people whose identity is collectively constructed through whakapapa and connection to whenua, mass incarceration represents cultural genocide by another name.

The Coalition Government's "tough on crime" policies threaten to accelerate this destruction. New data shows 42% of male inmates are now on remand22, with projections showing remand prisoners could overtake sentenced prisoners by 2032. This represents punishment before conviction - a direct assault on the presumption of innocence.

The court proceedings reported by the Eastern Bay Beacon represent just one day in an ongoing colonial project that has criminalised Māori for 180 years. From the 1863 Suppression of Rebellion Act that made defending our land a criminal offence, to today's mass incarceration complex, the settler state has consistently used law and order rhetoric to justify the oppression of tangata whenua.

Media coverage that presents this system as neutral and inevitable performs crucial ideological work in maintaining settler dominance. By reducing complex stories of colonial trauma to simple crime reports, outlets like the Beacon shield the public from understanding how structural racism operates through ostensibly neutral institutions.

The solution is not reforming this system but transforming it. True justice requires recognising tino rangatiratanga - our right to govern ourselves according to tikanga Māori. It means funding Māori-led healing programs instead of building more prisons. It means addressing the poverty, homelessness, and trauma that colonisation created instead of criminalising its symptoms.

As we continue fighting for constitutional transformation, remember that every court session like the one reported by the Beacon represents thousands of whānau torn apart by a system designed to destroy us. The green light of truth reveals this institutional violence for what it is - not justice, but the continuation of colonisation by other means.

Only by building genuine alternatives based on mana, tapu, and whakatōhea can we break this cycle and create the just society our tīpuna envisioned when they signed Te Tiriti.

E tū whānau - our resistance continues.

For readers who find value in exposing these systems of oppression, please consider contributing a koha to support this vital mahi: HTDM: 03-1546-0415173-000. The MGL understands these tough economic times for whānau, so please only contribute if you have capacity and wish to do so.

Ngā mihi nui,
Ivor Jones - The Māori Green Lantern

https://thebeacon.co.nz

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