"SELLING THE WAKA: How Judith Collins Just Handed Aotearoa's Sovereignty to the Empire of Death" - 18 March 2026

On 17 March 2026, Judith Collins smiled for the cameras in Canberra — on stolen Ngunnawal land — and signed away a piece of Aotearoa's soul.

The ANZAC 2035: Closer Defence Relations Statement was dressed up in the language of mateship and shared values, but strip away the press release gloss and what remains is this: a white supremacist neoliberal government, having already cut $40 million from Māori housing, $22.9 million from Māori land funds, and gutted every significant kaupapa Māori programme it could find, has now committed our rangatahi, our defence force, and our strategic sovereignty to an integrated military machine answerable — ultimately — not to te Tiriti, not to tangata whenua, not to the people of Aotearoa — but to Washington and London.

This essay names what that is.

It traces the whakapapa of the deal.

It quantifies the harm.

And it will not be polite about any of it.

What follows is an accounting of a betrayal.

In one document,

this government commits Aotearoa to embedded officers

in Australian military headquarters,

shared strike capabilities,

rotational deployments, and

defence industry integration

— all funded by $9 billion stripped from the same budget cycle that axed Māori housing,

health,

education, and

land programmes.

It invokes the ANZAC mythology of Gallipoli — where Māori soldiers died as colonial subjects for the British Empire — to sell a 2026 agreement that will send the next generation of brown rangatahi into wars planned in Washington.

It celebrates a 75-year-old imperial alliance as if it were a taonga.

It does all of this without consulting tangata whenua,

without a Waitangi Tribunal inquiry, and

without a single moment of publicly articulated acknowledgment that te Tiriti o Waitangi exists.

This is the whakapapa of this deal: colonisation, unbroken, rebranded as "Closer Defence Relations."

The Waka Has Been Sold

Kia ora, whānau. Kia kaha, kia maia, kia manawanui.

In te ao Māori, the waka is not just a vessel — it is the embodiment of collective identity, whakapapa, and tino rangatiratanga. The tohunga whakairo who carved its hull encoded the names of our atua. The tauihu declared to the ocean who we are. The navigator — the tohunga wayfinder — read the stars by their own knowledge systems, not by foreign instruction. When a waka follows another waka's course, it is because there is trust, mana, and reciprocity.

What Collins has done is something else entirely. She has lashed our waka to Australia's destroyer and thrown the paddle overboard.

The ANZAC 2035 statement calls for "embedded staff in each other's strategic and operational headquarters," for "common and complementary capabilities including strike capabilities," for NZ forces to rotate through Australian territory, and for defence industry integration — meaning NZ weapons manufacturing will be absorbed into Australia's far larger military-industrial complex.

By 2035, our soldiers will be indistinguishable from Australian soldiers in function, training, and deployment.

Where Australia goes to war, we go.

Where Australia's imperial masters

— Washington and London — point the finger,

our rangatahi follow, in uniform,

carrying weapons,

into fires we did not start.

And what does this 75th-anniversary celebration of the 1951 ANZUS Treaty actually celebrate?

The same imperial framework that sent our tūpuna to die in Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 — a campaign planned in London, executed in Turkey, and turned into a mythology of "mateship" to obscure the fact that working-class Māori, Pākehā, and Aboriginal men were used as cannon fodder for the British Empire. The ANZAC myth has always been colonialism dressed as heroism.

The Numbers Do Not Lie: Guns Over Grandchildren

Here is the whakapapa of this government's real values, traced in dollars.

The same government celebrating ANZAC 2035 has committed NZ$12 billion over four years to defence — $9 billion of that brand new spending — lifting military expenditure from 1% of GDP to over 2%.

This happened in the same budget cycle where, as documented by RNZ, this government:

• Cut $40 million from uncontracted Māori housing supply funding
• Axed $22.9 million from Te Ringa Hāpai Whenua, the Māori land fund
• Gutted $22.8 million from the Hapori Māori Data Capability programme
• Slashed $23.6 million from Hawaiki Hou — the programme supporting Māori, women, disabled, tamariki and rangatahi in sport and recreation
• Cut $5 million from the Office of the Māori Trustee
• Scrapped $4 million for Te Pae Roa Ministerial Group — the Māori education voice

As 1News reported, Tāmaki Makaurau MP Takutai Tarsh Kemp directly challenged the government:

"Why is more money going into Defence when there is a cost-of-living crisis where whānau can't afford basic necessities?"

The government had no answer.

Because the answer is: whānau were never the priority. The empire was.

University of Waikato Professor Al Gillespie told RNZ that New Zealand appears to be joining a new "arms race." That arms race is being funded by stripping the social infrastructure of the very communities — Māori, Pasifika, the poor — who will be expected to send their sons and daughters to fight in it.

🔥 Koha Consideration

While Judith Collins signs ANZAC 2035 in Canberra, and while Luxon's government strips the housing, the health, and the rangatiratanga from our whānau, this voice will not be purchased, silenced, or embedded in anyone's command structure.

Every koha to this mahi is a direct act of tino rangatiratanga — proof that Māori do not need the Crown to fund our own truth-telling, our own whakapapa tracing, our own resistance to the empire's paperwork.

If this essay reached you with truth, and if you have capacity, consider supporting the mahi that exposes what ANZAC 2035 actually means for our people.

Three pathways to support this work:

For direct koha — funding the accountability the Crown will not provide:
Koha — The Māori Green Lantern

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For direct bank transfer: HTDM, account number 03-1546-0415173-000

If you cannot koha — no worries at all, whānau. Share this essay. Post it. Read it at your marae. Tell your rangatahi what ANZAC 2035 actually is before the recruitment posters arrive. That sharing is koha. That sharing is rangatiratanga.

Kia kaha, kia maia, kia manawanui.
— Ivor Jones, The Māori Green Lantern

Tūmatauenga Without Rongo: The Spiritual Violation

In te ao Māori, Tūmatauenga is the atua of war and humanity. But he does not exist alone.

He is held in balance by Rongo — the atua of peace, cultivation, and sustenance.

When a rangatira prepares for war, the community does not first cut the food supply of the most vulnerable. That is not tino rangatiratanga. That is tyranny wearing a haka.

This government has invoked Tūmatauenga — the atua of combat — while actively starving the mauri of communities.

They have cut the kai, the wharenui, the rongoā, and the kura.

They have fired the healers, as The Māori Green Lantern's own essay documented: "Western Puppets Dance to Israel's Tune" — revealing how Collins and Peters have already abandoned independent foreign policy, blindly following imperial scripts without evidence or democratic mandate. You cannot protect a people by arming their colonisers.

Three Examples for the Western Mind

Some readers — particularly those trained in Western political frameworks — may struggle to understand why a defence agreement between two "friendly democratic nations" is a problem.

So let us be precise.

Example One — The NATO Trap: How Military Alliances Devour Social Investment

When European nations joined NATO and committed to spending 2% of GDP on defence, as documented by Reuters, healthcare, housing, and social programmes were cut to fund it.

Greece's NATO obligations contributed to the fiscal conditions that produced austerity — which devastated its most vulnerable populations.

New Zealand is now replicating this model exactly.

The $9 billion in new defence spending was announced alongside a Budget operating allowance slashed to $1.3 billion — the tightest in a decade.

Every gun purchased is a house not built for Māori whānau. Every helicopter bought is a kura not funded. The trade-off is explicit, deliberate, and racist in its impact.

Example Two — The Gallipoli Pattern: Working-Class Brown Bodies for Imperial Wars

In 1915, Māori soldiers of the Pioneer Battalion were sent to Gallipoli and the Western Front.

They were not sent to protect Aotearoa — there was no threat to Aotearoa.

They were sent to serve the British Empire in a war that had nothing to do with tino rangatiratanga or te Tiriti.

Over 2,200 Māori served; the death toll was devastating and proportionally higher than for Pākehā troops.

Now, in 2026, this government is again building the institutional architecture — embedded commands, shared strike capabilities, rotational deployment — to ensure that when Washington and London point at the next target (Iran? China? the next manufactured enemy?), our rangatahi follow in the same boots.

The Māori Green Lantern's previous essay "Western Puppets Dance to Israel's Tune" documented precisely how this government — through Winston Peters and in coordination with Australia — has already abandoned independent foreign policy, blindly following imperial scripts without evidence or democratic mandate.

Example Three — The Pacific "Security" Lie: Colonialism in Humanitarian Clothing

Line of Effort 6 of the ANZAC 2035 statement speaks warmly of

"Pacific-led solutions to regional security challenges."

This is the most insidious paragraph in the entire document.

Australia and New Zealand are not Pacific nations in any Indigenous sense — they are settler-colonial states occupying stolen Indigenous land who happened to be geographically proximate to the Pacific.

When Australia sends its military into the Pacific, it does so to counter Chinese influence and maintain Western imperial dominance — not to protect Pacific peoples' sovereignty or climate survival.

The Pacific Response Group mentioned in the statement sounds like disaster relief.

It is force projection dressed as humanitarianism.

Ask the people of West Papua — where Australia has for decades supported Indonesian colonisation — whether Australian "Pacific security" protects Indigenous sovereignty.

The Waitangi Tribunal itself has found that Māori never ceded sovereignty. Yet this government is ceding it — to Australia, to ANZUS, and to Washington — one "line of effort" at a time.

Five Hidden Connections: The Whakapapa of This Deal

The whakapapa methodology demands we trace what is hidden beneath what is visible.

Here are five connections the government and its media allies will not name:

Connection 1: Collins → AUKUS Pipeline

As RNZ analysis made clear, this ANZAC integration is explicitly described as a stepping stone toward AUKUS — the nuclear submarine pact between Australia, UK, and USA. The logic is sequential: first interoperability, then integration, then nuclear infrastructure on or near Aotearoa's waters. Judith Collins is laying the foundation. Her government will not be in power when the consequences arrive. Our mokopuna will be.

Connection 2: Defence Industry Integration → Weapons in Our Economy

The ANZAC 2035 commitment to "reduce barriers to defence industry participation" and "co-develop, co-produce, co-sustain common capabilities" is a direct invitation for Australian and American defence corporations to embed themselves in New Zealand's economy. This is how military-industrial complexes reproduce themselves — by making war profitable for enough domestic constituencies that peace becomes economically undesirable. It is the same playbook that locked the United States into perpetual war after 1945.

Connection 3: Surveillance Architecture → Targeting Māori Activists

As The Māori Green Lantern documented in "Western Puppets Dance to Israel's Tune", the expanded intelligence-sharing frameworks that accompany military integration — Five Eyes, ANZUS, and now ANZAC 2035 — are the same networks that monitor land rights activists, water protectors, and anti-colonial organisers. As RNZ reported, New Zealand already operates in darkness on lobbying transparency unlike most developed nations. The "combined mission planning" and "intelligence sharing" cited in this statement will be turned on domestic dissidents. Māori who stand at the paepae of their whenua blocking mining, resisting eviction, or organising against this government will find themselves in the files of a binational security apparatus.

Connection 4: Pacific Integration → Māori Dispossession Repeated at Scale

The "Pacific Response Group" and the expanded Pacific military activities proposed in this deal mirror the exact logic used to justify the 19th-century colonisation of the Pacific — civilising, stabilising, protecting. The same language was used to justify the raupatu. The same framework that stripped Māori of 95% of their land is now being exported, in military camouflage, to our Pacific whānau. As 1News documented, Western powers have long used aid, diplomacy, and now military architecture to extend imperial influence across the Pacific.

Connection 5: ANZAC Mythology → Erasure of Indigenous Warriors

The invocation of Gallipoli in the opening paragraph of this statement — "the first ANZAC landing at Gallipoli forged a bond unlike any other" — erases the fundamental truth that Māori soldiers served in those trenches not as equals, but as colonial subjects, denied the vote in many cases, denied land returned from war, denied the protections of te Tiriti. The ANZAC bond Collins celebrates is the bond of coloniser mythology. It was never our bond. It was the empire's bond, sealed in Māori blood.

The Harm, Quantified

Let the numbers be the indictment:

• $9 billion in new defence spending approved 2025 while Māori housing, health, education, and data funding were systematically gutted
• $40 million stripped from Māori housing supply — meaning more whānau in emergency accommodation, cars, garages
• $22.9 million axed from Te Ringa Hāpai Whenua — land stolen twice: first by raupatu, then defunded by this government
• $1.3 billion — the tightest budget operating allowance in a decade — imposed on social services while defence received a $1.9 billion operating increase in Budget 2025 alone, as confirmed by RNZ
• 2% of GDP — the new defence spending floor, confirmed by both 1News and Reuters — nearly double the current rate, in a country where Māori children experience poverty at three times the national average

This is not a budget. It is a value statement. The government of Christopher Luxon and Judith Collins values the capacity to kill more than it values the capacity of Māori children to live with dignity.

Rangatiratanga Is the Response

Te Tiriti o Waitangi did not sign away Māori military autonomy.

It certainly did not authorise the integration of our rangatahi into a foreign war machine serving Washington's imperial interests.

The Waitangi Tribunal has been clear: Māori sovereignty was never ceded. Every dollar spent on ANZAC 2035 integration, every "line of effort" that embeds our defence force in Australia's command structure, is a dollar stolen from the promise of te Tiriti and a step deeper into the imperial machinery our tūpuna never consented to.

The path forward is not despair — it is clarity, organising, and truth-telling.

Demand that every iwi and hapū be formally consulted on any defence agreement that affects Aotearoa's sovereignty.

Demand a Waitangi Tribunal inquiry into whether ANZAC 2035 violates Article 2.

Demand the repeal of the $9 billion defence commitment and its reallocation to Māori housing, health, and education.

Name what this is: a racist, neoliberal government trading our children's futures for American approval ratings and Australian military contracts.

Judith Collins can smile in Canberra. But she cannot smile away the truth.

We see the whakapapa of this deal.

We trace every dollar, every line of effort, every embedded officer.

And we will not be silent.

Nō reira, e tū whānau.

Stand.

And do not let them sell the waka.

Research conducted 18 March 2026. Sources include the Beehive, RNZ, 1News, Reuters, NZ Treasury, the Waitangi Tribunal, Te Ao News, and the Australia–NZ Joint Defence Statement. All URLs live-verified at time of publication. Active web research tools used throughout. The Māori Green Lantern discloses all research methodology in the interests of transparency and accountability.