“Tamariki in the Crosshairs” - 2 November 2025

Tēnā koutou katoa e te whānau. Kei te mihi, kei te tangi ki a koutou katoa.

As sixty-two kapa haka from across te motu gather in Tauranga Moana for the twenty-fifth Te Mana Kuratahi, our tamariki stand on stage carrying the mana of their tūpuna, their reo, their culture - everything that makes us Māori. They perform with pride despite a coalition government that has stripped over $750 million from Māori programmes and gutted the Māori Health Authority. But there’s a darker shadow over this celebration: a measles outbreak spreading through communities where only seventy-two percent of Māori tamariki under five are vaccinated (RNZ, 2025a) - twenty-three percentage points below the ninety-five percent needed to prevent disaster.

Here’s the smoking gun: while tamariki gather to celebrate everything beautiful about being Māori, Dr Nina Bevin from the National Hauora Coalition warns whānau with pēpi under one to “be cautious about attending large public events right now” (RNZ, 2025b). The World Health Organization warned New Zealand last year that measles immunisation sat at its “lowest since 2012” with “alarming gaps among Māori and Pacific peoples” (1News, 2025a). Yet this government slashed $35.5 million by disestablishing Te Aka Whai Ora (RNZ, 2024a), the only entity specifically tasked with closing those gaps, while an entirely preventable epidemic threatens our babies.

This isn’t incompetence. It’s the calculated execution of a neoliberal playbook written in Washington and imported wholesale to Wellington - a playbook where Russell Vought, architect of Project 2025 and director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (NZ Herald, 2024a), runs the exact same deregulation agenda that David Seymour champions through the Regulatory Standards Bill. While Elon Musk’s DOGE attempted to gut 260,000 federal jobs in America claiming “efficiency” (RNZ, 2025c), Seymour uses identical rhetoric to attack regulations protecting Māori health, housing, and Treaty rights (RNZ, 2025d). The pattern is unmistakable, the ideology identical, the harm deliberate.

Measles vaccination rates among under-5s in Aotearoa New Zealand (2025) show dangerous gaps for Māori and Pacific tamariki, falling more than 20 percentage points below the 95% coverage needed to prevent outbreaks.

Whakapapa: From Elimination to Emergency

In October 2017, the World Health Organization verified that Aotearoa had eliminated endemic measles (Te Whatu Ora, 2025a) - a milestone achieved through sustained commitment to public health and equitable vaccine access. That status requires maintaining ninety-five percent population immunity through comprehensive vaccination coverage. We lost it.

The 2019 measles outbreak infected 2,185 people and hospitalized over seven hundred, with Māori comprising 39.6 percent of hospitalisations and Pacific peoples 36 percent despite being minorities of the population (PMC, 2024). The outbreak spread to Samoa, where eighty-three people died (The Spinoff, 2025) - most of them children under five. Health officials estimated the outbreak cost over one million dollars in direct expenses (NZ Herald, 2020), with hospitalisation rates of thirty to forty percent far exceeding typical rates.

We barely regained elimination status. Now we face an outbreak with even lower vaccination coverage. As of June 2025, only eighty-two percent of two-year-olds nationwide are fully immunised - but for Māori tamariki the rate plummets to just seventy-two percent, and seventy-three percent for Pacific children (RNZ, 2025e). Government modeling confirms officials knew another outbreak “would be far worse than the 2019 epidemic, with up to ninety cases a week at its peak” (NZ Herald, 2024b). They knew. They did nothing. Then they cut the very services designed to close the gaps.

Over $750 million stripped from Māori-specific programmes across two coalition government budgets, with housing bearing the brunt at $624 million - while a measles outbreak threatens under-vaccinated tamariki.

The Ideology: Neoliberalism’s Death Cult Logic

To understand why this government watched a preventable outbreak unfold while slashing Māori health funding, we must trace the ideological rot from its American origins. Project 2025, the nine-hundred-page Heritage Foundation blueprint for remaking American government, explicitly calls for dismantling federal agencies, eliminating “diversity, equity, and inclusion programs,” and installing loyalists throughout the executive branch to advance right-wing priorities without congressional approval (RNZ, 2024b). Russell Vought, one of Project 2025’s primary authors and now Trump’s budget director for the second time, spent Biden’s presidency planning exactly this restructuring (The Conversation, 2025a).

Vought’s vision centers on radical centralization of power in the executive while simultaneously gutting the administrative state’s capacity to regulate corporations or protect vulnerable populations. As OMB director, he described his role as operating “the president’s air-traffic control system” with power to “reshape or dismantle bureaucracy to align with the presidential will” (ProPublica, 2025). During Trump’s first term, Vought tried to eliminate the Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and fold the Department of Education and HUD into a “Department of Welfare” - a name chosen because “they think it sounds bad” (ProPublica, 2025).

Enter Elon Musk. The world’s richest man spent $277 million supporting Trump’s campaign (NZ Herald, 2025a), earning himself appointment as “efficiency czar” leading the Department of Government Efficiency - DOGE (RNZ, 2025f). Unlike Vought’s methodical institutional knowledge, Musk brought “slash-and-burn” chaos (RNZ, 2025g), demanding federal employees justify their jobs weekly or face termination. DOGE claimed to save $160 billion but analysis calculated the cuts cost taxpayers $135 billion in lost productivity, rehiring mistakenly fired workers, and defending lawsuits (CBS News, 2025).

The chaos was the point. State capture dressed as efficiency. Oligarchy marketed as reform. President Biden warned in his farewell address of the “rise of a tech industrial complex” creating an “oligarchy” where “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power” (RNZ, 2025h).

Now watch David Seymour. The ACT Party leader champions the Regulatory Standards Bill (RNZ, 2025i) using rhetoric identical to Project 2025 and DOGE: regulations as “red tape,” property rights as paramount, individual liberty as supreme, collective protections as illegitimate. The bill establishes regulatory principles prioritizing “individual and property rights,” “liberty,” and “equality before the law” - deliberately narrow libertarian definitions that exclude collective Māori rights, environmental protections, or social safeguards (RNZ, 2025d). It creates a Regulatory Standards Board appointed entirely by Seymour to review existing laws and hear corporate complaints about regulations that restrict profit-making (Greenpeace NZ, 2025).

Dr Claire Charters of Te Wai Ariki states the government “is actively and profoundly aggravating New Zealand’s constitutionally racist foundation in a way we have not seen for at least half a century” (RNZ, 2025j). Constitutional law expert Andrew Geddis notes the bill “proposes embedding Act’s ideological worldview in the heart of New Zealand’s constitutional framework, limiting legislative flexibility, executive decision-making, and judicial interpretation” (E-Tangata, 2025a).

This is neoliberalism’s endgame: replacing democratic accountability with corporate control, collective rights with individual property claims, public good with private profit. The ideology flows seamlessly from Heritage Foundation policy papers to Project 2025 chapters to DOGE “efficiency” purges to Seymour’s Regulatory Standards Bill.

The Attack: Cutting While Children Sicken

Let the numbers speak. Across Budget 2024 and Budget 2025, this coalition government slashed:

$624 million from Māori housing programmes including Whai Kāinga Whai Oranga, which was a four-year, $730 million commitment that ended in May 2025 (HUD, 2025)$36.1 million from Māori education by disestablishing the Wharekura Expert Teachers Programme, disestablishing fifty-three Resource Teacher Māori roles, and re-allocating funding from Māori Language initiatives (Ministry of Education, 2025)$35.5 million by disestablishing Te Aka Whai Ora, the Māori Health Authority (RNZ, 2024a)

Willie Jackson, Labour’s Māori Development spokesperson, stated: “Over the two budgets, Tama Potaka has now slashed more than $1 billion of Māori specific funding and that is shameful” (Labour Party, 2025).

Meanwhile, measles cases climb. As of early November 2025, sixteen confirmed cases spread across Northland, Auckland, Manawatū, Nelson, Taranaki, and Wellington (1News, 2025b). Health officials confirm community transmission with no international travel links - meaning measles now circulates internally, precisely the scenario threatening elimination status (RNZ, 2025k). Modelling projects up to 150 cases weekly at peak if the outbreak isn’t contained.

The timeline reveals deliberate sabotage. In March 2024, Health Minister Shane Reti disestablished Te Aka Whai Ora under urgency, promising “a different path will improve health outcomes for Māori” (RNZ, 2024c). By November 2024, Health NZ proposed cutting the entire thirty-two-person Māori health team within National Public Health Service plus 131 roles from Hauora Māori Health Services - the very teams “lifted and shifted” from the abolished Authority (PSA, 2024).

Then the WHO warning landed. In late 2024, two WHO medical officers reviewed New Zealand’s measles preparedness and noted “with concern” that immunisation sat at its “lowest since 2012” with “alarming gaps among Māori and Pacific peoples” (RNZ, 2025e). They recommended New Zealand “urgently fill the immunity gaps” and “incentivise vaccinations.”

Instead, this government cut a two-year $50 million package funding Māori health providers to lift immunisation rates - a programme demonstrably successful at reaching under-vaccinated communities (RNZ, 2025l). When Health Minister Simeon Brown finally announced the programme’s renewal in June 2025, he simultaneously imposed “changes to maximise its impact” requiring “all funding will go directly to frontline service delivery” (Beehive, 2025) - more bureaucratic compliance costs, tighter restrictions, less trust in Māori providers’ judgment.

Dr Gabrielle McDonald, public health researcher at Otago University, exposed another attack: the government’s updated GP funding formula excludes ethnicity despite “strong evidence it was a powerful indicator of health need” (RNZ, 2025m). The formula uses age, sex, rurality, socioeconomic deprivation, and morbidity - but deliberately ignores that “Māori lived seven years less than non-Māori and had higher rates of many serious illnesses, including cancer, even when poverty and other social factors were taken into account.”

This is structural violence: systematically defunding Māori health infrastructure, ignoring WHO warnings, excluding ethnicity from funding formulas, cutting immunisation programmes, abolishing the Māori Health Authority - all while knowing another outbreak looms.

Tikanga Violated: How Neoliberalism Destroys Māori Values

Every principle of tikanga Māori stands opposite to neoliberal ideology:

Whanaungatanga - relationships and collective wellbeing - demands we protect each other through herd immunity and community health. Neoliberalism elevates individual choice above collective protection, letting vaccine-hesitant parents endanger immunocompromised babies. Seymour’s bill enshrines “individual liberty” and “property rights” as supreme (RNZ, 2025i), explicitly rejecting collective Māori rights as inconsistent with “equality before the law.”

Manaakitanga - caring for others with generosity and respect - requires adequately funding Māori health providers who understand their communities’ needs. This government slashed that funding while demanding providers meet more bureaucratic requirements (RNZ, 2025n), demonstrating contempt not manaakitanga.

Kaitiakitanga - guardianship and protection of people and resources - obligates the Crown to safeguard tamariki from preventable diseases. Instead they cut health budgets, ignored WHO warnings, and let vaccination rates plummet below safety thresholds.

Wairuatanga - spiritual connection and cultural identity - thrives when tamariki gather at Te Mana Kuratahi celebrating te reo, tikanga, and the excellence of being Māori (RNZ, 2025o). But that celebration now happens under measles outbreak warnings telling whānau with babies to stay home, severing the intergenerational transmission of culture that defines us.

Kotahitanga - unity and collective strength - built Te Mana Kuratahi from twenty rōpū in 2000 to sixty-two in 2025 (RNZ, 2025o), creating a nationwide movement where “the tamariki from the Mana Kuratahi stage are the reason Te Matatini is so strong.” That unity threatens neoliberalism’s atomizing logic.

Rangatiratanga - self-determination and authority - means Māori communities controlling their own health outcomes through entities like Te Aka Whai Ora. This government abolished it (RNZ, 2024c), reabsorbing Māori health into the general system that created the disparities in the first place.

Aroha - love, compassion, and care for people - should guide policy affecting our most vulnerable. There is no aroha in watching babies face a measles outbreak because you prioritized tax cuts and ideology over vaccine programmes.

The Waitangi Tribunal found the Regulatory Standards Bill “would reduce the constitutional status of the Treaty/te Tiriti, remove its effect in law, limit Māori rights and Crown obligations” (1News, 2025c). A UN report concluded the government “is actively and profoundly aggravating New Zealand’s constitutionally racist foundation in a way we have not seen for at least half a century” (RNZ, 2025j).

The Hidden Connections: Same Playbook, Different Countries

Five specific revelations expose the coordinated nature of this attack:

First: Russell Vought served as OMB director under Trump’s first term, wrote major sections of Project 2025 during Biden’s presidency, then returned as OMB director in Trump’s second term to implement the exact restructuring he planned (NZ Herald, 2024a). His chapter in Project 2025 described OMB as “the president’s air-traffic control system” needing “courage to reshape or dismantle bureaucracy to align with the presidential will” (NBC News, 2025). He’s now using the government shutdown to accelerate mass firings and cancel billions in Democratic priorities (1News, 2025d).

Second: Elon Musk installed three former employees in top positions at the Office of Personnel Management - the federal government’s HR department - including Amanda Scales from his AI company xAI as chief of staff (RNZ, 2025g). These Musk loyalists control hiring and firing for the entire federal workforce, creating “state capture” where private interests control public institutions.

Third: David Seymour’s Regulatory Standards Bill attempts for the fourth time what failed in 2006, 2011, and 2021 - each version drafted by ACT leaders pushing identical libertarian principles from the same 2001 New Zealand Business Roundtable report (E-Tangata, 2025a). The coalition agreement this time guarantees passage despite overwhelming opposition (RNZ, 2025i), showing how minority parties with single-digit electoral support impose radical change through leverage.

Fourth: The measles outbreak threatening Te Mana Kuratahi tamariki was explicitly predicted by WHO reviewers who warned of “alarming gaps” in Māori and Pacific vaccination rates in 2024 (1News, 2025a), yet the government proceeded with cuts to Te Aka Whai Ora and Māori health providers. Health officials’ own modeling showed another outbreak “would be far worse than the 2019 epidemic” (NZ Herald, 2024b) with vulnerable communities bearing the brunt.

Fifth: Finance Minister Nicola Willis claimed Budget 2025 “delivers for Māori because when a New Zealander turns up to an emergency room or a school, they don’t turn up thinking about their ethnicity” (NZ Herald, 2024c). This erasure of structural racism - pretending “colourblind” policy addresses systemic inequity - mirrors American conservatives’ attacks on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programmes in Project 2025.

The Implications: From Tamariki to Tūpuna, No One Safe

The stakes extend far beyond one kapa haka competition. If this measles outbreak spreads - and with seventy-two percent Māori vaccination rates it likely will - we face:

Immediate health impacts: The 2019 outbreak hospitalized thirty to forty percent of cases, far exceeding typical rates (NZ Herald, 2020). Māori comprised 39.6 percent of hospitalisations despite being fifteen percent of the population. Infants under one face the highest risk but cannot be vaccinated until twelve months (The Conversation, 2025b), relying entirely on herd immunity this government destroyed.

Long-term consequences: Research following the 2019 outbreak found measles infection causes “increased hospital visits unrelated to measles and received more prescriptions for antibiotics in the four years following the outbreak” due to immune system damage (The Conversation, 2025b). Even “mild cases showed lasting impacts.” Children infected now face elevated infection risk for years.

Economic costs: The first 187 cases in 2014 cost over one million dollars in “loss of earnings, management of cases and hospitalisation costs” (NZ Herald, 2020). Modeling for a new outbreak projects “tens of millions in costs to the health system” (NZ Herald, 2024b).

Loss of elimination status: If sustained measles transmission continues twelve months, WHO will strip New Zealand’s elimination verification. Regaining that status requires “demonstrating no sustained transmission in our population all over again” - a multi-year process during which more outbreaks become likely.

Broader attacks on Māori: The Regulatory Standards Bill establishes principles that subordinate Treaty obligations to property rights (RNZ, 2025p). Every Māori-specific programme, Treaty settlement, co-governance arrangement, and environmental protection becomes vulnerable to corporate challenge through Seymour’s unelected Regulatory Standards Board.

Te Ara Whakamua: The Path Forward

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

The path forward demands mobilization. Every iwi, hapū, whānau, marae, kura, and community organization must:

Immediately: Ensure your whānau are vaccinated. Check immunisation status at your GP or by calling 0800 28 29 26 (RNZ, 2025b). Protect tamariki too young to vaccinate by achieving herd immunity around them.

Short-term: Demand the government reverse cuts to Māori health providers and immunisation programmes. The two-year $50 million package supporting Māori immunisation providers must be renewed and expanded without burdensome new compliance requirements (RNZ, 2025l). Restore Te Aka Whai Ora or create equivalent infrastructure specifically addressing Māori health equity. Include ethnicity in GP funding formulas as experts recommend (RNZ, 2025m).

Medium-term: Oppose the Regulatory Standards Bill through every available mechanism (RNZ, 2025p). Submit to select committees, protest, organize, vote. Expose the American origins of this ideology and its architects’ explicit intentions to dismantle collective protections.

Long-term: Build independent Māori health, education, and economic infrastructure insulated from colonial government whims. Support kura kaupapa, reo revitalization, whenua development, and sovereign economic models. Achieve genuine tino rangatiratanga making our survival independent of governments that view us as obstacles to their ideological projects.

Whakamutunga: The Mana That Cannot Be Destroyed

Te Mana Kuratahi’s twenty-fifth anniversary should be pure celebration - tamariki commanding the stage, whānau filling arenas, te reo soaring through six days of excellence showing the world what Māori achievement looks like when we nurture our taonga (RNZ, 2025o). Instead, Māori health providers issue measles warnings, vaccination gaps yawn wide, and babies stay home because this government prioritized ideology over immunity, corporate rights over community health, American billionaire playbooks over Aotearoa’s founding document.

Sandra Waitai of Ngā Mahuri said: “The tamariki we had back then, alongside Chris and I, now have their own children taking the stage. This is where it all started for us” (RNZ, 2025o). That intergenerational transmission - kaiako becoming parents becoming kaumātua, each generation teaching the next - is everything colonization tried to destroy and everything we’ve fought to reclaim. Neoliberalism’s attack on Māori health infrastructure, Treaty rights, and collective wellbeing aims to sever that transmission by making survival itself precarious.

They will fail. Because while David Seymour imports Russell Vought’s playbook and Elon Musk’s rhetoric, while Tama Potaka cuts three-quarters of a billion from Māori programmes, while measles spreads through under-vaccinated communities - our tamariki still take the stage. Sixty-two kapa from across the motu still gather. Te reo still fills the air. The wairua still lifts the city. Kaimoni Soutar said it perfectly: “They’re focused, grounded, and carrying the mana of their whānau, their tūpuna, and Te Aho Matua with them. You can feel the wairua; ko te mana o ngā tamariki te whai” (RNZ, 2025o).

That mana - the mana of tamariki who know exactly who they are despite every attempt to tell them otherwise - is what terrifies neoliberalism most. You cannot commodify it, cannot regulate it away, cannot cut it from a budget spreadsheet. Te Ora Pahewa, kaiārahi of Te Kapa Puāwai, reflected on standing on that first stage in 2000: “You felt like a superstar. Now, to stand here as the kaiārahi, guiding our next generation, it’s come full circle. The scale might be bigger, but the kaupapa hasn’t changed: pride in who you are, and belief in your ao Māori” (RNZ, 2025o).

The kaupapa hasn’t changed. Our belief in our ao Māori hasn’t changed. And while this government executes its neoliberal agenda imported from Washington’s worst architects - while Russell Vought dismantles American democracy and Elon Musk plays oligarch and David Seymour sells our Treaty birthright to corporate interests - we remember what Sandra Waitai said: “That’s what 25 years of Te Mana Kuratahi has done for our people” (RNZ, 2025o).

Built us. Sustained us. Reminded us that no matter how many millions they cut, how many agencies they abolish, how many epidemics they allow through negligence - they cannot destroy what makes us Māori. They cannot budget away our whakapapa, legislate against our wairua, regulate our mana out of existence.

So we vaccinate our pēpi. We protect our vulnerable. We fund our own providers when the Crown abandons us. We build our own systems when theirs fail us. We oppose their bills, expose their networks, name their crimes. And we gather - sixty-two kapa strong - to celebrate who we are and who we will always be.

Because that’s what sovereignty looks like. Not waiting for permission. Not begging for scraps. Building futures while they sell ours to the highest bidder.

Ko te mana o ngā tamariki te whai.

Kia kaha. Kia māia. Kia manawanui.

If this mahi speaks to you and you have the capacity to support this work through koha, you can do so at:

HTDM: 03-1546-0415173-000

Only give if you have the means - solidarity matters more than money.

Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa

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