The land remembers us, even when the law forgets

Thursday, 11 June 2026

Dr Adreanne Ormond is a senior lecturer at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington. She is from Mahia and also has whakapapa to Nuhaka and Whakaki.

OPINION: I know a place at Mahia where the wind comes off the sea in a way that feels like a greeting. Where the hills above Nuhaka hold stories older than any title deed. Where Whakaki lagoon sits quietly at the edge of the land, neither fully sea nor fully earth — a threshold, like so much of what it means to belong somewhere.

This is Māori land. My land. And right now, it is under review — again.

Te Puni Kōkiri is consulting on proposed amendments to Te Ture Whenua Māori Act 1993, the legislation that governs how Māori freehold land is held, managed, and protected. Nearly 60 engagement sessions have been held around the country. The stated goal is to “streamline processes” and support “easier development and use” of Māori land.

Those words sound reasonable. They often do.

Read more:

• ‘How do the people break through?’ – third of Māori land considered landlocked

• Footsteps to Parliament: revisiting the 1975 Māori Land March

• Banks on long journey to finance more home-building on whenua Māori

But buried inside the language of efficiency and utilisation is a set of assumptions worth examining. When policymakers describe Māori land as “underutilised” or “underperforming”, they are not making a neutral observation. They are applying a particular lens, one that measures the worth of land almost entirely through economic productivity: return on investment, development potential, growth.

By that measure, a hillside that has never been farmed is wasted. A lagoon that has never been drained is idle. A coastal headland with no hotel on it is simply waiting to be unlocked.

But that is not how we understand land. It never has been.

For Māori, whenua is not a commodity. It is a relative. The word itself — whenua — means both land and placenta; the first land we know is the one we return to. Our relationship with the land is not transactional. It is genealogical.

When I stand at Mahia, I am standing in a relationship, with those who came before me, with those who will come after, with the land itself as a living entity that has its own memory and its own needs.

This is not sentiment. It is a different but entirely coherent framework for understanding value.

Te Ture Whenua Māori Act 1993 was itself the product of decades of advocacy and loss. Māori have already watched an extraordinary amount of land leave our hands — through confiscation, through manipulation of the Native Land Court, through laws that turned communal ownership into individual titles that could be sold, mortgaged, and lost. What is left — roughly 1.4 million hectares of Māori freehold land — is, as some have described it, the last bastion. What remains after everything else was taken.

The act was designed with that history in mind. Its core purpose was retention, to keep Māori land in Māori hands. To ensure that when decisions were made about that land, they were made by the right people — the owners, the whānau, the hapū — not by outside investors, developers, or a legal system that has historically not served us well.

Now we are being asked to consider a “more flexible approach to development”; a rebalancing between retention and use. And yes, there are real tensions here — many Māori landowners want to build papakāinga, develop housing, create economic opportunities for their whānau. Those aspirations are legitimate and important. Better tools to achieve them are genuinely needed.

But flexibility for whom, and on whose terms?

The concern is not development itself. It is who defines what development means, and whose values shape the framework. When the review is driven by a broader government agenda of economic growth and productivity — the same agenda behind the Fast-Track Approvals Act and changes to overseas investment rules — we should be clear-eyed about the pressure being applied.

The hills above Nuhaka are not underperforming. They are resting. They are holding water, sheltering birds, maintaining connections between people and place that no productivity metric can capture. The sea-land-sky scape of Mahia is not awaiting humanity to find and give it value. Whakaki is not idle. It is alive with the kind of value that cannot be depreciated or divided into shares.

Any review of Te Ture Whenua must begin from one question: does this strengthen the ability of Māori to determine the future of their own land, on their own terms? If the honest answer is no — or even maybe — then we should say so clearly, and loudly, before the submissions close and the bill is drafted.

The land has survived this long. It deserves advocates who understand what it is worth