GUEST BLOG: Tadhg Stopford – ACTs Ram Raid on Nz

The Treaty Principles Bill isn’t policy—it’s a ram raid. A full-throttle, smash-and-grab attack on the last legal barriers preventing New Zealand from being strip-mined by corporate overlords. It’s not enough that they’ve sold off everything they could get their hands on over the last 40 years—now, they want the legal scaffolding that keeps the looting from being absolute.

ACT are bad actors, but let’s be real—they’re just hired goons for something much bigger. Dr. Vincent O’Malley has torched their historical lies, showing how their rewriting of the Treaty is a cynical, racist farce designed to erase Māori rights. But that’s just the surface. The real endgame is even more insidious: full-spectrum privatization—turning New Zealand into a low-wage, foreign-controlled, corporate playground where the people own nothing and rent everything.

They are here to nail New Zealand’s legs open for economic rape.

This Bill Is a Trojan Horse—And We’re Meant to Thank Them for It

The Treaty Principles Bill is an ideological IED rigged to blow apart what little economic self-determination this country has left.

It attacks from two angles:

1. It manufactures racial division, because if the public is fighting each other, they won’t fight back.

2. It clears the last legal roadblocks for privatization, so everything that isn’t already owned by foreign capital can be picked off.

This is how colonization works in the 21st century. The flags and muskets are gone; the corporate buyout is here.

Forty Years of Economic Colonization in the Name of ‘Efficiency’

New Zealand was once a country that owned itself. The state built the infrastructure, ran the banks, and ensured that the economy worked for its people. Then came the Great Neoliberal Fire Sale.

• Telecom? Gone. Sold for peanuts.

• The railways? Gone. And when the privatizers ran it into the ground, the taxpayer had to buy it back at a premium.

• State housing? Gutted.

• Banks? Dominated by Australia, extracting billions a year.

We were promised efficiency. What we got was serfdom.

Through all this looting, one force stood in the way: Māori sovereignty and tino rangatiratanga.

Despite every effort to erode it, Te Tiriti o Waitangi has remained a legal tripwire that prevents total corporate rule. Even the flawed Treaty settlement process has forced some degree of accountability, allowing Māori to retain or reclaim some control over their resources and lands.

This is a problem for the people who run this country like a tax haven with better scenery.

So ACT and their financial backers have deployed one of the oldest weapons in the playbook: racial division.

NAct’s Realpolitik: Using Race to Disguise Corporate Theft

The real political purpose of the Treaty Principles Bill isn’t to clarify anything. It is to make the people fight each other so they don’t fight their true oppressors.

• They frame the Treaty as “unfair” or “race-based” to weaponize New Zealand’s ignorance and racism.

• They turn Pākehā against Māori so no one notices who is actually robbing us.

• They present Māori self-determination as an elitist privilege, when in reality, it has been one of the last remaining tools stopping total corporate control of New Zealand’s resources.

• They create a false enemy (“Treaty elites”) to distract from the real enemy—billionaires, corporate monopolies, and foreign investors draining the country.

This is divide and conquer—and New Zealanders fall for it every time.

The same playbook has been used before:

• In America, Reagan and Nixon used racial dog whistles like “welfare queens” and “law and order” to gut unions and deregulate the economy.

• In Britain, Brexit was sold as a fight against “European elites,” but in reality, it paved the way for more privatization and austerity.

And look how that worked out. New Zealand’s elites are running the exact same scam.

The Treaty Principles Bill: The Final Step Before New Zealand Becomes a Fully Privatized Plantation

This Bill is the last piece of the puzzle. Once tino rangatiratanga is erased, there are no remaining barriers to absolute neoliberal rule.

• New Zealand’s vast, untapped mineral wealth—already under pressure from foreign mining interests—will be up for grabs, with no Māori claims to stop it.

• Water rights, long contested, will be fully commodified—allowing foreign corporations to take control of our most valuable resource.

• Māori land, protected under Treaty-based frameworks, will become just another commodity to be sold off.

And once that happens, everything else will follow.

This Isn’t Just Privatization—This Is a Corporate Coup

The Treaty Principles Bill isn’t just about handing assets to corporate raiders—it is about shifting New Zealand into full-blown corporate rule.

This is not fearmongering—this is the logical conclusion of everything that’s already happened.

Look around:

• New Zealand’s banking sector is dominated by Australian interests, which extract billions in profits annually.

• Electricity and fuel markets have become price-gouging rackets, forcing Kiwis to pay obscene rates for basic necessities.

• The housing market has been transformed into an unregulated casino, enriching a few while forcing the rest into generational debt.

And now they want to finish the job.

The same people that orchestrated Rogernomics in the 1980s, privatized railways, and sold Telecom for a fraction of its value are still in power.

They have never been held accountable. And the Treaty has been one of the few legal instruments capable of challenging this trajectory—which is why ACT and their corporate backers have made its eradication a priority.

Luxon and Seymour: The Corporate Middlemen Selling Aotearoa

Luxon and Seymour are not leaders. They are not visionaries.

They are salesmen.

• Luxon, a corporate manager through and through, is not here to govern—he is here to facilitate corporate takeover.

• Seymour, spawn of the Atlas Network, is their ideological snake oil salesman, selling corporate looting as “freedom.”

Neither of them care about New Zealand’s long-term interests. Because they are not here to govern—they are here to sell us out.

A Nation on the Brink

If the Treaty Principles Bill passes, New Zealanders will wake up to a country where the last line of defense against total economic exploitation has been removed.

Without Treaty-based protections:

• There will be no legal basis to challenge the wholesale sell-off of what remains of public assets.

• The state—already compromised—will accelerate its mission to turn New Zealand into a deregulated, low-wage, foreign-owned extraction zone.

• The public will be too divided by racial propaganda to mount an effective resistance.

At that point, we will no longer be a self-determining nation—we will be a corporate vassal state, a neoliberal experiment with no mechanisms for resistance.

This Bill is the Final Step Before Corporate Rule

This isn’t about history.

It isn’t about clarity.

It is about power.

It is the final step before the total privatization of New Zealand.

If we let this happen, we will follow the path of every nation that handed over its sovereignty to oligarchs.

We have one choice.

Fight!

But to do that, we need to organise around a plan we can believe in. We need a clear actionable alternative to the garbage talk of growth without investment.

So, we dont just say “Stop the Treaty Principles Bill!”

We say, “Stop the sellout! Letsd start the rebuild!”

We need to reclaim Energy, Water, Transport, and BANKING.

Becauase, public ownership means LOWER COSTS. National investment, and control over our own destiny.

We need to BREAK foreign control over our economy, and ban offshore (landlords) of land, utililities and infrastructure.

We need to build a SOVEREIGN banking system. Why has Kiwibank been starved of funds? When we issue our own currency? To suit the aussie banks? ENOUGH! No more billions flowing to Australia. No more.

We need a mass economic education movement, to lift the veil on the scam. Kiwis need to know how the system works, and how we are being scammed. In the 1930s we knew. But netflix, and political media lies, have emptied our brains.

We need to use the same financial tricks they do – but for the public good.

For our nation.

If central banks can create money to bail out corpoprations, we can create money to rebuild New Zealand into what it should be. Godzone. A paradise on earth, and a positive example to the world.

 

Tadhg Stopford is a Teacher and Historian.