I’ve developed a chronic case of Electxiety

By Mātengahere Mete

In May 2026, the New Zealand government changed the law. Not for future cases. For all cases. Including Mike Smith’s.

Smith, a Māori elder of Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Kahu, spent years taking this country’s largest emitters — Fonterra, Genesis Energy, Z Energy among them — to court. He argued they had caused damage to his whenua, his coastline, his community. Rising seas. Flooding of cultural sites. The slow erosion of everything his whakapapa is tied to.

The Supreme Court in 2024 ruled unanimously in his favour, setting a trial for April 2027. But the government amended the Climate Change Response Act 2002 to make that case — and all cases like it — impossible. The government said the lawsuit was creating “uncertainty in business confidence.” But documents released after the announcement revealed that Fonterra and Z Energy, two of the defendants in Smith’s case, had met with the Prime Minister’s office. A briefing note explaining the rationale for the legislation had been provided to that office. Smith called it a “co-ordinated campaign of secret lobbying, political interference and corporate influence at the highest levels of power.” The Prime Minister says he has no record of the meetings. The trial that was coming will not now come. Smith has since taken the fight to the United Nations. Together with the National Iwi Chairs Forum, Climate Clinic Aotearoa and Lawyers for Climate Action, he has filed a formal complaint with the UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights, asking her to intervene before the bill reaches Parliament. The government has not paused.

When the rules of the game can be rewritten overnight to protect powerful corporations, the act of participating in that game starts to feel heavy. It breeds a specific kind of exhaustion.

And so, I’ve got election anxiety. Electxiety. The knowledge that you must act. The inability to see where. The friction of those two things grinding against each other. And the exhaustion of living inside that friction election after election.

But this election has made me do something I didn’t used to do. I’ve started talking to people — anyone, really. Strangers. The woman at the checkout counter, flicking my butter, eggs and milk through the scanner. I stop her. Are you voting? She looks at me, her eyes are engaged. Holding her stare, I ask: Who are you voting for? She responds, “anyone but this government, I’m over them.”

I don’t know exactly when it started. But I do it now, in the small spaces of ordinary life — the queue, the counter, the moment before the eftpos machine beeps. At first I thought it was just my way of raising awareness… but if I was to be honest I am looking for something. Confidence, maybe. Or company. Someone else who believes enough for both of us.

Because if I am honest about that too — I am not sure I believe. Not fully.

I am caught inside a system that demands I engage, knowing it may not deliver. To vote feels like a kind of untruth — a performance of faith I do not fully possess. But to not vote feels like failure. Like I gave up before I even woke up. Either way I do not feel true to myself. Hence, electxiety.

It is an epistemic shudder—where knowledge produces both the paralysing uncertainty and the fierce compulsion to move forward. Knowing that I am betraying myself by voting into a system that forsakes Māori — and yet knowing that I am bound to vote into a system that has a history of forsaking. Electxiety — that friction in election season when what you know gets in the way of what you want to believe, yet you are still bound to act. Until there is a better way.

This is not the first time. It will not be the last. The history of Māori engagement with the New Zealand legal and political system is littered with moments like this one — where the tool worked, where the argument held, where the system said yes, and then found another way to say no. The foreshore and seabed. The Treaty principles. Now climate litigation.

Both major parties have done this. In different registers, with different language, toward the same end. The system does not fail Māori by accident. It morphs and reconfigures. Akin to a virus.

The American writer and theorist bell hooks wrote about what it means to live and act from the margin — the place where those pushed to the edges of a society develop a particular clarity about how power works. She argued that the margin is not only a place of deprivation. It is also a place of insight. Of seeing clearly what those at the centre cannot or will not see.

I see clearly. That is the problem. And the gift.

hooks also wrote about the difference between withdrawing from a system and refusing to be consumed by it. You can participate without surrendering. You can vote without pretending the vote is enough. You can put the ballot in the box with your eyes open.

So I will vote in November. Not because the epistemic shudder has stopped. Not because I believe the system will hold, or that the goalposts will stay where they are, or that what happened to Mike Smith will not happen again in some other form to some other Māori person who found the right tool at the right moment.

I will vote because the alternative is silence. And silence, in a system that is already very good at not hearing us, is not neutrality. It is a gift to those who benefit from our absence.

And maybe I will walk away with a wholeness I have reclaimed — not because voting will bring closure, but because voting will put me in the eye of the storm. The electxiety will stop palpitating in my heart, the epistemic shudder in my head will quiet, the act will bring a still — for the moment.

Somewhere in the mess of placing myself inside the political storm, I will force the necessary movement and from that I will determine direction into the struggle without end. Ka whawhai tonu mātou.

References

Smith v Fonterra Co-operative Group Ltd [2024] NZSC 5

Relates to: “The Supreme Court in 2024 ruled unanimously in his favour, setting a trial for April 2027.” http://www.nzlii.org/nz/cases/NZSC/2024/5.html

NZ Herald, “Climate law change: Inquiry sought over PM’s office lobbying claims”

Relates to: “…by May 2026, the government amended the Climate Change Response Act 2002 to make that case — and all cases like it — impossible.” https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/climate-law-change-inquiry-sought-over-pms-office-lobbying-claims/Q2EKUAWOMRHPDHQKIKUNTUSD7Q/

1News, “‘A co-ordinated campaign of secret lobbying’ – climate activist”

Relates to: “documents released after the announcement revealed that Fonterra and Z Energy… had met with the Prime Minister’s office,” the briefing note, Smith’s “co-ordinated campaign” quote, and the PM’s “no record” denial. https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/05/24/a-co-ordinated-campaign-of-secret-lobbying-climate-activist/

RNZ, “Iwi leader Mike Smith asks UN to intervene before government introduces new climate law”

Relates to: Smith’s UN complaint with the National Iwi Chairs Forum, Climate Clinic Aotearoa, and Lawyers for Climate Action, requesting the Special Rapporteur intervene before the Tort Prohibition Bill reaches Parliament. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/politics/598540/iwi-leader-mike-smith-asks-un-to-intervene-before-government-introduces-new-climate-law

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