You know something is wrong with a country when its Indigenous culture is globally hot but locally not.
I was reminded of that watching rugby recently. Among the thousands of supporters was a sign that captured something we sometimes seem incapable of recognising here at home: came for the haka, stayed for the rugby.
Think about that.
Thousands of kilometres from Aotearoa, haka is not regarded as some irritating cultural imposition. It is spectacle, identity and attraction. It announces New Zealand to the world before a ball has even been kicked.
People know us because of it.
And yet back home, we can spend an extraordinary amount of political energy arguing about whether there is too much Māori language, too much tikanga, too much Treaty, too much Māori.
There is something deeply wrong with that picture.
Hollywood heard what some of us refuse to hear
Earlier this year I watched Project Hail Mary, the Ryan Gosling blockbuster.
What stayed with me was Pō Atarau, performed by the Tūrakina Māori Girls’ College Choir.
This was not a modern recording commissioned for Hollywood. It came from Turakina Sings, recorded in 1976. Nearly half a century later, Hollywood filmmakers searching the world for music to carry one of their film’s most emotional moments found their answer here, in te ao Māori.
The film’s music supervisor said the recording became a defining reference point for what they wanted the soundtrack to achieve — something capable of communicating across cultures even when audiences did not understand the language.
There is something magnificent about that.
There is also something bittersweet.
Hollywood can hear the beauty in te reo Māori.
International audiences can feel it.
But in the country where that language was born, we are still subjected to arguments about whether it belongs on road signs, in government departments, in schools, at public events or even in the mouths of public servants during their working day.
Globally hot. Locally not.
We have been here before
Some of us are young enough to remember the impact of Te Māori.
When Te Māori opened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984, our taonga were not presented merely as archaeological curiosities from some vanished people.
Māori culture stood before the world as a living culture.
The exhibition went on to St Louis, San Francisco and Chicago and attracted more than 621,000 visitors during its American tour. When it returned home, around 917,500 people saw it across Aotearoa — an extraordinary proportion of the population at the time.
Te Māori helped change the relationship between museums and Māori. Te Papa has described it as a major shift in the way Māori were consulted and involved in presenting their own taonga and culture.
The world understood something important.
Māori culture wasn’t a relic.
It was alive.
It was sophisticated.
It was powerful.
It was ours.
Four decades later, we should not still be arguing about whether Māori identity somehow diminishes New Zealand identity.
Māori culture is one of the things that makes New Zealand identifiable in the first place.
Glasgow heard it too
Then came the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
Again we saw athletes carrying te reo Māori confidently onto an international stage.
Think about the journey represented by that.
There was a time when generations of Māori were discouraged and punished for speaking their language.
Now our athletes can stand before international audiences and speak it with confidence.
That should be celebrated as a national achievement.
Not a Māori achievement alone.
A New Zealand achievement.
Because every time te reo Māori is heard overseas, every haka is performed, every Māori artist tours internationally and every visitor experiences manaakitanga here, the whole country benefits.
And yes, Māori culture makes money
Perhaps we need to say this in the language politics understands best: money.
Māori tourism contributed $1.2 billion to GDP in 2023, with 3,595 Māori tourism businesses employing more than 15,000 people.
And international visitors are not indifferent to Māori culture.
In the year to December 2025, 24.2 percent of international visitors went somewhere significant to Māori, 19.1 percent saw Māori artefacts, arts or crafts, 13.2 percent visited a marae and 12.4 percent watched a live Māori performance.
Almost 90 percent of international visitors who experienced Māori culture said they enjoyed it. Even more tellingly, 57.6 percent wanted more of it.
Read that again.
They wanted more.
International visitors arrive wanting to encounter something they cannot experience anywhere else on Earth.
They can find English-speaking societies elsewhere.
They can find mountains elsewhere.
They can find beaches elsewhere.
But there is only one Aotearoa.
And there is only one tangata whenua of Aotearoa.
That cultural distinction has economic value, international brand value and enormous soft power.
At a time when New Zealand desperately needs productivity, exports, investment and tourism dollars, denigrating one of the country’s most internationally distinctive assets is not merely culturally offensive.
It is economically stupid.
We market Māori abroad and fight Māori at home
That is the contradiction I struggle with.
We are happy to put haka in the tourism advertisement.
Happy to put Māori designs on the aircraft.
Happy to use Māori imagery when selling New Zealand to investors.
Happy when international broadcasters show our athletes performing haka.
Happy when Hollywood discovers a Māori waiata.
Happy when visitors spend money experiencing Māori culture.
But back home?
Suddenly te reo becomes controversial.
Suddenly Māori names are supposedly confusing.
Suddenly tikanga is political.
Suddenly Treaty obligations are divisive.
Suddenly Māori asserting that our culture and language deserve protection are accused of dividing the country.
You cannot commodify our culture on the international stage and then condemn its expression at home.
You cannot sell Māori to the world on Monday and tell Māori to know their place on Tuesday.
Who exactly is causing the division?
That brings me to perhaps the most offensive part of this debate.
Māori are repeatedly told that we are creating division.
By speaking our language.
By defending Te Tiriti.
By using Māori names.
By demanding equitable outcomes.
By expecting our culture to occupy public space in the country from which it comes.
That is not division.
Existing as Māori is not an act of political provocation.
Speaking te reo Māori is not an attack on somebody who speaks English.
A bilingual road sign does not steal anyone’s identity.
A haka does not diminish anybody else’s culture.
Acknowledging Te Tiriti does not erase anybody’s whakapapa.
And disagreement over Māori policy does not justify importing racial grievance into mainstream politics.
We should be especially vigilant when political rhetoric drifts towards ideas historically associated with racial superiority or ethno-nationalism. Those ideas deserve scrutiny regardless of who advances them.
Calling that out is not divisive.
Normalising it would be.
Then there is the extraordinary English-language debate
There is another irony.
Parliament has just passed legislation giving English statutory official-language recognition. The Government’s own legislation acknowledged that English was already New Zealand’s de facto official language, overwhelmingly used across Parliament, the courts and government communications, and did not require legislative protection in order to continue being used.
English is not endangered in New Zealand.
Nobody needs to fight to hear English at the supermarket.
Nobody worries their children will be unable to find an English-speaking teacher.
Nobody has to launch a national revitalisation strategy to stop English disappearing.
Te reo Māori has faced precisely that existential struggle.
There is nothing wrong with English. It is part of modern Aotearoa and connects us with much of the world.
But there is an obvious difference between recognising a dominant language and revitalising an Indigenous language that colonisation pushed towards extinction.
Pretending those circumstances are equivalent does not create equality.
It erases history.
Imagine recognising what the world already sees
What frustrates me most is the wasted opportunity.
Imagine if instead of treating Māori culture as a battlefield, we treated it as the extraordinary national advantage it is.
Imagine every New Zealander leaving school comfortable with basic te reo Māori.
Imagine iwi tourism and Māori creative industries receiving investment proportionate to their international potential.
Imagine our cultural diplomacy becoming one of New Zealand’s great foreign-policy assets.
Imagine kapa haka, Māori design, waiata, film, fashion, gaming, storytelling, mātauranga and digital content reaching global audiences at scale.
There is evidence for that opportunity already. The Māori arts and creative sector contributed about $2.1 billion to GDP in the year to March 2025.
This is not a niche.
It is culture.
It is identity.
It is employment.
It is intellectual property.
It is tourism.
It is exports.
It is brand New Zealand.
And most importantly, it belongs here whether or not it produces a single dollar.
Stop apologising for who we are
I have had enough of Māori being expected to defend the legitimacy of our own culture in our own country.
Enough of te reo being turned into an electoral football.
Enough of Māori identity being useful when somebody wants to sell New Zealand overseas but inconvenient when tangata whenua ask for respect at home.
The world is not embarrassed by Māori culture.
The world is fascinated by it.
Hollywood hears our waiata.
Rugby crowds wait for our haka.
International visitors seek out our marae, taonga and performances.
Our athletes carry te reo onto global stages.
Te Māori showed generations ago that our culture could walk confidently into the greatest institutions in the world without surrendering an ounce of its mana.
Maybe the problem was never whether the world was ready for Māori culture.
Maybe the question is why, after all these years, parts of New Zealand politics still aren’t.
That is the disgrace.
And we should have the courage to say so.
Our culture is not the cause of division. Our language is not a threat. Our whakapapa is not a political inconvenience.
Māori culture is one of the great things Aotearoa has given the world.
It is about time we treated it with the same admiration at home.
Globally hot should never mean locally not.
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https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/m%C4%81ori-tourism-driving-economic-growth?utm_source=chatgpt.com
