A Tiriti-Based Critique of the 2024 Needs based service provision Cabinet Circular

In late 2024, the Coalition Government issued Cabinet Circular CO (24)5, directing that public services should be prioritised “on the basis of need, not race.” At first glance this framing may appear benign—even progressive. Yet on closer inspection it represents a profound mischaracterisation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, an erasure of Māori rights, and a recentring of monocultural authority under the guise of equality.

Te Tiriti never used the term race. That concept emerged from nineteenth-century European thought which sought to rank human value on a racialised hierarchy. In Aotearoa, the language of “one people” has long been mobilised to demand Māori assimilation into settler institutions. The Cabinet Circular continues this tradition, substituting the relational promises of Te Tiriti with a colour-blind rhetoric that collapses difference into sameness.

By recasting equity as “meeting need,” the Circular not only delegitimises Māori authority but also imports neoliberal economic rationalism into service design. Needs testing becomes a mechanism for rationing, surveillance, and ultimately retrenchment of culturally distinct provision. The sleight of hand is that race is dismissed as illegitimate, while the very real consequences of systemic racism and colonisation are ignored.

Using Discursive Tiriti Analysis, my co-authors – Dominic O’Sullivan, Grant Berghan and Tim McCreanor - and I demonstrated how the Circular privileges Crown narratives while silencing Māori voices. Strategic silences abound: the absence of rangatiratanga in policy design, the marginalisation of mana motuhake, and the denial of ongoing colonial harms. The Circular requires targeted services for Māori to jump through higher evidentiary and fiscal hurdles than generic programmes, reinforcing a one-size-fits-all approach that perpetuates inequities

The Circular’s mantra that “we are all one people” mistakes equality for sameness. But sameness denies historical context, differential power, and the constitutional arrangements of Te Tiriti. Substantive equality demands recognition of tino rangatiratanga and the redistribution of authority, not its erasure. The disestablishment of Te Aka Whai Ora and the attacks on kaupapa Māori services illustrate how “needs-based” rhetoric functions to undermine Māori health and wellbeing.

Te Tiriti envisaged a relationship of balance: kāwanatanga constrained by, and co-existing with, tino rangatiratanga. The Circular’s rejection of Tiriti obligations and its narrow invocation of international human rights instruments work to collapse that balance. What is required is not the abandonment of targeted services, but their expansion—grounded in whakapapa, equity, and Māori authority.

As scholars and practitioners, we must remain vigilant to these rhetorical manoeuvres. “Needs not race” is not neutral policy language; it is a political project designed to re-embed monoculturalism. A Tiriti-based future demands that we see through such framings, re-centre Māori authority, and pursue equity not as sameness but as justice.

Full paper available here.

Citation: Came, H., O’Sullivan, D. T., Berghan, G., & McCreanor, T. “Needs not race”: A discursive Tiriti analysis of the 2024 New Zealand cabinet circular on needs-based service provision. Ethnicities, 0(0), 14687968251381847. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968251381847