For Everyone. On Whose Terms?

TE AO MĀORI | ISSUE SEVEN | MATARIKI

Written by Taigaga (Jamal) Rerecich (he/him) | @417mal | Contributing Writer

Matariki 2026 carries the theme Herenga Waka - For Everyone, and the question that theme invites, if we are being honest about the political moment it lands in, is whose "everyone" is being offered and on what terms.

The public holiday passed into law in 2022 without the support of National or ACT, both of whom now govern. In the same parliamentary term, those parties backed a Treaty Principles Bill that went to select committee, generated 300,000 submissions against it, and was defeated 112 to 11. The political appetite to relitigate the constitutional relationship between the Crown and Māori was real enough to produce legislation; the public appetite to stop it was larger than Parliament appeared to anticipate. Matariki 2026 lands inside that history, and the Herenga Waka framing asks something of us that the current political climate makes genuinely difficult to deliver.

The three pillars Matariki asks us to engage with: 

• Remembrance

• Celebration 

• Looking forward 

Each pillar carries political weight that this moment puts pressure on in a specific way.

Remembrance: requires naming what is being remembered and why it matters that we do. Matariki marks a whakapapa older than the Crown, and the people who submitted against the Treaty Principles Bill were not acting on sentiment alone; they were defending constitutional commitments built across decades of litigation, legislation, and negotiation that the bill would have fundamentally recharacterised. The bill's defeat did not dissolve the conditions that produced it. The same governing parties that backed it remain in office, and the work of institutional rollback has continued at the level of funding, co-governance arrangements, and the quiet redefinition of what Treaty partnership requires. 

Remembrance, in that context, carries a political obligation to resist the normalisation of that process.

Celebration: is where "for everyone" looks most settled, and where the gap between framing and reality is most worth examining. Matariki has become a genuinely anticipated moment in the national calendar, and that has real value. The difficulty is that Māori knowledge is treated as sufficient grounds for a public holiday while remaining actively contested in health policy, environmental law, and constitutional design — frameworks where its application would carry material weight rather than symbolic recognition. As Co-Tumuaki of Te Aro Ture, AUT's Māori Law Students' Society, I spend considerable time in the space between how institutions describe their relationship to Te Tiriti and how they behave when that relationship has a cost attached to it. 

For Māori students working inside those institutions, the celebration and the policy environment surrounding it are not separable.

Looking forward: is where the Herenga Waka theme has the most to offer, if it is taken seriously as a structural commitment rather than a seasonal one. A mooring line holds under pressure; it is not a gesture toward connection but a mechanism for maintaining it when the conditions work against you. The past parliamentary term tested what "for everyone" means when it has constitutional content, and 300,000 people answered that question with a clarity that the vote tally confirmed. 

The question of looking forward is whether the political institutions that govern this country are willing to meet that answer with something durable that treats Matariki, not as a resolved question dressed up as a holiday, but as an ongoing one that this year, more than any before it, demands honesty about what acknowledgement actually requires.