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Higher education confers significant private benefits for graduates, such as higher earnings and rates of employment, and also generates wider social benefits for communities and society. Māori and Pacific Peoples (Pacific) are under- represented and underserved within Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa) universities, and experience persistent and entrenched inequities across education, health, justice and other social domains. 

Kaupapa Māori models now required to reduce disparities and measure outcomes.

The government departmental and judicial system for making decisions about the care and protection of tamariki Māori when their whānau are in crisis needs urgent societal attention. A Kaupapa Māori approach is required to make the best use of the opportunities available in the recently amended legislation to avoid the further systemic undermining of Māori and their whānau.

The need to reorient policy to cultivate more humane understandings of whānau in need.

 Aotearoa New Zealand is now the fifth most unequal economy in the OECD. To highlight the human cost of this situation, the concept of “the precariat” offers more informed and contextualised understandings of the situations of socio-economically marginalised people in Aotearoa. Significant societal and policy change is required for Māori whānau to be truly free from the cycle of precarity.

Māori have repeatedly stressed that wealth and well-being is not just about bank balances.  Instead for tangata whenua it is defined in terms of the quality of whānau relationships, whanau cohesion, and our children’s capacity to thrive.  NPM’s fifth Te Arotahi paper asserts that tikanga Māori values must form a core component of teaching financial management skills to our whānau and communities.  As we seek as a nation to ensure prosperity and well-being for all, the unique concepts of wealth that are defined by tikanga need to be valued equally with the practical skills of

Iwi/hapū (tribe/subtribe) governance institutions are increasingly asserting their rangatiratanga (autonomy) to manage climate change risks and meet the well-being of whānau (family)/hapū/ iwi. However, there is a shortage of specific guidance for whānau/hapū/iwi with respect to climate change adaptation and mitigation. We provide a commentary about risk and uncertainty, knowledge gaps, and options for climate change mitigation and adaptation for whānau/hapū/iwi.

This paper calls on government to pay even closer attention to the issues of whānau and whakapapa within the criminal justice system and advocates for the development of a new paradigm of transformative justice based on whānau development that values tino rangatiratanga and tikanga Māori.

In Whānau Ora and Imprisonment Sir Kim Workman asserts that “If the principle of tino rangatiratanga is fully acknowledged, then the development of a Kaupapa Māori justice system is an achievable outcome.”