Is Nick Smith race-baiting over Abel Tasman?
- Grant McLachlan
- 15 hours ago
- 3 min read
The Nelson mayor says he is defending a national park from a bill he calls the largest removal of protected land in New Zealand's history. His own post, and his own record, leave out the parts that complicate that claim.
Nick Smith wants Nelson to sign a petition to save Abel Tasman National Park from what he calls, in a Facebook post viewed more than the average council press release, the largest chunk of national park “ever removed from permanent protection.”
It is a serious claim from a serious man: Nelson’s mayor, a former Minister of Conservation, and National’s MP for Nelson for 24 years. It also leaves out almost everything a reader would need to judge it for themselves.
Start with what the Te Here ā Nuku (Nelson Tenths) Bill actually does.
Attorney-General Chris Bishop is adamant it is not a Treaty settlement. It is the tail end of sixteen years of litigation in which the Supreme Court, in 2017, and the High Court, in 2024 found, respectively, that the Crown had been holding land on trust for the descendants of Nelson’s original owners, and had never reserved the “tenth” of the settlement block it promised them in the 1840s.
The Crown did not choose to hand the land back. The courts told it to.
To his credit, Smith’s conservation record in the park is real. As Minister of Conservation in the 1990s and 2010s he backed the Tonga Island Marine Reserve, the crowd-funded purchase of the Awaroa Spit, and the Project Janszoon habitat restoration.
He is not a man faking an interest in Abel Tasman to make a political point. That makes the framing of this particular post worth taking seriously — and worth checking, rather than simply accepting.
Smith accepts all of that.
“I strongly support the resolution,” he wrote.
His real objection is narrower: that of the roughly 3000 hectares changing hands, 1723 hectares sit inside Abel Tasman National Park, and the Bill lets the new owner, Te Here-ā-Nuku Trust, eventually carve pockets of coastline out of the National Parks Act’s permanent protection.
That is a genuine, specific point about conservation law — the kind of thing section 4 of the National Parks Act 1980 was written to guard against. It is not, on its face, a comment about who should own the land.
But notice what the post leaves out.
It does not mention the Supreme Court finding, the High Court finding, or that it was the Crown — not the Trust — found to have broken faith with a 180-year-old promise.
It calls the transfer the biggest hit ever taken by a national park without mentioning the land was never rightfully the Crown’s to protect in the first place.
And, suspiciously, it is built around a petition, launched in an election year, timed to a submission window Parliament itself compressed to six days.
None of that requires manufacturing a grievance out of nothing, which is what race-baiting usually means.
The template that it fits is dog-whistle politics: language calibrated to sound like ordinary conservation concern to most readers, while resonating with a narrower audience on an older and more loaded story about land being taken from Pakeha ownership.
Smith was a sitting National MP, and briefly deputy leader, through the Orewa speech and the 2005 Iwi-Kiwi election, when his own party learned exactly how well that resonance performs at the ballot box.
Thirty years in Parliament is long enough to know which phrases do that work without ever mentioning race.
The Bill’s cross-party support — introduced by National’s own Attorney-General, and welcomed, with reservations, by Labour’s Willie Jackson — shows the government is not running a race-based scare campaign. It does not show that one mayor, drafting his own post, isn’t reaching for a frequency he knows carries.
The more useful comparison isn’t to race-baiting. It’s to Smith’s own habit of picking a fight he can win while leaving out the parts that complicate it.
He resigned as a minister in 2012 for using ACC letterhead to help a friend’s claim.
He told Parliament he was cracking down on the country’s worst-performing councils for resource-consent delays while a 1000-page complaint against one of them sat in his own ministry, given a “low priority.”
He resigned again in 2021, after a bullying investigation colleagues called Parliament’s worst-kept secret.
A man with that record does not need a race angle to reach for a petition and a frightening number.
He has spent three decades learning that a simple, alarming claim will always outrun a complicated, accurate one — and this time, inconveniently for him, the complicated version is the one a court has already settled.
