The gift you can’t refuse: How naming-as-performance is failing Maori culture, public infrastructure, and the Treaty alike.
- Grant McLachlan
- 1 day ago
- 18 min read
You are at Auckland Airport, pulling up Google Maps. You need to get to the station at the bottom of Queen Street — the old Britomart, the transit hub you have used a hundred times. What do you type? Most people still type “Britomart.” The official name is now Waitematā Station — named for a harbour that stretches from Riverhead to North Head, a geographic label so vast it could encompass a dozen stations. The sign above the stairwell tells you where you are culturally. It does not tell you where you are.
But, first, you need to take a bus to the Puhinui Railway Station, on the shores of Manukau Harbour. An hour by road at the opposite end of Auckland, Ngati Manuhiri (and Auckland Council) are pushing for Warkworth to be renamed Puhinui, already describing the town as 'Puhinui Warkworth.' Confused?
This is the defining problem with naming-as-performance: names designed to give lessons rather than locations. Over the past decade, New Zealand’s infrastructure naming process has been systematically redirected from its core function — helping people navigate shared spaces — toward a secondary function of performing Treaty partnership. The mechanism is the “gifted name,” and it is, in practice, a gift you cannot refuse.
The mechanism: The gift you can’t refuse
When Ngāti Manuhiri gifted the name Te Honohono ki Tai to the new 1.35-kilometre link road connecting State Highway 1 to Matakana Road north of Warkworth, Auckland Council’s own subdivision adviser explained why no consultation with other iwi had taken place. The gifting, he stated,
“carries with it an important level of respect to the recipient and as such should be considered a taonga. As a result, and in this instance, no consultation has been undertaken with other iwi.”
Te Honohono ki Tai is officially translated as “from the land to the sea” — a coastal-pathway name. The road connects a motorway to a roundabout. It does not go to the sea. It goes to Matakana Road.
The Rodney Local Board’s December 2022 meeting record shows that Wellsford member Colin Smith raised the objection that normal mana whenua consultation had been bypassed — not because he opposed the name, but because the standard process of offering all local iwi the opportunity to provide feedback had been waived in deference to the gifting itself. The gift had pre-empted democracy. The board adopted the name by majority.
Among those voting for adoption was newly elected Warkworth member Michelle Carmichael. Carmichael had entered local government partly on the strength of her role leading Fight the Tip — the community campaign against a proposed regional landfill in the Dome Valley — in which Ngāti Manuhiri had been a key ally. She had campaigned explicitly on her collaborative relationship with the iwi, and had taught at Tapora School on the shores of the Kaipara Harbour directly threatened by the proposed landfill. Supporting the iwi’s gifted road name was, from one angle, a natural extension of that alliance. From another angle, it was the currency of political debt.
What followed illustrates the political economy concealed beneath the language of cultural partnership. The Environment Court’s interim decision on the Dome Valley consent, released days before Christmas 2021, revealed that a decisive factor in conditionally granting resource consent to Waste Management was Ngāti Manuhiri’s reversal of its opposition to the landfill — a reversal secured after the iwi’s Kaitiaki Charitable Trust negotiated a deal worth $10 million, along with jobs and eventual ownership of the thousand-hectare site. Court documents confirmed the consent would likely have been refused without that reversal. The same iwi that had gifted the road name as a taonga — a cultural treasure, an act of partnership — had accepted commercial terms to support a landfill in its own ancestral waterways. Carmichael’s Fight the Tip colleague was quoted as saying she was “totally gutted.”
The naming, it turned out, was not the partnership. It was the receipt.
The names themselves: Mythology versus wayfinding
The naming logic for the four CRL stations reveals a consistent pattern: the most defensible name was assigned to the wrong station, the station with no formal Maori heritage was given one anyway, and a road name the city has used for a century and a half was rewritten in the process of being honoured. Working through the four stations in order of ascending damage makes the pattern plain.
Maungawhau — the Maori name for Mt Eden, applied to the new CRL station at Eden Terrace — translates as “mountain of the whau tree.” There is a volcano. There is a station beneath it. The name locates. It is the one unambiguously defensible choice in the set, and it sets a standard the other three fail to meet.
Britomart Station stands on reclaimed land at the foot of Queen Street — the precise site where the Waihorotiu Stream once met the Waitematā Harbour in a tidal estuary. It was that estuary, and the freshwater stream draining down the Queen Street valley from the Karangahape ridge, that led William Hobson to choose the site for Auckland’s founding settlement in 1840. The stream was the settlement’s primary freshwater source; its course shaped the route of Queen Street itself. The estuary was effectively at the front door of the station. If any station on the CRL warranted the name Waihorotiu, it was that one. Instead it was renamed Waitematā — after a harbour encompassing thirty kilometres of tidal waterway across the entire northern margin of the Auckland urban area. Britomart placed you precisely at the foot of Queen Street. Waitematā places you somewhere in the upper third of the North Island. The harbour already lends its name to a council ward, a ferry service, and a stadium. It did not need a train station.
The name that belonged at Britomart was instead given to the Albert Street station, now officially Te Waihorotiu. That station occupies a section of Hobson Ridge with no formal Maori place name of record. The Horotiu pa — from which the stream takes its name — stood on the eastern ridge of the Queen Street valley, the site now occupied by Albert Park. The station is on the western side of that valley. A more geographically honest name, if one were required, would be Te Ngahuwera — a pa that stood near the base of Hobson Ridge, considerably closer to where the Customhouse now stands. That name has at least a locational claim on the ground beneath the station. Te Waihorotiu does not. The stream, the pa it was named for, and the station named after the stream are in three different places.
Karanga-a-Hape station presents the most instructive case of all, because what is called a grammatical correction is in fact the replacement of a geographically grounded name with a single iwi’s mythological claim. The ridge has been called Karangahape since well before any European set foot in Auckland. Its documented function was as Te Ara o Karangahape — the Path of Karangahape — the portage route linking the Waitematā and Manukau harbours. Maori travelling that route ate shellfish as they walked, leaving middens along the ridge. The name records that physical reality: the path of shells. Multiple iwi over many centuries used the ridge and the name, each with their own understanding of its meaning.
The Hape legend is specifically Tainui. Hape was a founding tohunga of the Tainui iwi — left behind in Hawaiki because of his club foot, arriving by stingray ahead of the Tainui waka, standing on the ridge to call out a greeting as his people landed. It is a vivid story. It is also a story claimed by one iwi, attached to a ridge that was already named and already worn into the landscape by generations of travellers carrying shellfish between two harbours. The portage route predates Tainui arrival, which is dated to around 1350 AD.
“Karanga-a-Hape” — karanga (a calling) + a (of) + Hape — is a grammatical construction that makes the Tainui reading permanent and forecloses all others. The CRL did not restore the name Karangahape. It took one iwi’s mythological overlay, encoded it into a hyphenated compound, and described the result as a correction of a name the ridge had carried for centuries. The appropriate station name was never in doubt: Karangahape Railway Station, matching the road above it and honouring a name that belongs to no single iwi, because it was old before most of them arrived.
The most defensible name went to the wrong station. The name that belonged at Britomart was used to label an unmarked ridge on the other side of the valley. And a road name the city has used for a century and a half was rewritten in the act of being 'honoured.'
Rival mana: Who speaks for the land?
The gifting framework conceals a further problem: mana whenua is not a monolith. Auckland’s central rail corridor crosses the claimed territories of multiple iwi with overlapping and sometimes competing interests. The CRL Mana Whenua Forum comprises eight iwi — eight distinct groups with different oral histories, different territorial claims, and different cultural priorities. The names for the central Auckland stations emerged from that forum. The names for the three new southern stations — serving the Manukau area — came from a different group entirely.
Those southern names generated their own controversy, separate from the question of what they were. Ngāti Te Ata Waiohua gifted three station names using double-vowel spellings that reflect their distinctive dialect: Te Maketuu, Ngaakooroa, Paeraataa. The New Zealand Geographic Board — the statutory authority responsible for official place names — rejected the non-standard spelling and standardised them in accordance with conventional te reo orthography. The iwi described this as an imposition by a Wellington-based Crown entity that diminished their unique cultural identity. Their own gifted names, offered as taonga, were overwritten by a bureaucracy applying rules the gifting iwi explicitly rejected.
Here is the irony embedded in the process: the very mechanism that forecloses public consultation — the taonga-status of the gift — cannot protect the gift from institutional modification once received. Ordinary citizens cannot question gifted names because doing so disrespects the taonga. But the Geographic Board can rewrite them in the name of orthographic standards. One direction of scrutiny is forbidden. The other is statutory.
This is the political environment in which infrastructure naming decisions are actually made. Bureaucrats and project managers, confronted with competing iwi claims, overlapping territorial assertions, and disputes about whose spelling conventions apply to whose dialect, do not reach for the historical record. They reach for the path of least resistance. The gift that comes earliest, from the iwi most engaged with the project team, resolves the problem and allows the work to proceed. That it may privilege one group’s mythology over another group’s older and better-grounded claim is not their concern. Their concern is getting the consent signed and the concrete poured.
Meanwhile, Pakeha New Zealanders watching these disputes play out roll their eyes — not at te reo, not at the principle of cultural recognition, but at the spectacle of rival groups competing for naming rights over a bypass road or a train station while presenting that competition as sacred obligation. The eye-rolling is then cited as evidence of racism, which closes off the conversation and ensures the poor decision stands. The cycle is self-reinforcing: iwi bicker, officials capitulate to whoever engaged first, critics are labelled racist, and the result — a name chosen not for its historical accuracy but for its political convenience — is dressed in the language of Treaty partnership and cultural restoration.
The names are not the problem. The process that produces them is.
The naming right goes to whichever iwi engaged earliest with the project team — not the one with the deepest historical connection.
Other examples of gifted names
Roads, motorways and expressways
Ara Tūhono — Pūhoi to Warkworth motorway — "connecting pathway"
Te Ara Nui o Te Rangihaeata — Transmission Gully motorway, Wellington — "the great path of Te Rangihaeata" — a $1.25 billion motorway named after a Ngāti Toa chief best known for the 1843 Wairau Affray, in which Crown surveyors were killed
Te Ara Tuku o Te Rauparaha — Peka Peka to Ōtaki Expressway, Kāpiti Coast — "the path bequeathed by Te Rauparaha" — gifted by Ngāti Raukawa in honour of the same tribal confederation whose chief led the Wairau Affray
Te Ahu a Turanga — Manawatū Tararua Highway, SH3 replacement — "the cairn/altar of Turanga" — a Rangitāne ancestor who died on a nearby ridge; $824 million highway
Te Honohono ki Tai Road — Matakana Link Road, Warkworth — "the connection to the sea" — a 1.35km bypass road to a roundabout; does not go to the sea
Te Ara Kahikatea — Whakatu Arterial Link, Hastings — "the path of the kahikatea tree"
Walking and cycling paths
Te Ara Tupua — Wellington to Lower Hutt coastal shared path — "path of the ancient supernatural phenomena" — named for two mythological sea creatures said to have created Wellington Harbour; gifted by Taranaki Whānui
Ngā Ūranga ki Pito-One — Ngauranga to Petone section of the above — "the landing places to Petone" — note that this is a section name that is itself a full sentence, within a project that already has its own Māori name
Tupua Horo Nuku — Eastern Bays shared path, Lower Hutt — "the supernatural being that moves swiftly across the land" — again referencing the same harbour-creation mythology as Te Ara Tupua, applying it to a different project in the same corridor
Te Ara o Whareroa — shared path through Queen Elizabeth Park, Kāpiti — "the path of Whareroa" — Whareroa meaning "long house"
Auckland CRL railway stations
Waitematā Railway Station — former Britomart — "sparkling waters" — the name of the entire harbour, applied to one underground platform
Te Waihorotiu Railway Station — former Aotea — "the water of Horotiu" — a stream named after a pā on the opposite side of the valley
Karanga-a-Hape Railway Station — "the calling of Hape" — a specific Tainui mythological construction replacing the geographically grounded and historically multi-layered "Karangahape"
Maungawhau Railway Station — former Mt Eden — "mountain of the whau tree" — the one unambiguously defensible CRL name; station is beneath the volcano
Ngākōroa Railway Station — new, south Auckland — "the stream of long eels"
Paerātā Railway Station — new, south Auckland — "the flat rock" or "the palisade at the boundary"
Te Maketuu, Ngaakooroa, Paeraataa — three Manukau-area stations gifted by Ngāti Te Ata Waiohua in double-vowel dialect spelling, then standardised by the NZGB — meaning "the standing post," "the long eeling stream," and "the flat rock" respectively — the gifting iwi then objected that the standardisation erased their dialect, so even the gifted names were overwritten
Auckland Eastern Busway stations and structures
Te Taha Wai, Koata, Pōhatu — three bus stations; Rā Hihi, Tī Rākau, Taupaepae — flyover and two bridges — meaning respectively "the water's edge," "the heart of the cabbage tree," "stones," and structures named "rays of the sun," "the cabbage tree," and "to meet or escort your visitors" — all gifted by Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki and Ngaati Whanaunga; someone requesting an OIA for what was paid for the gifting received the response that no payment was made — the gifting was free, the signage and rebranding was not
Government agencies (Māori-primary names, most since reversed to English-first)
Waka Kotahi — NZ Transport Agency — "one vessel" — as Winston Peters observed, no one has yet seen a waka on the motorway
Oranga Tamariki — Ministry for Children — "wellbeing of children" — an agency that has repeatedly been found to be failing the children in its care, including through the controversial practice of uplift
Kāinga Ora — Homes and Communities — "healthy homes" — an agency subject to multiple reports of failing to provide healthy or habitable housing
Te Whatu Ora — Health New Zealand — "the weaving of wellness" — disestablished and replaced under the current government
Te Aka Whai Ora — Māori Health Authority — "the vine seeking wellness" — disestablished after less than two years
Ara Poutama Aotearoa — Department of Corrections — "pathway of excellence" — for a prison system in which Māori comprise 52 percent of inmates
Manatū Taonga — Ministry for Culture and Heritage — "ministry of treasures"
Te Tāhuhu o te Mātauranga — Ministry of Education — "the ridgepole of knowledge" — a ridgepole is the central beam of a traditional meeting house; this is eleven syllables for "Education"
Whaikaha — Ministry of Disabled People — "pursuing strength"
Aroturuki Tamariki — Independent Children's Monitor — "to watch over/inspect children"
Mana Mokopuna — Children's Commission — "the mana of grandchildren/descendants"
Rau Paenga — Crown Infrastructure Delivery — "many threshold stones" — the paenga being the foundation stones at the base of a meeting house wall; applied to a construction delivery agency
Toitū Te Whenua — Land Information New Zealand — "the land endures"
Te Waihanga — New Zealand Infrastructure Commission — "the construction" or "the builder"
Public buildings and civic spaces
Tūranga — Christchurch City Library — "standing place" or "anchor point" — no reference to books, reading, or its function
Te Toka Tumai — Auckland City Hospital — "the rock that stands firm" — as the Herald noted, many patients receiving correspondence from this organisation are vulnerable and frightened and need clear information, not a metaphor
Te Komititanga — civic square outside Waitematā Station, Auckland — "to mix or merge"
Parallels in compulsory culture
New Zealand is not alone in this. The Australian parallel is instructive — and contains an irony so deep it has gone largely unexamined.
Welcome to Country ceremonies, now effectively mandatory at public events, government functions, school assemblies, and sporting occasions across Australia, were formalised in 1976 when Richard Walley and Ernie Dingo developed a ceremony for visitors at the Perth International Arts Festival. The performers demanding to be officially welcomed onto the land before they would perform were Maori and Cook Islander dancers — Polynesians. Aboriginal Australians are Melanesian, their ancestry tracing back to migrations some fifty thousand years earlier. The cultural expectation that visitors must be formally welcomed onto traditional territory came not from Aboriginal tradition but from Polynesian protocol imported by guests who would not otherwise take the stage. A ceremony now presented as ancient Aboriginal custom was, at its genesis, a cross-cultural transplant.
Walley, a Nyoongar man, obtained permission from his elders and performed the welcome. A genuinely generous act of intercultural accommodation then became, over the following decades, a mandatory national ritual. Both Walley and Dingo have stated that the ceremony should never be mandatory — that compulsion would destroy its meaning. It has been made compulsory anyway, by the very institutions that describe it as sacred.
The haka follows the same arc. For most of the All Blacks’ history, the haka was performed on overseas tours — a challenge issued in unfamiliar territory, carrying the weight of occasion. It was not until 1986 that it became a fixture at home matches. Former All Black Kees Meeuws said directly that the haka “has lost its mana. It has become a showpiece. They should do it at certain Test matches but not all.” Colin Meads echoed the concern. When flashmob hakas proliferated during the 2011 Rugby World Cup, Maori leaders described them as “inappropriate” and “a bastardisation.” Ka Mate — the most performed of all haka — has been described by Maori cultural commentators as “the most maligned, the most abused of all haka” and the most globally recognised form of cultural appropriation. These are Maori voices speaking about what institutional overdeployment does to ceremonial culture.
In every case, a practice with genuine cultural weight is institutionalised into a mandatory pre-event ritual. Repetition hollows it. The thing being performed stops being culture and starts being protocol.
The te reo paradox
In 2021 the Broadcasting Standards Authority received a record number of complaints about te reo use on radio and television — five times the volume of the previous comparable period. In March that year, the authority announced it would no longer consider such complaints, stating that te reo use is “an editorial decision for broadcasters” and not a standards issue. Six months later, the Human Rights Commission followed, announcing it too would cease accepting individual complaints about te reo use.
The closure of two independent formal complaint pathways was celebrated as progress. An AUT communication studies lecturer described the BSA decision as the authority “not pandering to racism anymore.” A Green Party MP said the complaints deserved to be treated “with the respect they deserve, which is none.” Citizens exercising a formal democratic right of complaint were characterised as racists whose concerns deserved contempt.
One detail in the BSA’s announcement is worth noting. Its chief executive acknowledged there were no Maori or te reo speakers on the panel that made the decision. A body without Māori representation decided — unanimously, in one direction — that all public concern about Maori language policy in broadcasting was inadmissible. The institution’s own demographic composition was invisible to itself throughout.
What neither body acknowledged was that Te Mangai Pāho — the government’s own Maori broadcasting funding agency — was simultaneously warning internally that if te reo deployment in mainstream media moved too fast, a backlash could undermine language revival. The agencies closing off complaints were suppressing the same signal the funding agency was tracking. The concern was not that critics were wrong. The concern was that critics might be heard.
The actual data on te reo learning complicates the suppression narrative further. Enrolments in adult te reo courses have risen 76 percent over the past decade. The majority of learners are now non-Maori. Speaker numbers are increasing. The organic, voluntary uptake of te reo is working. What the institutional deployment of te reo in road signs, government agency names, and broadcast bulletins has produced is not a bilingual population. It has produced a polarised one: some people inspired, others antagonised, and the antagonists increasingly labelled racist for responses that are partly about pace, partly about function, and in many cases not about the language itself at all.
The Treaty question
The Treaty of Waitangi is described as a partnership between Maori and the Crown, acting on behalf of all New Zealanders. A genuine partnership involves reciprocal obligations and mutual benefit. It does not require one party to waive scrutiny as a condition of the relationship.
The current naming-as-performance framework produces something quite different. One party holds unilateral cultural authority over shared infrastructure — exercised through a gifting mechanism that forecloses consultation, administered by a statutory board whose decisions cannot be formally challenged on democratic grounds, and validated by political relationships between project teams and whichever iwi happened to be most engaged during the planning process. The 85 percent of Aucklanders who are not mana whenua paid for the City Rail Link, use those stations daily, and have no standing in what they are called. Their taxes, their rates, their infrastructure — but not their names.
A genuinely Treaty-consistent naming process would look different. It would produce authentic Maori names where historical connection is real and locally meaningful — as at Maungawhau, where the name matches the landscape. It would produce dual names where both communities have legitimate claims. And it would produce English names where infrastructure is new and the Maori connection is confected from metaphor and mythology. That process would actually honour the Treaty. What we have instead is a performance of Treaty partnership that serves institutional relationship management and iwi political leverage rather than the public interest or the language itself.
If the Treaty is genuinely a partnership, unilateral naming rights are not partnership. They are one party’s cultural priority imposed on shared assets without consent.
The suppression of scrutiny and the hypocrites who enforce it
Critics of this system are routinely described as racist. The accusation forecloses exactly the scrutiny the system cannot afford. But it is worth pausing to examine who is doing the accusing, and what they are defending.
The BSA and the HRC — the bodies that sequentially closed off formal complaint pathways — did so without Maori representation on their decision-making panels. The institutions that describe objectors as racists are themselves products of a Pakeha-dominated structure making unilateral decisions about which public concerns are admissible. A Pakeha-majority institution decided that Pakeha-majority concerns about language policy were racist. The institution’s own composition was invisible to it throughout.
The New Zealand Geographic Board — which validates gifted names as official — overrode Ngāti Te Ata Waiohua’s double-vowel station names on orthographic grounds. The iwi called that a colonial imposition. They were right. But the same geographic board is a guardian of cultural heritage when it replaces English names, and a colonial imposer when it corrects Maori spelling. The label shifts with the direction of the action.
The Ngāti Manuhiri case is the sharpest illustration of all. The same iwi whose gift of Te Honohono ki Tai Road was defended as a taonga requiring unconditional acceptance accepted a $10 million commercial deal to reverse its opposition to a landfill in its own ancestral waterways. The cultural authority that made the road name sacred was the same cultural authority that monetised its consent to compromise the Hoteo River and Kaipara Harbour. Critics of the naming gift were racist. The iwi accepting money to support a Chinese-backed waste operation in its own rohe was exercising its Treaty rights.
The argument from cultural authenticity requires the culture to be consistent. It is not. The NZGB overwrites iwi dialect. Iwi dispute each other’s territorial claims over the same infrastructure. The naming right goes to whoever built the best project relationship, not the deepest historical connection. Ernie Dingo and Richard Walley — whose ceremony is now mandatory across Australian public life — both said it should never be compulsory. The haka’s own practitioners describe its current form as a bastardisation. And a Polynesian cultural expectation triggered the institutionalisation of what is now presented as an ancient Aboriginal tradition.
None of this is consistent. None of it is what it claims to be. Pointing that out is not racism. It is journalism.
The name you actually use
Return to the airport. You type Britomart, because that is the name your city knows. Google Maps, helpfully, still returns the result. The station knows what it is being asked.
The names on those signs will be forgotten by the majority of people who use the infrastructure daily, defaulted back to K Road, Britomart, the Matakana roundabout — not because New Zealanders are hostile to te reo, but because names that do not locate do not stick. And names that do not stick cannot do the cultural work they were designed to perform. The gift is refused every day by everyone who types the old name into their phone.
Genuine language revival happens when people choose to use a language because it means something to them, not because an institution has made the alternative inadmissible. The kōhanga reo movement, the adult learning boom, the surge in non-Maori enrolments — these are organic, and they are working. The performance of partnership on road signs and train station walls is not language revival. It is institutional theatre. And the audience has stopped applauding.
The gift you can’t refuse turns out to be the gift that most people don’t keep.
