Let's Be Clear About What "Referendum Now" Actually Is
A rebuttal to Hobson's Pledge's latest campaign — through a socialist, working class lens
This campaign — referendumnow.nz — is run by Hobson’s Pledge. Full stop. Don’t let the polished website fool you. Don Brash’s outfit has been trying to dismantle Māori political representation for years. This isn’t grassroots democracy. This is class warfare dressed up in the language of “equal citizenship.”
Let’s break down the sleight of hand.
THE “MMP FIXED IT” LIE The site claims MMP solved Māori representation, so the seats are now redundant. This is a half-truth — which is the most dangerous kind of lie.
Yes, more Māori MPs sit in Parliament today. But who do they answer to? Party lists are controlled by party hierarchies — predominantly Pākehā, predominantly capital-friendly. The Māori electorates are one of the only structures where Māori communities have direct, unmediated electoral leverage over their representatives. You can’t vote a list MP out. You can vote out your electorate MP.
Representation in numbers is not the same as structural power. A socialist understands this. The bosses have always been happy to put brown and women faces in high places — as long as the system underneath doesn’t change.
“LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE” IS NOT DEMOCRACY — IT’S MAJORITARIANISM
There is a reason we don’t put minority rights to majority votes. We learned this the hard way, through centuries of struggle.
Should we have had a referendum on women’s suffrage — where only men voted? Should Jim Crow laws have been settled by a Southern majority vote? The logic of “let everyone decide on the rights of a specific group” has a name: the tyranny of the majority. It is not democracy. It is democracy’s enemy.
Te Tiriti o Waitangi established a relationship — a contract — between Māori and the Crown. Māori did not cede sovereignty in 1840 to have it put to a popular vote in 2026 by a coalition government that has spent the past two years systematically dismantling every Treaty-based protection it can find.
We have already seen exactly what happens when you force a majority vote on indigenous representation rights. In October 2025, 24 out of 42 New Zealand councils abolished their Māori wards after this government legislated to force binding polls on all councils that had established Māori wards since 2021. This was a coordinated campaign. ACT Party candidates worked directly alongside Hobson’s Pledge, running ads featuring Māori people without their consent. The result? Rural majorities voted to strip Māori representation from local government, even though a nationwide majority (54 to 46 percent) actually favoured keeping the wards. That is majoritarianism. Not democracy.
And in Australia in 2023, the same playbook was used against the First Nations Voice to Parliament referendum. Despite overwhelming evidence that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians suffer profound structural disadvantage, more than 60 percent of Australians voted No — denying Indigenous peoples a constitutional right to be heard on matters affecting them. The No campaign was funded and amplified by right-wing networks, using deliberate confusion and fear about “special rights.” The result: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples remain, as legal scholar Professor Megan Davis wrote, a group for whom laws can be made with no effective form of political representation through which they can be heard.
THIS IS A GLOBAL PLAYBOOK — AND WORKERS NEED TO RECOGNISE IT
What Hobson’s Pledge is doing here is not unique. It is part of an international pattern of nationalist, capital-serving political movements using the language of democracy, equality and “one law for all” to roll back indigenous rights. Let’s name them:
BRAZIL — JAIR BOLSONARO (2019–2022)
Bolsonaro explicitly pledged during his 2018 campaign that he would not demarcate “one more centimetre” of indigenous land, and he delivered. His administration gutted FUNAI, Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency, by removing experienced staff, appointing military officers and evangelical missionaries to key positions, and halting all processes to identify and demarcate indigenous territories. The result was catastrophic: record indigenous land invasions, killings, child mortality, and the worst invasion of Yanomami territory in 30 years — with approximately 20,000 illegal miners flooding the territory. Human Rights Watch documented systematic, policy-level attacks on indigenous rights. The APIB (Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil) formally submitted a communication to the International Criminal Court in 2021 documenting crimes against humanity. The language was different from Hobson’s Pledge — Bolsonaro talked about “development” and “modernisation” — but the logic was identical: indigenous rights are obstacles to the nation; the majority economy should come first.
AUSTRALIA — THE VOICE TO PARLIAMENT NO CAMPAIGN (2023)
In October 2023, Australians voted 60 to 40 percent to reject a constitutional amendment that would have established an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament — a body that would have advised Parliament on matters affecting Indigenous people. This was not a radical proposal. It was a listening mechanism. The No campaign, backed by conservative and right-wing networks, successfully framed it as “divisive,” “risky,” and granting “special rights.” Research from the Australian National University found that No voters were more likely to believe that land rights and native title were unfair, and that if Indigenous Australians “tried harder” they could be as well off as non-Indigenous Australians. Those are not neutral political opinions. They are the ideological building blocks of settler colonial capitalism: if you’re poor and dispossessed, it’s your fault. The result of the No vote was that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples remain a group for whom Parliament can make laws with no protected right to be heard on those laws.
NEW ZEALAND — THE ACT-NATIONAL-NZ FIRST COALITION (2023–PRESENT)
This is the closest analogue to the current Referendum Now campaign, and it is happening right now. Since taking office in December 2023, this government has: abolished the Māori Health Authority; directed Pharmac to stop applying Treaty principles to funding decisions; legislated to force binding polls on Māori wards in local government; fast-tracked legislation that bypasses Waitangi Tribunal obligations; and introduced a Treaty Principles Bill (since withdrawn under pressure, but the intent was laid bare) that would have redefined Treaty principles to mean “one law for all” — i.e., no Treaty obligations at all. The ACT Party’s position, as stated by David Seymour as early as 2018, is to simply abolish the Māori seats outright — no referendum needed. NZ First’s Winston Peters has introduced a Member’s Bill in February 2026 to hold a binding referendum on Māori seats at this year’s general election. Hobson’s Pledge is the ideological and organisational ground crew for all of this.
HUNGARY — VIKTOR ORBÁN AND FIDESZ (2010–2026)
Orbán’s Hungary is the template for what happens when nationalist-capitalist governments get sustained power. Under the banner of “illiberal democracy,” his government systematically dismantled minority rights — particularly for Roma people — while rewriting the constitution and electoral laws to entrench Fidesz’s power. Hungary’s minority parliamentary system, while it technically guaranteed seats for recognised minorities, was structured so that minority voters who used their minority vote forfeited their right to vote for any political party. Roma people, Hungary’s most marginalised community, had no realistic path to full parliamentary representation under this system. The European Court of Human Rights found violations of the right to free elections. The lesson: nationalist governments don’t need to outright ban minority representation — they can simply structure the system so it is permanently toothless.
USA — PROJECT 2025 AND THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION (2025–PRESENT)
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for the second Trump administration, explicitly targets tribal sovereignty and indigenous rights. Cultural Survival documented that the first year of Trump’s second term caused “deep harm through policies and actions that erode the rights, dignity, and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples.” This includes ICE detention of Native citizens, gutting funding to Tribal programmes, and treating Native sovereignty as an obstacle to resource extraction. The framework is always the same: indigenous rights are “special treatment,” national unity requires a single standard, and the market should decide land use.
The pattern is not a coincidence. It is a coordinated international project of nationalist capitalism, and Hobson’s Pledge is Aotearoa’s franchise.
A WORD ON THE “RACE-BASED” FRAMING
Every time you hear “race-based seats,” replace it with what it actually means: seats that exist because of a history of dispossession, broken treaties, and deliberate exclusion.
The Māori seats were not created because someone thought Māori were a special, superior category of human. They were created in 1867 because the Crown imposed a property-based voting system — after having systematically stripped Māori of their land through raupatu (confiscation), legislation, and fraud. The cause was colonial theft. The seats are a partial, limited, and long-overdue remedy.
Calling the remedy “race-based” while ignoring the original crime is like breaking someone’s leg, then complaining they’re getting “special treatment” from the doctor.
This framing is not accidental. It is the core rhetorical strategy of every nationalist-capitalist movement that targets indigenous rights: erase the history, flatten the structural analysis, and reframe the remedy as the problem. You hear it from Bolsonaro’s team in Brazil. You heard it from No campaign spokespeople in Australia. You hear it from David Seymour, Winston Peters, Don Brash, and now from the polished website of Referendum Now.
WHAT WORKERS AND SOCIALISTS NEED TO UNDERSTAND
Divide and rule is as old as capitalism itself. When Māori workers and Pākehā workers fight each other over electoral structures, who wins? Not us.
The same government pushing this referendum agenda is the one cutting public services, attacking worker rights, and handing public assets to private capital. They want us arguing about Māori seats. They do not want us talking about who owns the land, who owns the housing stock, who owns the power companies.
Tino rangatiratanga — Māori self-determination — is not the enemy of working class solidarity. It is part of it. You cannot build a genuine workers’ movement on a foundation of colonial dispossession. That contradiction will break you every time. History proves this: in South Africa, in the United States, in Australia, wherever settler-colonial capitalism tried to build a labour movement on top of indigenous dispossession without addressing it, that movement was ultimately limited, divided, and co-opted.
We are being asked, by a lobby group backed by the same capital interests that have always opposed Māori rights, to spend our political energy on removing one of the few structural protections Māori workers have in the parliamentary system. Meanwhile: housing unaffordability is at a record high. Hospital waitlists are blowing out. Wages are stagnant. The cost of living crisis grinds on.
This is the oldest trick in the book. Don’t fall for it.
DON’T SIGN THE LETTER. HAVE THE CONVERSATION INSTEAD.
If someone you know is tempted to sign — have the conversation. Not with contempt, but with clarity. Most people who sign petitions like this aren’t racists. They’re people who’ve been fed a tidy story about “fairness” and haven’t had the historical context to interrogate it. That’s on us, not just on them.
Education is not separate from struggle — it is the struggle. Art, writing, music, community — these are the tools we use to build the consciousness that makes collective action possible. Share this. Debate it. Add to it. Correct it where it’s wrong.
But do not let Hobson’s Pledge and its parliamentary allies set the terms of the conversation.
Kia kaha. Tūturu whakamaua.
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SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
• Hobson’s Pledge — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_Pledge
• The Māori ward vote in New Zealand contains important lessons for Canada — The Conversation (April 2025): https://theconversation.com/the-maori-ward-vote-in-new-zealand-contains-important-lessons-for-canada-268434
• New Zealand: Māori rights in the firing line — CIVICUS Lens (August 2024): https://lens.civicus.org/new-zealand-maori-rights-in-the-firing-line/
• David Seymour says he wants to abolish Māori seats — The Spinoff (August 2018): https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/12-08-2018/david-seymour-says-he-wants-to-abolish-maori-seats-can-he
• NZ First Member’s Bill on Māori seats referendum — Winston Peters Facebook (February 2026)
• 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice Referendum — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Australian_Indigenous_Voice_referendum
• Detailed analysis of the 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum — ANU/Polis (2025): https://polis.cass.anu.edu.au/research/publications/detailed-analysis-2023-voice-parliament-referendum-and-related-social-and
• In the aftermath of the Voice referendum — Equal Times (2025): https://www.equaltimes.org/in-the-aftermath-of-the-voice
• Brazil: Indigenous Rights Under Serious Threat — Human Rights Watch (August 2022): https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/08/09/brazil-indigenous-rights-under-serious-threat
• APIB Communication to the International Criminal Court (2021): https://apiboficial.org/files/2021/08/APIB_ICC_.pdf
• Atrocities Crimes in Brazil Under Bolsonaro: The Yanomami Case — ECR2P Leeds: https://ecr2p.leeds.ac.uk/atrocities-crimes-in-brazil-under-bolsonaro-the-yanomami-case/
• Hungary’s minorities lose parliamentary representation in 2026 election — EURAC (April 2026): https://www.eurac.edu/en/blogs/midas/hungarys-minorities-lose-parliamentary-representation-in-2026-election
• After the No Vote: The Endurance of Indigenous Political Representation — Indigenous Constitutional Law (April 2025): https://www.indigconlaw.org/home/the-endurance-of-indigenous-political-representation
• What Project 2025 has to say about Native communities — High Country News (October 2024): https://www.hcn.org/issues/57-1/what-project-2025-has-to-say-about-indigenous-affairs/
• This Presidents’ Day, Stand with US for Indigenous Rights — Cultural Survival (February 2026): https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/presidents-day-stand-us-indigenous-rights-5-ways-act-now
• India’s Indigenous peoples under attack by Modi — Survival International: https://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/India-indigenous-under-attack