From New Zeal-land to Old Apathy-land: Outsourcing the Treaty One Obligation at a Time, and no one raises an eyebrow.

The Crown made the promises. The councils carry the burden. And you? You just foot the bill. In Old Apathyland, constitutional duty is a ghost—delegated, diluted, and politely ignored.

There is a certain type of bureaucratic mischief that doesn’t come with horns or a tail, but with committee minutes, spreadsheets, and laminated mission statements. It doesn't announce itself like a revolutionary or a robber. No, it prefers to sneak in behind your rates notice or nestle in the footnotes of a PDF you didn't ask for. And if you ever needed an example of this kind of administrative sleight-of-hand, look no further than the Office of the Auditor-General and its April 2025 report: How public organisations are fulfilling Treaty settlements. That word, fulfilling, sounds noble. It suggests promises honoured, duties embraced. But read a little closer and you realise what we're really witnessing is the Crown slowly moonwalking away from its Treaty obligations while whistling innocently, leaving councils, statutory bodies, and everyday Kiwis to mop up the constitutional custard and placidly wear the saddle of Crown Treaty obligations put on their backs.

Yes, friends, it appears the Crown, that venerable abstraction supposedly bearing the weight of honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi, is not so much carrying out its duties as outsourcing them. And not outsourcing to brilliant specialists or community leaders, but to whomever it can find in the crowded room of the state sector — councils already under water, Crown entities whose legal relationship to the Crown is as ambiguous as a bad Tinder date, and state-owned enterprises that are mostly busy turning public mandates into private losses

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The report opens with a humble tone, acknowledging that Treaty settlements are serious business. They are about righting historical wrongs, restoring relationships, and redress. But then comes the kicker: around 150 public organisations are now responsible for over 12,000 individual commitments arising from settlements. Of these, about 20% fall to "non-core Crown agencies" — entities that are not part of the central executive, but operate at arm's length. Local authorities, autonomous Crown entities, even statutory corporations. You know, the ones with 9 am to 4:30 pm customer service windows and voicemail trees that end in despair.

Now, you may be asking: so what? Isn’t it good to spread the work around? Shouldn’t local bodies be involved in redress, especially when so much of the land and resources in question are managed regionally? All fair questions. But here’s the rub: while the obligations have been spread, the resources, support, and accountability have not. The central government has set up a framework called He Korowai Whakamana to monitor core Crown agencies. But those other 20%? The non-core, non-funded, non-informed remainder? They’re on their own. No guidance. No dashboard. No help desk. No dosh. Just a warm pat on the back and a legal responsibility to uphold a Treaty they didn’t negotiate and are not equipped (nor funded) to implement.

This is not policy. This is abdication with a clipboard. It’s a bit like hiring a clown to do your taxes, then blaming him when IRD seizes your house. And the best part? When things inevitably go sideways — when a post-settlement governance entity doesn’t get the property title on time, or a council forgets to consult as required — the Crown gets to shake its head solemnly and promise to "review internal processes," which in bureaucratese translates to: we hope you forget by next week.

But wait, there’s more. The offloading isn’t just explicit, it’s implied. The way the Auditor-General phrases expectations, responsibilities, and "the holistic intent" of settlements, it leaves the door ajar for future governments to reinterpret obligations even more liberally. Think of it as administrative feng shui: arranging the furniture of the public sector in such a way that everything looks like it’s someone else’s job.

You see this most clearly in how the report talks about renewed relationships and shared commitments — phrases that sound cooperative but function like bureaucratic vapor. Everyone is responsible, which means no one is. The Crown appears less like a constitutional actor and more like the mysterious man who invites you to dinner and then disappears just before the bill arrives. And guess who gets stuck paying? The local ratepayer. You and Me.

These responsibilities aren't just symbolic. They involve land titles, resource consents, planning obligations, co-governance arrangements, and real money. But when delegated to agencies with neither Treaty literacy nor institutional heft, they become legal potholes waiting to trip up the entire process. And then — surprise! — litigation. As the report itself notes, the Crown has already paid out tens of millions in compensation for unmet obligations. That’s not Treaty justice. That’s the fiscal equivalent of taping over a broken window and calling it daylighting.

We should pause here to admire the sheer artistry of this manoeuvre. The bureaucracy has achieved what few thought possible: making Treaty settlements simultaneously someone else's problem and nobody's fault. It is like watching a magician pull a rabbit out of your wallet. The obligations have not disappeared. They have simply been repackaged and redirected, like a rogue parcel in the NZ Post system, endlessly circling the country but never quite arriving at the address that matters.

And what about the democratic implications? The Crown, at least, is elected. Ministers can be held to account. But many of the agencies now saddled with Treaty duties are not directly accountable to voters. They are governed by boards or operate under statutory charters, with few levers for public intervention. This creates a double insulation: iwi struggle to get resolution, and citizens can’t get answers. It’s a clever way to make constitutional failure look like a supply chain issue.

So where does that leave us? In a country where ordinary Kiwis are quietly becoming co-insurers of a relationship they had no part in damaging, and where public agencies are deputised without support to deliver redress with empty hands. It is not merely the breach of a duty, but the betrayal of a process. We have taken something sacred — the act of historical reconciliation — and transformed it into an unstaffed inbox.

If this all sounds a bit bleak, well, it is. But we are not without tools. The Auditor-General's office is an independent one. Citizens can write in, ask why these obligations are being delegated without clear lines of support or funding, and demand better data on who is failing what. Local bodies can push back, requesting proper Treaty capability resources if they are to be expected to uphold redress responsibilities. And perhaps most importantly, the public can resist the slow normalisation of this quiet offloading.

Because let us be honest: if this trend continues, it won't stop at Treaty obligations. The logic is too convenient. What begins with redress may soon apply to housing, infrastructure, even health. The Crown will remain the architect of national commitments but outsource the delivery — and blame — to whatever public-facing entity is too small to fight back.

It is a dangerous precedent wrapped in polite language. And it must be named for what it is: a constitutional sleight-of-hand that converts moral duties into managerial tasks. The bureaucrats, ever tidy in their mischief, may call it decentralisation. But you and I, watching the cost climb and the quality crumble, know what it really is. It is offloading. It is cowardice with a policy number.

And above all, it is expensive. Not just in money, though millions are lost. Not just in time, though years are squandered. But in trust. That most fragile of constitutional currencies, now spent too casually, too often. And when trust finally runs out, the invoices don’t go to the Crown. They go to us.