Pitched as a cultural sovereignty platform for Māori — Te Pāti Māori's Toi Māori policy frames arts and creative expression not as leisure or decoration but as the living infrastructure through which identity, language, and intergenerational knowledge survive.

The Policy: Te Pāti Māori Toi Māori Policy — October 2023 →

What it does

• Commits to investing in Toi Māori and Māori creative industries as a core government priority, not an afterthought of general arts funding.
• Proposes allocating $19 million to Te Matatini, the national kapa haka organisation, well above the $48.7m over three years (roughly $16m/year) provided under Budget 2024.
• Proposes $10 million for community, hapū, and iwi development of kapa haka and related art forms — pushing cultural investment to the grassroots level rather than concentrating it in national festivals.
• Proposes a $10 million research fund to measure how toi Māori contributes to wellbeing — creating an evidence base that currently does not exist at scale.
• Plans to establish an independent toi Māori entity — a standalone Māori arts agency — at an estimated cost of $57 million, designed to sit on the Lottery Grants Board with funding equal to Creative New Zealand.
• Commits to protecting Māori cultural rights and expressions, including intellectual property protections over mātauranga and cultural taonga.
• Backs Māori-led arts infrastructure and career pathways, addressing the structural underinvestment that leaves Māori artists dependent on a funding system not designed around their needs.

The result

The centrepiece of TPM's Toi Māori policy — a standalone Māori arts agency with parity funding to Creative NZ — is contested but has growing institutional support. Creative NZ's own 2023 Toi Ora Wānanga recommended exactly this kind of structural shift, calling for "mana motuhake" (self-determination) in arts funding and "support for a stand-alone Māori-arts agency." Creative NZ's new Tū Mai Rā, Toi Aotearoa 15-year strategy to 2040 and its companion Toi Ora Strategy echo this direction, with a stated goal that Māori arts and artists are "visible and valued globally." But aspirational strategies mean little without dedicated resourcing. Critics of the current funding model note that Māori make up roughly 17% of New Zealand's population yet Māori arts has historically competed for a minority share of Creative NZ's contestable pool — which itself dropped from $26m to $12m in 2024/25 due to the end of COVID-era funding. Supporters of the TPM model point to comparable international precedents: Canada's "Creating, Knowing and Sharing" programme funds Indigenous arts under a self-determination framework, and the Canada Council tripled its Indigenous arts support to $23.7m by 2021. Australia's Creative Australia has maintained a dedicated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board since 1973. New Zealand has no equivalent dedicated body. The question is not whether Māori arts deserve equal treatment — the economic data makes the case — but whether a separate agency would fragment the sector or finally give it the focused governance it needs.

The impacts to watch

• Te reo and toi are inseparable. Research consistently shows that language revitalisation and cultural expression reinforce each other — kapa haka, waiata, and kōrero on stage are among the most powerful vehicles for transmitting te reo to new generations. New Zealand's goal of one million te reo speakers by 2040 will stall without the artistic ecosystem that makes the language feel alive and worth learning.
• Whakaata Māori is in crisis. Government funding for Whakaata Māori television will fall from $48.56m in 2024/25 to $38.26m by 2026/27, forcing 27 job cuts and the end of its 20-year TV news programme. Māori broadcasting is a primary vehicle for toi Māori reaching mass audiences — defunding it contracts the cultural ecosystem.
• Matariki funding was cut 45%. The Budget 2024 reduction of Matariki events funding to $3m annually means fewer public events celebrating the Māori New Year — the most widely observed nationally-recognised expression of toi Māori in the calendar.
• Te Matatini's economic impact is measurable. The 2025 Impact Evaluation Report confirmed a $24 million direct economic contribution to Taranaki alone from a single festival. Māori tourism — heavily dependent on cultural expression — is a $1.2 billion industry employing over 15,000 people. Cultural defunding has downstream costs.
• NZ's creative sector is worth $17.5b (4.2% of GDP). The Ministry for Culture and Heritage's 2024 data shows the Māori arts and creative sub-sector grew at 6.5% in 2022/23 — outpacing the broader creative sector. Māori arts is a growth engine being treated as a cost.
• Intellectual property and AI. Without protective frameworks, mātauranga Māori and toi Māori are increasingly vulnerable to appropriation through AI training datasets and commercial exploitation. TPM's IP protection commitment addresses a frontier risk that no other party has acknowledged.

Our suggestion: Culture is infrastructure — toi Māori is how te reo and Māori identity survive into the next generation

New Zealand governments have long treated arts funding as a discretionary luxury to be trimmed in tight fiscal years. For Māori arts, this framing is especially dangerous. Toi Māori is not an optional aesthetic supplement — it is the medium through which te reo Māori is transmitted, through which whakapapa is recited, through which a people's account of their own history is kept alive. When kapa haka festival budgets are shaved by 5%, when Matariki events lose half their funding, when a national Māori broadcaster is forced to axe its news programme, the cumulative effect is not just fewer shows — it is cultural contraction. The case for a standalone Māori arts agency with equal funding to Creative NZ is not radical; it is overdue. Canada built this model in the 1970s. Australia built it in 1973. New Zealand is still debating whether Māori arts deserve their own governance structure. Meanwhile, every year without it is a year where Māori artists compete for scraps from a general funding pool that was never designed for them. Te Pāti Māori's Toi Māori policy — with its $57m independent entity, its $19m for Te Matatini, and its $10m wellbeing research fund — is the most complete proposal on the table for treating culture as what it actually is: infrastructure.