What the Government’s passport decision says about priorities – Editorial

Behind the bureaucratic brushing-off lies a choice with cultural weight: English back on top, te reo Māori quietly repositioned. Photo / Getty

Editorial

It’s official: “New Zealand” is being bumped back to the top of our passports, before “Aotearoa”.

Let’s applaud the Government’s focus.

Amid the cost-of-living crisis, record wait times in healthcare, and a beleaguered housing market, we’ve taken a bold stand ... on passport wording.

Because what better way to reassure the public – and foreigners or tourists – than by making sure New Zealand is printed first, so no one mistakes us for a bilingual backwater?

The Government insists this is merely a formatting tweak – just a bit of admin. But behind the bureaucratic brushing-off lies a choice with cultural weight: English back on top, te reo Māori quietly repositioned.

Since 2021, newly issued passports have carried the words “Uruwhenua Aotearoa” printed in silver above the “New Zealand Passport” logo. It was a slight but deliberate nod to our dual identity – bilingual, bicultural, Treaty-grounded.

Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden confirmed last week that the text would be reversed in future editions in line with the coalition’s commitment to its English-first policy on government documents.

It’s a tidy justification – grammatically sound, bureaucratically bland.

And it’s a significant amount of political energy invested in something that no one was really asking for.

At the heart of the matter, though, is a move that speaks to lingering discomfort felt when te reo Māori appears level with or above English; as if printing Uruwhenua Aotearoa on a passport first is a radical act of defiance, rather than a quiet nod of respect.

It is another quiet step in the country’s steady, incremental cultural unravelling. Another symbolic slap.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters was less subtle. No one had the right, he fumed, to “unilaterally, like some sort of arrogant bureaucrat, to change the country’s name without consulting the New Zealand people”.

He questioned why Aotearoa should appear on Government documents at all. “It’s not the name of New Zealand,” he declared.

True – it’s not the name. But it is a name. One that predates the Treaty. One that speaks to our founding partnership. One that has grown, naturally, into everyday use: Aotearoa New Zealand. No referendum required. No threat to democracy detected.

No one’s suggesting Aotearoa should replace New Zealand. Many New Zealanders see them as part of the same breath – because that’s how many say it, hear it, and live it.

It’s the name many speak to, live by, and embrace – in a country where te reo Māori has been an official language since 1987, and legally recognised as a taonga (national treasure) under the Māori Language Act 2016.

Other countries manage this just fine. Around the world, passports reflect more than one identity – and the fabric of society somehow remains intact.

Norway uses three national languages – Bokmål, Nynorsk and Northern Sámi – alongside English. Switzerland has four. The Philippines opens with Pilipinas. Bangladesh leads with Bengali.

Nobody panics. Civilisation endures.

Language is not the enemy. Te reo is not a threat.

And if two Māori words on the cover of a travel document are enough to rattle us, we’re not defending our national identity – we’re displaying just how brittle our confidence in it really is.

We can’t undo the decision. But we can name it for what it is: a small retreat dressed up as administrative housekeeping.

A gesture that says, subtly but clearly, whose voice we’d rather hear – and whose we’d prefer moved quietly to the back.