Morgan Godfery 
Morgan Godfery reveals some straightforward reflections while completing domestic chores, such as, well, socialism or barbarism? Read more from the lockdown letters here. I spent the last four weeks taking my darkest, densest books off the shelf, skirting around their edges, reading and re-reading their back covers. Should I open it from the front? Do I … Read more
Lockdown requires a sacrifice of some form or another from everyone, but the sacrifices never fall proportionately. Read more from the lockdown letters here. Four years ago, and yes, this is a shameless plug, and yes, I’m about to turn it into a loud self-vindication, I wrote: “To participate in politics is, for many young people, … Read more
In an ideal world the physical lives we build would speak to the past, but the truth is New Zealanders silence it, building their social and industrial histories literally on top of Māori. Read more Lockdown letters here. “The past is a foreign country,” goes the famous opening line from The Go-Between, but for tangata … Read more
‘Paint is peeling from the old truck workshop walls. Some days you can taste rust on the autumn wind, like swallowing iron and blood and pollen.’ Read more Lockdown Letters here IT’S GONE BELLY UP FOR THE WORLD. I bet the doomsday preppers are feeling smug right now, locking down in their DIY bunkers. The … Read more
In our new series The Lockdown Letters, some of New Zealand’s best writers tell us what they’ve been up to in the days of Covid-19 alert level four. Today, political commentator and essayist Morgan Godfery. IS IT DAY EIGHT? In the absence of a capitalist routine, one day bleeds into the other. In the before times … Read more
In our new series The Lockdown Letters, some of New Zealand’s best writers tell us what they’ve been up to in the days of Covid-19 alert level four. Today, political commentator and essayist Morgan Godfery. I’M TWEETING AT 2AM. The responsible part of my brain is sending sleep signals. Inconvenient yawns. The first. The second … Read more
A proper reckoning with March 15 2019 demands that we take up a generations-long struggle to destroy all the exclusions that make up our society and produce the conditions we know as racism. An essay by Morgan Godfery. This work is made possible by Spinoff Members. 1 I was cleaning out the garage the other … Read more
There’s a big pay disparity between nurses working for Māori health providers and nurses working at DHBs. And Māori voters aren’t going to ignore signs of indifference, writes Morgan Godfery. At the last election I was a know-nothing 25-year-old who truly, genuinely, thought a Labour-led government would catch up on nine lost years under National. … Read more
It’s estimated that as many as half a million Papuans have been killed at the hands of Indonesian security forces over the past 50 years. Not holidaying in Indonesia is an easy way to say you’re not OK with that, writes Morgan Godfery. Would you have gone on holiday in apartheid South Africa? I suspect … Read more
They are the clowns who shall inherit the earth – and for Trump, Johnson, Morrison et al, the jokester act provides the perfect political cover, writes Morgan Godfery. (This essay is extracted from new essay collection Public Knowledge: Radical Futures and is heavily abridged. Godfery goes on to argue for a revolution by degrees, beginning … Read more
Morgan Godfery tries to make sense of the last decade for Māori in te ao hurihuri, the changing world. Here he looks at the highs, the lows and the TBCs… Taika’s interesting world There are three roads out of Opotiki, the rural town where the Eastern Bay of Plenty becomes the East Coast. You can … Read more
If Labour MPs are serious about the Treaty and its promise of power-sharing – and if the members and delegates are keen to honour their party’s special history with Māori – the answer is clear, writes Morgan Godfery. “Parliamentary party leader” is probably the only decent demographic where Māori make up a majority. I mean, … Read more
In this charged essay, Spinoff columnist Morgan Godfery takes stock of Treaty of Waitangi interpretations that pay lip service to values without honouring the core tenets of power. Illustration by Toby Morris. This feature is made possible thanks to the Spinoff Members Fund. We need your help to make journalism that matters. For more information, click here. … Read more
Former Te Kōhanga Reo National Trust chair Toni Waho was removed from his position in 2014 for allegedly bringing the trust into disrepute when he reported misspending by a subsidiary. Last month the High Court cleared Waho of any misconduct. The price paid by everyone involved in the six years leading up to that point … Read more
Labour’s Māori MPs should count their lucky stars Te Ururoa Flavell is busy doing other things, writes māui street‘s Morgan Godfery. It’s a mug’s game making a call about the general election more than a year out from polling day. If an election were held tomorrow Labour would almost certainly return with its seven-seat monopoly … Read more
All week this week we feature tangata whenua writings to mark Waitangi Day. Today: “Everything we know about urban Māori is probably wrong”, writes Morgan Godfery, in his review of a new study by Bradford Haami. The first urban Māori were probably eighteenth century Sydneysiders. Until 1912, a laneway near the Australian Heritage Hotel, a … Read more
All week this week we feature tangata whenua writing to mark Waitangi Day on Wednesday. Today: in this extract from a book of essays, Morgan Godfery wonders exactly what the point is of New Zealand bowing to a monarch “of a rain-soaked island off the north-western coast of the European mainland”. One of my earliest memories is, for … Read more
The parties founded by Tariana Turia and Gareth Morgan both failed to make parliament at the last election, and now there’s talk of a collaboration to turn that around. Māui Street editor Morgan Godfery asks whether it might bear fruit. Big news via TVNZ: TOP and the Māori Party could be allies in the next … Read more
Self-confessed fan Morgan Godfery talks Māori politics with Green Party co-leader, Marama Davidson. Marama Davidson is your best friend. If she’s isn’t, you just haven’t met her yet. The Green Party co-leader, an ex-theatre girl – the daughter of Whale Rider koro Rawiri Paratene – former human rights advocate, and multitasking mother of six, wants … Read more
The Māori caucus statement that it stands by Meka Whaitiri is simply tikanga in action, writes Morgan Godfery. Parliament and the Beehive are, as workplaces, uniquely awful. The expectations are high. The hours are punishing. And the work never really stops. There’s correspondence to file, press releases to draft, briefings to read or write, negotiations … Read more
A year and two days ago New Zealanders went to the polls, returning a record 29 Māori MPs. But who’s up and who’s down? Who are the top performers and who are the up-and-comers? Māui street editor Morgan Godfery picks his faves and rates them out of 10 for performance. Ministers Willie Jackson, Labour (Ngāti … Read more
Māui Street editor Morgan Godfery with an exclusive look at the internal rift threatening the Māori Women’s Welfare League. A remit to expel controversial Māori Women’s Welfare League members will go the League’s AGM this year, National President Prue Kapua confirmed in a statement to Māui Street. The remit is aimed at expelling Pauline Rewiti, a South … Read more
Detachment is a luxury only some enjoy. For women, non-whites or any of the subjects of Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern’s rants, looking the other way is rarely possible, writes Morgan Godfery White nationalism is, for the basement dwelling 4chaners, mouth breathing Redditors, and Youtube philosopher kings, nothing more than a desperate search for an … Read more
Māui Street editor Morgan Godfery chats to ‘minister for everything’ Andrew Little about nation building and resolving Treaty settlements on ‘marae time’. Old timers will tell you the words “former Labour leader” are a curse. Former Labour leader Phil Goff. Former Labour leader David Shearer. Former Labour leader David Cunliffe. Former Labour leader is the … Read more
On some scores, the National Party is streets ahead on Māori representation. But, asks Morgan Godfery, is it progress? Every politician keeps a list of regrets, and Labour politicians keep lists longer than most: they were the neoliberals, the foreshore and seabed thieves, and the slowpokes. If things were right and proper Simon Bridges would … Read more
Morgan Godfery was born to a teenage mother and a gang father in Kawerau, New Zealand’s poorest town. He recounts the experience in this essay from the Journal of Urgent Writing, 2017. Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past. — T. S. Eliot, … Read more
In retrospect, it seems obvious that New Zealand First would never have chosen National. Now forward-looking Labour and Greens will need to learn to work with a party that would love to turn the clock back 40 years, writes Morgan Godfery. There are only two kinds of politicians, insiders and outsiders, and then there’s Winston … Read more
Morgan Godfery looks back at the four term history of the parliamentary Māori party, 2005-2017. Te Ururoa Flavell, the former Minister for Māori Development, school principal, charity boxer and “Iron Māori”, is out of Parliament after twelve years representing Waiariki, a four-term run that saw him expand Whānau Ora – his party’s signature achievement – … Read more
The party led by Te Ururoa Flavell and Marama Fox is at once clinging by a thread and on the brink of the balance of power. Morgan Godfery examines the crucial battlegrounds in the Māori seats Don Brash is waking each morning at 3am, cold sweat crawling across his face, and reaching for his iPhone. … Read more