‘A neat trick’: Critics aim to shift Aotearoa debate, but historical fidelity no longer matters

The early European explorers understood the power of naming and so do Mori today

New Zealand is, in its own imagination, a progressive utopia. The first country in the world where women won the right to vote, the first country in the world to introduce workplace arbitration, the Anglosphere's chief critic of nuclear weapons, and the former British colony with the fairest treaty ever made by Europeans with a native race".

Related: New Zealand Mori may have been first to discover Antarctica, study suggests