ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the postcolonial position of “speaking back” to examine the impact of neoliberal policies as developed in New Zealand from 1984 and throughout the 1990s on indigenous Maori communities and their responses to the process of reform and the changed environment. It argues that the neoliberal vision of society and the power by its proponents to implement much of that vision through the political process sought to sever and then reformulate and privatize the relationships between the British Crown and state and Maori people as individuals. In 1984 with the election of a Labour Government, New Zealand began a significant neoliberal program of reform, of deregulation and reregulation of the economy and of a restructuring of the education, health, and welfare systems. Neoliberal doctrine and the continuous process of reform and institutional restructuring that New Zealand has undergone in, and its effects, has had a cumulative and deeply profound effect on New Zealand society.
