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  "description": "When Fonterra and Z Energy walked briefing notes into the Beehive by hand, the whenua burned, the wai rose, and a Māori elder's right to justice was erased by the same government that swore to uphold it. This is not climate policy. This is organised corruption dressed in parliamentary robes.",
  "path": "/the-defendants-wrote-the-law-that-killed-their-own-case-and-the-prime-minister-helped-them-hide-it-25-may-2026/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-24T22:47:53.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.themaorigreenlantern.maori.nz",
  "tags": [
    "Trojan Horse in our education system",
    "fossil fuel lobbyists hijacking our climate governance",
    "‘A co-ordinated campaign of secret lobbying’ - climate activistMike Smith says government changes to climate law have “exposed” what appears to be a “deliberate effort” to conceal lobbying.RNZLillian Hanly",
    "RNZ's Lillian Hanly",
    "Climate and Human Rights Litigation Database",
    "Te Ao Māori News",
    "Greenpeace Aotearoa reported",
    "law firm Bell Gully confirmed",
    "law firm Minter Ellison noted",
    "Beehive's own press release",
    "The Spinoff",
    "Buddle Findlay",
    "Russell McVeagh",
    "THEY CHANGED THE LAW AGAIN: Paul Goldsmith's Climate Shield Is the Green Chain, Resurrected",
    "RNZ",
    "Beehive",
    "rule of law and good legislation",
    "New Zealand Law Society confirmed in its reporting on the Ombudsman's public interest framework",
    "this archived RNZ story",
    "Transparency International NZ in 2022",
    "Transparency International launched a full reform campaign",
    "Ministry of Justice has been reviewing lobbying regulation since 2023",
    "Greenpeace Aotearoa confirmed",
    "Labour's Smoke and Mirrors: Are They Practicing What They Preach on Big Tobacco Influence?",
    "Corporate Puppets in Climate Governance: How Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Hijack New Zealand's Renewable Future",
    "could collapse entirely by 2028",
    "Transparency International NZ confirmed",
    "Integrity Institute's research",
    "Te Ara's constitutional conventions guidance",
    "Transparency International NZ",
    "published standards",
    "E-Tangata",
    "app.koha.kiwi/events/the-maori-green-lantern-fighting-misinformation-and-disinformation-ivor-jones",
    "themaorigreenlantern.maori.nz/#/portal/support",
    "facebook.com/Themaorigreenlantern/subscribe"
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  "textContent": "Kia ora Aotearoa,\n\nThis essay examines the secret lobbying network that killed Mike Smith's climate case because it directly affects Māori whānau\n\n> — their whenua, their wai, their moana — and the democratic right of every tangata whenua to hold corporate polluters accountable in a court of law.\n\n* * *\n\n## Ko Au — I Am Ivor Jones, The Māori Green Lantern\n\nI am Ivor Jones. The Māori Green Lantern. And I need you to understand something before you read another word.\n\nI have been writing about the whakapapa of corporate power in Aotearoa for years. I have traced the neoliberal networks from Treasury to the Roundtable, from the Atlas Network's Trojan Horse in our education system to the fossil fuel lobbyists hijacking our climate governance. I have named the individuals, the institutions, the money, and the ideology.\n\n> And every time, I have been told: this is how democracy works. This is the system. Trust the process.\n\n‘A co-ordinated campaign of secret lobbying’ - climate activistMike Smith says government changes to climate law have “exposed” what appears to be a “deliberate effort” to conceal lobbying.RNZLillian Hanly\n\n> This week, the process burned itself to the ground and posted the photos.\n\nBecause, as first revealed by RNZ's Lillian Hanly, we know that the corporate defendants in New Zealand's most significant climate case walked their preferred legislation\n\n> — drafted, printed, and hand-delivered — into the Prime Minister's office in mid-2024.\n\nThe government hid the document. Changed the law using language from that document. And when asked under the Official Information Act, provided only\n\n> \"limited material\" — omitting the very briefing note that two corporations have now confirmed, under court oath, they physically delivered by hand.\n\n## The Deep Dive Podcast\n\nHow Corporations Secretly Rewrote New Zealand Laws\n\n0:00\n\n/1116.25288\n\n1×\n\n> Listen to a lively conversation between two hosts, unpacking and connecting topics in the sources of this essay. I apologise in advance for the AI's very harsh pronounciation of reo. Please dont shoot me, :).\n\nThis is not politics. This is not spin. This is a documented, verified, court-confirmed cover-up at the highest levels of power in Aotearoa New Zealand. And I am going to take it apart, piece by piece, so that every whānau member, every kaitiaki, every lawyer, every journalist, and every voter in this country understands exactly what was done — and exactly who did it.\n\n* * *\n\n## Ko Wai a Mike Smith — The Kaitiaki Who Took on the World\n\n> Let me start with the man at the centre, because he deserves to be seen fully before we document what was done to him.\n\nMike Smith (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu) is the climate change spokesperson for the Iwi Chairs' Forum — the collective voice of iwi leadership across Aotearoa.\n\n> He is not a radical. He is not an extremist. He is an elder, a leader, and a kaitiaki who watched the natural world his ancestors were charged to protect being systematically destroyed by the largest emitters in the country — and decided that the law was the appropriate place to address it.\n\nHe filed his case in 2019, as confirmed by the Climate and Human Rights Litigation Database.\n\n> He sued seven corporations: Fonterra, Genesis Energy, Z Energy, NZ Steel, Dairy Holdings, Channel Infrastructure and BT Mining.\n\nHe claimed their emissions — which together represent a substantial share of New Zealand's total greenhouse gas output — constituted public nuisance, acts of negligence, and a breach of a duty to cease contributing to climate change, as documented by Te Ao Māori News.\n\nThe High Court struck out two of his three causes of action in 2020. The Court of Appeal upheld that strike-out in 2021. But Smith did not stop. He took it to the Supreme Court. And on 7 February 2024, the Supreme Court of New Zealand **unanimously** reinstated his full statement of claim, referred the case back to the High Court for trial, and confirmed — as Greenpeace Aotearoa reported — that these corporations\n\n> \"may be liable for the harm their climate pollution causes.\"\n\nAs law firm Bell Gully confirmed, the Supreme Court overturned the Court of Appeal's earlier decision to strike out all three claims. A full High Court trial had been scheduled for April 2027.\n\nThe Supreme Court is the highest court in the land. Its ruling was unanimous. It was unambiguous.\n\n> And it set an international precedent\n\n> — as law firm Minter Ellison noted, the decision opened the door to activist litigation globally, making it harder for corporates to use strike-out procedures and more likely that climate cases would reach full trial.\n\nThat is the context. The corporations could not win in court. So they went somewhere else.\n\n* * *\n\n## Ko te Tikanga — What the Western Mind Must Understand\n\n> Before I continue, I need to explain something for the Western mind, because the full depth of this crime is invisible if you view it only through the lens of legal procedure.\n\nIn te ao Māori, kaitiakitanga is not a legal argument. It is a living obligation — a covenant written into the whakapapa of every person whose tūpuna named the rivers, the mountains, the sea. The health of the wai is not an environmental issue in the Western sense.\n\n> It is a genealogical relationship.\n\n> The mauri of the awa is the mauri of the people. When the climate rises and the reef bleaches and the mahinga kai disappears, that is not environmental damage — it is a wound to the genealogy of a people. An assault on who they are, where they came from, and what they owe to those who come after.\n\n> When the Supreme Court confirmed Mike Smith's standing as kaitiaki in 2024, it did something historically extraordinary: it recognised Māori tikanga as capable of grounding a legal claim in the common law.\n\n> It said: your obligation to the natural world, your ancestral duty, gives you the right to stand before this court and demand accountability.\n\n> That ruling had implications not just for this case — but for every future Māori legal claim grounded in kaitiakitanga. For every hapū whose awa is poisoned. For every iwi whose moana is warming. For every whānau who turns to the courts because every other door has been shut.\n\nThis government did not just block a lawsuit. It legislated the erasure of that recognition. And it did so using a briefing note written by the defendants themselves.\n\n* * *\n\n## Ko te Kōhuru — The Assassination of a Supreme Court Ruling\n\nOn 12 May 2026, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith announced the government would amend the Climate Change Response Act 2002, as confirmed by the Beehive's own press release. The amendment would bar courts from making findings of liability in tort for climate damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions — applying retroactively, to current and future cases. As The Spinoff documented, the government pushed this through despite opposition from its own Climate Change Commission, over the objections of international law, and in defiance of the world's highest court. As Buddle Findlay confirmed, individuals and communities were now effectively barred from seeking compensation from corporations for climate harm — full stop. As Russell McVeagh confirmed, the bar applied to both current and future claims.\n\nGoldsmith called it bringing\n\n> \"certainty to climate change tort law.\"\n\nCertainty. For whom?\n\n> Not for the whānau in coastal Northland watching their marae foundations crack from rising seas.\n\n> Not for the tangata whenua in the Waikato watching the river that names them run brown and dead.\n\n> Certainty for Fonterra. Certainty for Z Energy. Certainty they will never pay a cent.\n\nI covered this the moment it happened. I named it for what it was in THEY CHANGED THE LAW AGAIN: Paul Goldsmith's Climate Shield Is the Green Chain, Resurrected.\n\nSame Crown. Same corporations. Same function. Different chemical. The Green Chain never really ended — they just gave it a parliamentary warrant.\n\n* * *\n\n## Ko te Pakiaka Huna — Five Verified Hidden Connections\n\n> Now we have the receipts. And they are worse than I thought.\n\n> In mid-2024 — nearly two years before Goldsmith's announcement — a member of Fonterra's government affairs team physically walked a hard-copy briefing document to a staff member at the Prime Minister's office.\n\n> In mid-2024, a member of Z Energy's government affairs team did the same, delivering the same or a similar document by hand to the same office.\n\n> Both corporations have confirmed this to RNZ. Both stand by the document. Neither appears to consider it remarkable that defendants in a live Supreme Court case were walking draft legislation to the executive branch of the government that would ultimately enact it.\n\nThe briefing note — as documented by RNZ — explained the\n\n> \"rationale for proceeding with the introduction of legislation to prevent private litigation seeking to impose liability for climate change, including current litigation brought by Mr Michael John Smith.\"\n\nIt explained why legislative intervention\n\n> \"is necessary and appropriate.\"\n\nAnd it proposed a two-sentence amendment to the Climate Change Response Act 2002 that would\n\n> \"resolve the uncertainty and risks posed by private law claims like Mr Smith's.\"\n\nThe defendants wrote the amendment. They walked it in by hand. And then that amendment became law.\n\nSmith's defendants had been court-ordered to release lobbying documents by March 2026. The briefing note was not provided to Smith until May 2026 — after Goldsmith's announcement\n\n— meaning that while Smith was still preparing his case, the corporations were working behind closed doors with the government to legislate that case out of existence. As Smith himself stated, reported by RNZ:\n\n> _\"These documents were supposed to have been discovered by the defendants, but it seems they were kept from me, while decisions were being made behind closed doors.\"_\n\nThe Environmental Law Initiative sought these same records in March 2025 via the Official Information Act, specifically requesting information about meetings and proposed legislative responses relating to the Smith case. As RNZ confirmed, they received \"only limited material.\" The briefing note was withheld. The PM's office now says it has \"no record\" of it\n\n> — the same document that two corporations have confirmed, under court process, that they physically carried there by hand.\n\nFive verified connections, each documented and sourced:\n\n  * **Fonterra → PMO by hand** (mid-2024): confirmed by Fonterra to RNZ\n  * **Z Energy → PMO by hand** (mid-2024): confirmed by Z Energy to RNZ\n  * **PMO OIA non-disclosure** (March 2025): confirmed by ELI and RNZ\n  * **Defendants' delayed discovery to Smith** (March → May 2026): confirmed by Smith's own statement to RNZ\n  * **Corporate brief → enacted law** : the two-sentence amendment proposed in the briefing note matches the amendment Goldsmith announced, per RNZ and the Beehive\n\n\n\n* * *\n\n## Ko ngā Ture — Five Legal Pillars This Government Has Cracked\n\n## The Rule Against Retrospective Legislation\n\nThe New Zealand Law Society is explicit in its guidance on the rule of law and good legislation: legislation should not apply retrospectively, and passage of retrospective legislation under urgency without explanation \"is a concerning example\" of a rule-of-law violation. Goldsmith's amendment applied retroactively to a case the Supreme Court had unanimously validated. That is constitutionally improper. It is not a debatable point. The Law Society said so. More than 100 lawyers and academics said so, in a public open letter reported by RNZ. The government proceeded regardless — because the corporations had already walked their briefing notes through the door.\n\n## The OIA Withholding — Unreasonable and Contrary to Law\n\nAs the New Zealand Law Society confirmed in its reporting on the Ombudsman's public interest framework, section 9 withholding grounds under the Official Information Act must be weighed against the purposes of enabling public participation in the making of law and promoting ministerial accountability. A corporate lobbying document proposing specific legislation — delivered by hand to the PM's office by defendants in a live Supreme Court case — is precisely the document the OIA exists to surface. The Chief Ombudsman used the phrase \"unreasonable and contrary to law\" when he held NZ First Minister Casey Costello accountable for her tobacco OIA conduct, as documented in this archived RNZ story. The same standard applies here — with the Prime Minister's own office in the frame.\n\n## Aotearoa Has No Lobbying Law — And Corporations Exploited It Completely\n\nNew Zealand is at the lenient end of comparable democracies on lobbying regulation — confirmed by Transparency International NZ in 2022. No lobbyist register. No mandatory code of conduct. No cooling-off periods for revolving-door movement between government and corporate roles. No disclosure requirements for documents handed to Ministers' offices. In April 2025, Transparency International launched a full reform campaign calling for a Regulation of Lobbying Act, an online searchable register, a 1-3 year cooling-off period, an Integrity Commission, and strengthening of the OIA. The Ministry of Justice has been reviewing lobbying regulation since 2023 — the review remains incomplete as of today. In that vacuum, Fonterra and Z Energy walked briefing notes to the Beehive by hand, and there was no law that required them to disclose it, no register where it would appear, and no mechanism to catch it — until a High Court discovery order forced the documents into the open. This is what regulatory capture looks like when there are no rules.\n\n## Māori Legal Standing — Erased by Legislative Fiat\n\nThe Supreme Court's 2024 ruling did not just validate Smith's case. It created precedent that Māori kaitiakitanga could ground a tortious claim in the common law — a development of extraordinary significance for every future Māori legal claim relating to environmental harm. This government has now set the counter-precedent: that Parliament can, at the request of corporate defendants, retroactively eliminate Māori legal standing mid-case. For the next kaitiaki who takes a corporation to court, the message is clear. Win at the Supreme Court. Watch the defendants walk a briefing note to the Beehive. See your case legislated out of existence. As Greenpeace Aotearoa confirmed, the Smith case had international significance. The erasure of that precedent has international consequences — for climate litigation everywhere.\n\n## The Tobacco Playbook — Proved, Documented, Repeated\n\nIn the 1950s and 60s, tobacco companies lobbied governments, funded counter-research, and sought legislative immunity for products they knew were killing people. That playbook is globally documented and globally condemned. I wrote about exactly this pattern in Labour's Smoke and Mirrors: Are They Practicing What They Preach on Big Tobacco Influence? — and I traced the corporate capture of NZ climate governance in Corporate Puppets in Climate Governance: How Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Hijack New Zealand's Renewable Future. The Smith case is the same mechanism applied with new corporate actors and a new product — greenhouse gases — with the same result: liability erased, harm externalised, and whānau left with no remedy.\n\n* * *\n\n## Ngā Tauira — Three Examples for the Western Mind\n\n## Example One: The Quantified Harm — What Blocked Litigation Costs Whānau\n\nThis is not abstract. The Climate Change Commission reported in May 2026 — as documented by RNZ — that climate change is already causing \"long-lasting hurt, grief and fear\" in New Zealand, with \"decisive action\" urgently required. In December 2025, this government rejected all of the Commission's emissions target recommendations — every single one — as confirmed by RNZ. The Emissions Trading Scheme — the government's stated alternative to litigation — had all four 2025 auctions fail to sell a single unit, with the Commission warning it could collapse entirely by 2028. Māori communities are disproportionately located in coastal and low-lying areas. Māori are disproportionately affected by climate events. And Māori now have no legal remedy against the corporations most responsible. That is not collateral damage. That is the design.\n\n## Example Two: The Constitutional Comparison — What Happens When Defendants Write Laws\n\nImagine a company faces a personal injury lawsuit. While the trial is pending, its government affairs team walks a draft bill to the Minister of Justice by hand — a bill that would retroactively immunise that company from all personal injury claims. The Minister, without disclosing the meeting or the document, announces the bill, pushes it through Parliament, and the lawsuit is extinguished. A subsequent Official Information Act request for records of that meeting is declined. The document only surfaces because the plaintiff's legal team forces disclosure through court discovery. In virtually any comparable democracy — Australia, the UK, Canada — a mandatory lobbying register would have required disclosure of that meeting and that document within days. In New Zealand, there is no such requirement. As Transparency International NZ confirmed, \"New Zealand has no regulation on lobbying.\" That is why this happened. That is why it could be hidden. And that is why the Integrity Institute's research into the cost of regulatory capture to ordinary New Zealanders is so urgently relevant.\n\n## Example Three: The Tikanga Cost — Mana, Pono, and the Obligation of Authority\n\nIn tikanga Māori, those entrusted with power carry an obligation called _kaitiakitanga o te mana_ — guardianship of authority. That obligation requires _pono_ : truthfulness, transparency, authenticity. A rangatira who conceals, who makes decisions behind closed doors on behalf of those who exploit, who hides the paper trail and claims there is \"no record\" — that rangatira has forfeited their mana. They lead without pono. And in te ao Māori, to lead without pono is not leadership. It is corruption. When this government withheld the corporate lobbying briefing note from an OIA request, it acted without pono. When it allowed defendants to delay discovery of that document to Smith while using it to shape national policy, it acted without pono. When it claimed \"no record\" of a document two corporations have confirmed by hand delivery, it acted without pono. As Te Ara's constitutional conventions guidance confirms, the convention of individual ministerial responsibility requires Ministers to answer to the House for the exercise of their powers. That convention is now in crisis — and every Māori whānau that ever relied on the courts to protect their whenua, their wai, their moana, is paying the price.\n\n* * *\n\n## Ko te Ara Whakamua — What Must Happen Now\n\n> I am not interested in outrage without action.\n\nHere is what accountability looks like:\n\n  * **Ombudsman inquiry** into the PM's office non-disclosure of the corporate lobbying briefing note in response to ELI's March 2025 OIA request — demanded by the Environmental Law Initiative, reported by RNZ\n  * **Solicitor-General review** of the non-disclosure, the discovery delay by corporate defendants, and whether either constitutes a breach of law — also demanded by ELI per RNZ\n  * **Immediate Regulation of Lobbying Act** — New Zealand is an outlier among comparable democracies, as confirmed by Transparency International NZ, and the Smith case is now the proof of concept for why that gap is catastrophically dangerous\n  * **Repeal of the retrospective climate amendment** — the Law Society's own rule-of-law guidance, confirmed in their published standards, condemns this type of legislation\n  * **Parliamentary inquiry** into the process by which the amendment was drafted, including the relationship between the corporate briefing note and the enacted law\n\n\n\n> And if this government refuses — and it will — then every name, every connection, every hand-delivered briefing note goes on permanent record. History will know exactly who chose the corporations over the whenua.\n\nThis is not just about climate change anymore.\n\nAs Mike Smith told E-Tangata: this is \"corrosive to democracy.\" I will go further. This is a white supremacist neoliberal government demonstrating, in real time, with verified documentation, that billion-dollar corporate defendants can use private access to draft the legislation that eliminates their own legal liability — and that the Prime Minister's office will conceal the paper trail until a court forces it into the light.\n\nKo au tērā. Ko The Māori Green Lantern tērā. Ka whawhai tonu mātou.\n\n* * *\n\n## Koha — Fund the Truth They Are Paying Lawyers to Bury\n\nFonterra has a government affairs team. Z Energy has a government affairs team. They have lobbyists, lawyers, and a Prime Minister's office that apparently loses documents on request.\n\n> What do you have? You have this. You have The Māori Green Lantern — tracing every connection, naming every name, publishing the whakapapa of power so that whānau can see exactly what is being done to them, and why, and by whom.\n\nEvery koha signals that rangatiratanga includes the power to fund our own truth tellers. While corporations draft legislation in secret, we publish the receipts in public. While they walk briefing notes into the Beehive, we walk the evidence out the other door and into the hands of whānau who deserve to know.\n\nIf you cannot koha — no worries. Subscribe, follow, kōrero, share with your whānau and friends. That is koha in itself.\n\n**Four pathways:**\n\n  * **Koha direct:** app.koha.kiwi/events/the-maori-green-lantern-fighting-misinformation-and-disinformation-ivor-jones\n  * **Subscribe for essays direct:** themaorigreenlantern.maori.nz/#/portal/support\n  * **Bank transfer:** HTDM, 03-1546-0415173-000\n  * **Facebook:** facebook.com/Themaorigreenlantern/subscribe\n\n\n\nKia kaha, whānau. Stay vigilant. Stay connected.\n\n* * *\n\n_Views expressed constitute honest opinion on matters of public interest under the Defamation Act 1992 (NZ) and Durie v Gardiner NZCA 278. All factual claims sourced and cited. Named individuals are referenced solely in their public capacity as Ministers or corporate executives acting in their official roles. This essay examines the conduct of the Prime Minister's office, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith, Fonterra, and Z Energy because their actions directly determine whether Māori whānau — and all New Zealanders — retain any legal remedy for corporate harm to the natural world. Errors or corrections: contact via themaorigreenlantern.maori.nz._\n\n* * *",
  "title": "\"THE DEFENDANTS WROTE THE LAW THAT KILLED THEIR OWN CASE — AND THE PRIME MINISTER HELPED THEM HIDE IT\" - 25 May 2026",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-24T22:47:53.569Z"
}