Dr Pounamu Jade Aikman (Photo supplied)

Knowledge takes many forms, but not all of them are considered equal, writes Pounamu Jade Aikman in this extract from Whose Knowledge Counts? From Warp Drive to Waka Huia, published by BWB Texts.

My study decisions were principally driven by curiosity, not returns: neoliberalism doesn’t shape everything. Mum had trained as a nurse in the 1970s, and, for her, education in all forms was important and cherished.

No one in our immediate whānau had been to university, and so in my final year of college, Mum and I figured out a plan ourselves. This meant applying for scholarships and student loans, and reading page by page a phonebook-like prospectus of every course Otago offered.

I chose subjects that piqued my curiosity, rather than programmes that would assure a healthy future income. For our whānau, knowledge was about the pursuit of humility, not a career. I was curious about the cosmos and was astonished that you could take courses to decode the grammar of so many different universes, from language to engineering.

Early on, I vividly remember the sudden delight of grasping fragments of meaning. There I was in my small dorm room with its big sash window, listening to a te reo CD. It was one of those golden evenings, light spilling through the glass and pooling on the floor. The honeyed glow gilded the walls amber, lighting up my hand-drawn posters of the many ways te reo says “we” and “you” and “us, but not you”.

The moment I realised that I was comprehending the escapades of Tama and his friend was a breakthrough!

That there exist tools capable of making the cosmos knowable is, to me, as spellbinding as it is wondrous.

The miracle of knowledge is that it speaks across time and space, from tūpuna to descendant. As the visionary astronomer and educator Carl Sagan similarly marvelled in Cosmos:

One glance [at a book] and you hear the voice of another person — perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you . . . Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

Studying te reo showed me that a grammar exists beneath everything, and that with the right tools, everything becomes clear.

Yet, for all my curiosity, I also had to confront how little I knew about the practical, technical world. This hit home one night when some friends and I were driving through Marlborough on our way to tramp at Queen Charlotte Sound. The darkness was pierced in the distance by a vehicle’s incandescent hazard lights: someone had broken down. We approached the parked car with a genuine desire to help. But I quickly realised I had nothing useful to offer, registering, with painful humility, just how little I knew.

Soon after arriving back in Dunedin, I walked into the nearby automotive workshop of Otago Polytechnic. “Am I too late to enrol in next year’s course?” I asked one of the staff, and then and there signed up to the most enjoyable year of my studies: an automotive engineering course at polytech, and an anthropology master’s at the university next door.

Each morning, I’d join my classmates in the workshop, its metallic doors wide open and the chilly breath of Tāwhiri commanding us awake. Our very first lesson explored how petrol engines operate, something I had long wondered about. As a toddler, I would watch Mum fill our car at the petrol station, wondering how on earth this pungent liquid could make cars move. When our tutor explained how four-stroke engines convert chemical energy — petrol — into mechanical energy — motion — through combustion, I was ecstatic!

Deep inside the engine, the fire of Mahuika is ignited by Tāwhiri’s wind, their combined mauri harnessed, creating the reciprocal motion of pistons moving up and down, making the car go.

I learned vehicular grammar, disassembling engines to peer inside the mechanical nouns and verbs that make cars speak. One of my favourite assessments was engine strip-down and reassembly, taking an engine apart to its base components, and then rebuilding it. To pass, the engine had to start. I knew I was becoming fluent when it roared to life.

Yet this didn’t make strategic sense, and it didn’t fit the narrative: a year of automotive study seemed to others like a detour, not progress. For me, curiosity was never a distraction, but method. Neoliberalism glorifies entrepreneurialism, but my journey started with a pātai (question), not a business plan: How does this work?

Markets and money are ancient, dynamic and useful inventions. As systems of exchange, they transformed human history, arising in part as a response to questions of who we are and how we relate (trade) with one another. But manaaki and whakapapa are just as old, and offer their own ways of answering those same pātai — as does the fostering of curiosity in new generations of tamariki. While neoliberal forms of reasoning tend to totalise life in all its rhythms, as if value is legible only through economic metrics, we resist in our own ways.

Whether in hīkoi to parliament or at the polytech at dawn, we’re too unruly, too joyfully inconsistent, to fit the market’s mould. As long as we measure the worth of health and education in purely financial terms, we will always see programmes like school lunches as inherent liabilities, not long-term investments.

And yet the pragmatic reality of interrogating whose knowledge counts means that the earning power of an automotive apprentice contrasts greatly to that of a lawyer, civil servant, or consultant — despite all being essential, skilled contributions to our economy. (Whose knowledge counts on a dark road with a broken-down car?) To know this is to know humility: the battle of truth — be that for economics or education — is not just an intellectual inquiry, but one with very real implications in everyday finances and household budgets. It is why questions of epistemology continue to be relevant.

The Regulatory Standards Act

Deciphering the whakapapa of the 1980s reforms requires a careful reading of our layered past. With Foucault’s help, we’ve seen how curated ideas of individual liberty and responsibility have become the dominant way of thinking, acting and managing how we live on shared whenua.

With this contextual background, we now course through a more recent neoliberal nebula: the Regulatory Standards Act 2025. This legislation has enshrined the neoliberal rulebook into law, and done so at the expense of our evolving democratic tikanga and conventions.

The Regulatory Standards Act came about as a result of coalition bargaining between ACT and the National Party in 2023. National agreed to support ACT’s policy of improving the quality of regulation by “ensuring that regulatory decisions are based on principles of good law-making and economic efficiency”.

The ensuing Regulatory Standards Bill wasn’t new — there had been multiple incarnations since 2006 — but it had never passed into law. When introduced to parliament in May 2025, the bill proposed a set of principles for all legislation to be assessed against, through a “consistency accountability statement”.

The principles are wide-ranging. Relevant for our discussion are: the rule of law, and equality before it; that laws shouldn’t limit individual liberties or property rights; that laws shouldn’t take property without giving good reason and fair compensation; and that good law-making means, among other things, laws should deliver benefits greater than their cost to the public, through cost-benefit analyses.

Against these benchmarks, a Regulatory Standards Board, made up of members appointed by the Minister for Regulation, was to conduct assessments — meaning unelected appointees would decide for or against legislation.

There’s plenty to unpack here. At face value, the principles spoke a language of transparency and fairness; the stated intent to “reduce red tape”, which ACT leader David Seymour proclaimed, had widespread appeal. Ironically, though, consistency accountability statements will inevitably tangle more of that crimson webbing around the very machinery they claim to free.

While elements of the principles do speak to effective law-making, their presence is not a wholesale guarantee of future performance. To begin with, we already had a raft of checks and balances in place to help with “good law-making”. Legislation guidelines, the Legislation Design and Advisory Committee, and input from armies of lawyers, civil servants and experts are all involved as policies are translated into laws.

As debate over the bill became heightened, there were many “what ifs” to consider. Could environmental protection or tenant-oriented laws be read as impacting property rights, giving rise to compensation claims? Even though the bill didn’t create new rights to this effect, “simply embedding the principle in law could alter expectations over time”.

As Jane Kelsey noted in her submission to the select committee on the bill, this could have a “chilling effect” — particularly when corporate interests enter the fray, such as in the regulation of the food, electricity and banking industries. Business interests might very well see this as an opportunity to lobby ministers, using the bill as an entry point. It could easily affect how future laws will be shaped.

Could fairness and Te Tiriti considerations be overridden by cost-benefit analyses? Te Tiriti was notably absent from the bill. Could feeding our tamariki through any kai-in-schools programme be a casualty?

Theoretically at least, the bill didn’t allow people to litigate in court, and it wasn’t binding on parliament, so even if a consistency accountability statement found discrepancies with new laws, parliament could still do as it pleased.

But power, through words, always shapes the terrain of possibility and knowability. Although cloaked in procedural language, the language in the original bill sought to rewrite the possibilities of political contest through the new default of market metrics. It wished to create a form of epistemic exclusion and hierarchy in public policy, determining whose knowledge of measurement would prevail, and what would count as sensible, thinkable and responsible.

Consolidating this singular economic view, profit would become the baseline assumption against which all laws are measured. Rather than accountability to the public, regulation would now need to prove its worth to the market.

This means we no longer begin by asking if a law is fair or just, but simply if it delivers greater benefits than it costs. It codifies one way of knowing — based on the principles of liberty, property and law-making — while foreclosing other possibilities of stewardship and governance, like those grounded in manaaki, whakapapa and whenua. As Emeritus Professor of Public Policy Jonathan Boston noted of the bill in June 2025, it “stretches, if not crosses, the boundaries of commonsense”.

The “what if” questions above are hard to answer, as they don’t have a simple yes or no; and I’ve indulged here in that frustrating mainstay of politicians’ babble: answering every pātai except the ones asked!

But what does happen when we let market reason decide what is reasonable? That’s what’s most unsettling of all. Feeding our tamariki lunch at schools may never pass the cost-benefit test, because an exclusively market-driven appraisal is anchored in money, not manaaki.

Fiscal responsibility is always important when stewarding the hard-earned pūtea of New Zealanders into shaping the āpōpō of Our-tearoa. But focusing only on the economic means government too easily loses sight of who it serves — tāngata, we as New Zealanders.

Extracted with permission from Whose Knowledge Counts? From Warp Drive to Waka Huia, published by BWB Texts.

Dr Pounamu Jade William Emery Aikman (Ngāti Apakura, Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Wairere, Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Uenukukōpako, Ngāti Tarāwhai) is an independent scholar working at the intersections of Indigenous sovereignties, epistemologies and criminal justice. He gained his PhD at the Australian National University and was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard in 2022. He is the author of Terra in Our Mist: A Tūhoe Narrative of Indigenous Sovereignty and Settler-State Violence (ANU Press, 2026), and co-lead of Tiaki Tāne, a Marsden-funded project on youth offending among young Māori men. In 2025, he was Emerging Māori Writer in Residence at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington.

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