50 Maranga Mai! Robert Bruce a Member of Parliament for instance declared: We could not devise a more ingenious method of destroying the whole of the Māori race than by these land courts. The natives come from the villages in the interior, and have to hang about for months in our centres of population where they are brought into contact with the lowest classes of society, and are exposed to temptation, the result is that a great number contract our diseases and die (Taonui, 2012a). During the first 50 years of settler colonisation, Māori were alienated from most of their land (Reid et al, 2017, p. 31) which amounted to a “stolen potential of over six Māori generations” (HalkyardHarawira, 2021). In 1885 the New Zealand Herald observed the effects of the Native Land Court: “men and women have abandoned all work and all industrious occupation. ... for the most part they have for years past lived in tents or slept on the ground with the shelter merely of a break-wind. They have been made to do this by having to run from one part of the country to another after Land Courts. They have had to live on wretched watery food, such as potatoes, and the only relief from the utter misery of their surroundings is in getting drunk. What wonder is it that they should die of consumption like rotten sheep, and that the children born of them should ‘linger out a short life?’”(Taonui, 2012). The Māori Representation Act (1867) The Māori Representation Act (1867) created further inequality. Formed to lessen Māori opposition in the wake of the Wars of Sovereignty by providing a voice in parliament, the Act prioritised settler concerns about a potential Māori majority and limited Māori political representation. This Act introduced four Māori seats and limited Māori to these seats for more than 150 years ensuring a Pākehā majority. On a per-capita basis, Māori should have had 16 seats (Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2016c). From 1896-1975 only so-called ‘half-castes’ (people with one Māori and one European parent) were allowed to choose which seats they wished to vote in (Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2018). The Native Land Purchase and Acquisition Act (1893) Richard Seddon’s Liberal government of the 1890s intensified the alienation of Māori land. Driven by the want of more Māori land, the Seddon government oversaw the sale of over two million acres at artificially low prices to the benefit of Pākehā land buyers (Binney, 2009, p. 328; Brooking, 2014, p. 136). The key strategy was to wrestle idle Māori land from Māori control through the Native Land Purchase and Acquisition Act (1893), the explicit purpose of which was to make what Pākehā argued was wasted and unproductive Māori land available for white settlement (Binney, 2009, p. 345; Banivanua Mar, 2013). For Pākehā, Māori practices of fostering and