For nearly two centuries, we have been told that order must be imposed from the top down. Whether it’s a government department in Wellington or a centralised trust board, the message is the same: the "centre" knows best. But in Taitokerau, we know this is a "Bad Explanation" that has left our regions drained and our people waiting for permission to thrive.

The Insight: The Entropy of the Centre

Centralised systems—what I call the "Babylonian" model—are thermodynamically broken. In physics, trying to force order from a single point into a complex system creates massive "entropy" or disorder. Think of the "Runanga" or "Trust Board" models often imposed on us; they often create a "Brown Bureaucracy" that mimics the Crown, separating the resources from the actual flax-roots need.

When power is centralised, information gets lost. The managers at the top can never have the granular, local knowledge held by the whānau at the "edge" of the network. This leads to sub-optimal decisions, high energy costs for bureaucracy, and a system so fragile that one bad policy at the top propagates disorder everywhere.

More Than Just a Warrior

Growing up in Te Tai Tokerau, you hear the names of the great rangatira passed down like heirlooms. But history has a funny way of flattening a man. For my 4-greats grandfather, Pomare I of Ngāti Manu, the history books often get stuck on the image of the "formidable warrior"—all muskets, mana, and battlefield prowess.

But if you sit on the porch long enough and look past the colonial ink, you see a different story. Pomare I wasn't just a fighter; he was a master of Strategic Entanglement. He was the original disrupter who transformed the Bay of Islands into a global trade powerhouse. He was an architect of reality who understood that to keep his people's Rangatiratanga, he had to master the new world's tools without letting them overwrite his internal "source code".