I was driving behind a line of logging trucks heading toward Marsden Point the other day, and it hit me. We aren’t just looking at timber; we are watching the literal skin and bone of Papatūānuku being shipped offshore. This is the "Leaky Bucket" in real-time. We export the sunlight, the rain, and the soil nutrients—the embodied energy of our whenua—and in return, we get a bit of fiat currency that leaks straight back out on petrol and plastics.

In our latest research, we’ve identified that the struggle in the North isn't just about a lack of money; it’s a battle between two different operating systems: Babylon and Zion.

Babylon is the system of extraction. It’s built on "Newtonian" software—the idea that everything is separate. It treats the land as dead matter and people as atomised units of labour. This is what we call Chrematistics: the art of making money for its own sake. It’s thermodynamically "Entropic," meaning it creates disorder. It leaves us with road damage, silted harbours, and social fragmentation.

I was “passengering” to Mt Manaia with my bro and sis the other day listening to Unity Pacific’s “Thou We Are”, and it hit me how much of our story in Te Tai Tokerau is tied to a land thousands of miles away. Most people see the red, gold, and green flags at Waitangi and think it’s just about the music. But if you look deeper, those colours are signals of a shared "Quantum Entanglement" with a global struggle for sovereignty.

The connection isn't accidental. Back in the 19th century, our prophets like Te Kooti and Ratana saw something in the scriptures that the missionaries didn't want them to see. They looked at the story of Israel and didn't see a lost people needing British "salvation"—they saw themselves. They claimed that identity of a "Chosen People" with a direct covenant to Io, bypassing the spiritual authority of "Babylon" or the British Empire.