Lesson 3: The Māori Economy — Triple Bottom Line & Tikanga
Examining the Māori economic worldview: Tangata (People), Taiao (Environment), and Ōhanga (Economy) alongside iwi land trusts.
Ngā Whāinga Akoranga — Learning Intentions
Analyse the Triple Bottom Line, contrast intergenerational wealth creation with short-term profit models, and evaluate tikanga business case studies.
Whakataukī | Traditional Wisdom
“Nā tō rourou, nā taku rourou, ka ora ai te iwi.”
With your food basket and my food basket, the people will thrive.
Te Whakatakotoranga | Run of show
Tirohanga Whānui | What this lesson is doing
Lesson 1 left a question on the board: where does value come from? Lesson 2 answered part of it — the bees, the flowering window, the work. This lesson asks the harder half: value for whom, and measured over how long?
Most business teaching gives students one instrument for that: profit, measured yearly. The Māori economy uses a wider instrument, and it is not a softer one. A trust that holds land for the descendants of its owners is doing something commercially harder than a company chasing a good year, because it has to still be right in eighty years. Students should leave able to argue that case in business terms, not moral ones.
You'll need
- The board question from Lesson 1 still up — Where does value come from?
- Whiteboard space or large paper for a three-column ledger, one per group.
- Devices for one lookup task in Act 1. One per group is enough.
- Optional but strong: the name of a real land trust or rūnanga in your rohe. Ask around your kura before the lesson — a local name changes this lesson from a case study into a neighbour.
Do Now — The hundred-year question 8 min
What it is: A forced choice that exposes the timeframe students are unconsciously using.
Run it
- Put the choice up (1 min): "You control a block of mānuka. Option A: harvest everything you can this season and make the most money you have ever made. Option B: harvest about half, and make a decent amount every year." Ask for a show of hands.
- Take the reasoning, not the vote (3 min): ask three students why. Most Option A arguments assume you can leave afterwards. Most Option B arguments assume you cannot. Do not correct either — write the assumption next to each.
- Change one fact (3 min): "Now: you cannot sell this land, you cannot leave it, and your grandchildren will farm it." Re-vote. The room usually moves.
- Name what changed (1 min): the plant did not change and the price did not change. The timeframe changed. Write that on the board under Lesson 1's question.
If the room does not move
Some classes hold Option A even after the change, and that is a real position worth taking seriously — push it rather than closing it. "So who pays for that decision, and when?" That is the whole lesson, arrived at from the other direction.
Act 1 — Three baskets, one ledger 15 min
What it is: Students build a triple bottom line by finding what an ordinary profit-and-loss leaves out.
Run it
- Build the normal ledger first (4 min): in pairs, list everything a standard business account for a mānuka operation would count. Income from honey; costs of hives, labour, fuel, testing, freight. Take a few and put them up. This column is not wrong — it is just narrow.
- Introduce the three baskets (3 min): Tangata (people), Taiao (environment), Ōhanga (economy). The ledger you just built is only the third basket.
- Re-sort and fill the gaps (5 min): groups redraw the ledger with three columns and move each item into place, then add what the first ledger had no box for. Expect: local jobs and who holds them, whether young people can stay in the rohe, soil and waterway condition, the health of the hives themselves, knowledge passed on or lost.
- Lookup task (3 min): one device per group — find the current estimated size of the Māori economy in Aotearoa, and note who published the figure and in what year. Groups will return different numbers. That is the point: ask why an estimate of a whole economy varies, and what is being counted differently.
| Question | Standard profit-and-loss | Three-basket ledger |
|---|---|---|
| What counts as a cost? | Money spent this year | Anything drawn down — soil, water, hive health, people's time and knowledge |
| Who is the owner? | Shareholders now | Owners now and those not yet born |
| When is success measured? | End of the financial year | Across generations |
| What is a good outcome? | Profit is up | All three baskets are still full |
Act 2 — Why the land cannot simply be sold 15 min
What it is: The legal structure behind the values. This is the act that stops the triple bottom line sounding like a preference.
Run it
- Set the puzzle (2 min): "If a block of Māori freehold land is worth a great deal and the owners could use the money, why is it so rarely sold?" Collect guesses.
- Give the structure (5 min): much Māori land is held as Māori freehold land under Te Ture Whenua Māori Act 1993. It is commonly administered by an ahu whenua trust: trustees manage the land on behalf of often hundreds or thousands of beneficial owners, who hold shares by whakapapa. Selling is deliberately difficult — the Act's stated purpose includes retaining land in the hands of its owners and their whānau and hapū.
- Draw it (4 min): students sketch the structure — owners (many, by descent) → trustees (few, elected) → the land (one, permanent). Compare with a company: shareholders (can sell any day) → directors → assets (can be sold).
- The consequence (4 min): ask directly — "If you cannot sell the asset, what is the only way to get value from it?" Students land on it themselves: you have to keep it productive, forever. The long timeframe is not a philosophy bolted on. It is what the structure forces.
Keep it accurate
Two things to avoid saying. First, that Māori land "cannot be sold" — it can, under conditions, and saying otherwise will be corrected by any student whose whānau has been through it. Second, that this structure was chosen freely; it sits on top of a long history of land loss, which is Lesson 5's territory and the subject of its own units. "Deliberately difficult" is accurate and enough for today.
Act 3 — The trustees' meeting 15 min
What it is: A decision scenario argued in role, using the ledger from Act 1 as the actual instrument.
Run it
- Give the offer (2 min): an exporter offers the trust a five-year contract at a premium price, on one condition: the trust must roughly triple its hive numbers on the block for the whole term. The money would clear the trust's debt and fund a long-wanted project.
- Assign roles (2 min): in groups of four — a trustee who wants the contract, a trustee worried about the whenua, a beekeeper who knows what tripling hives does to a site, and a young beneficial owner who will inherit the block. Everyone argues in the trust's interest; they disagree about what that means.
- Argue with the ledger open (7 min): the rule is that every argument must name which basket it draws from and which it draws down. "It pays the debt" is Ōhanga. "The site cannot carry that many hives" is Taiao — and, since starving hives make less honey, Ōhanga too.
- Decide and report (4 min): each group states its decision in one sentence and names the cost it accepted. There is no correct answer. There are answers that hid a cost and answers that named it.
Groups often invent a fourth option — accept a shorter contract, or a smaller increase, or ask for the premium in exchange for something other than volume. Let them. Negotiating the terms rather than accepting the frame is exactly what trustees do.
Synthesise — Profit for whom, by when? 8 min
Run it
- Back to the board (2 min): Lesson 1's question is still up. Add the two words this lesson supplied: for whom, and by when.
- The reframe (4 min): put it plainly — a triple bottom line is not a business being generous. It is a business using a longer measuring stick, because its structure will not let it use a short one. Ask whether any of the ledger items from Act 1 would eventually show up in the money column anyway, given enough time. Most of them would. That is the argument.
- Forward link (2 min): "Next lesson you set your own prices. Which ledger will you be pricing against?"
Exit ticket 4 min
One sentence, handed in: name one cost that a standard profit-and-loss would miss, and say who ends up paying it.
You are looking for the second half. Naming a cost is easy; identifying who carries it — the next generation, the awa, the people who stay in the rohe — is the thinking.
Ngā Huarahi Ako | Differentiation
Tautoko / Support
- Give Act 1's ledger with four items already sorted into the three columns, so the task is extending a pattern rather than starting one.
- In Act 3, give the two "worried" roles a written opening line each. Getting started in role is the hard part, not the arguing.
- Accept the exit ticket spoken, or drawn as an arrow from the cost to the person who pays it.
Toitoi / Extension
- Find an actual ahu whenua trust or rūnanga annual report online. What do they report on besides money? Bring back their headings — they are usually a triple bottom line in practice.
- The lookup in Act 1 produced different figures for the Māori economy. Find two and work out what each one counts. Which definition is bigger, and why would an author choose it?
- Argue the opposite case seriously: when is a short timeframe the responsible choice? Debt, climate risk and an ageing owner list are all real answers.
Te reo Māori
- Kupu: tangata (people) · taiao (environment) · ōhanga (economy) · whenua (land) · ahu whenua (land trust) · kaitiakitanga · whakapapa.
- Unpack the whakataukī before Act 1, not as decoration: two baskets pooled feed more people than two baskets kept apart. That is a claim about economics, and students can test it against Act 3.
Mātauranga Māori | Not a morality tale
The risk in this lesson is the opposite of Lesson 1's. There, the danger was treating rongoā as folklore awaiting proof. Here, it is treating the Māori economy as a parable — the good business that cares, set against the bad business that does not.
It is not a parable. It is a large, commercial, competitive part of the New Zealand economy, operating under real debt, real market prices and real disagreement between owners. Trusts argue. Contracts go wrong. Some blocks are run well and some are not. Teaching it as a moral example is flattering and useless; students cannot analyse a parable.
What is genuinely distinctive is structural and stated in law: the asset is held for people who are not in the room yet, and that changes what a rational decision looks like. Teach that, and the values follow from it rather than being asserted over the top.
Hononga Marautanga | Curriculum
These changes follow a pattern of economic growth from largely agricultural to a growth in manufacturing and then to a growth in the tertiary sector. The latter two stages coincide with increasing urbanisation of a population.
Te Mātaiaho (2025) · Social Sciences · Phase 3 · Economic Activity · statement id 21044
This lesson teaches the statement by complicating it. The pattern it describes is a real one and students should know it. But an ahu whenua trust does not migrate from one sector to the next and leave the land behind — it is often in all three at once, and cannot urbanise away from an asset it is not able to sell. Students finish able to state the standard pattern and name a significant part of the New Zealand economy that does not follow it, with a structural reason why.
Sources and checking
- Te Ture Whenua Māori Act 1993 — the source for Māori freehold land, ahu whenua trusts, trustees and beneficial owners, and for the difficulty of alienation. Read the purpose provisions before teaching Act 2 if you want to quote it directly: legislation.govt.nz.
- The size of the Māori economy is deliberately not stated in this lesson. Estimates are published periodically and vary by what they count; finding a current one and naming its author and year is the Act 1 task. Do not replace it with a number from memory — a stale figure taught with confidence is worse than the lookup.
- Local trust or rūnanga material — annual reports are usually public and are the best evidence in this lesson, because the reporting headings are a triple bottom line written by people who have to live with it.
- What this lesson does not cover: how the land came to be held this way. That history is real, contested and larger than one period — it belongs in the Aotearoa histories units, and Lesson 5 touches the trade end of it.