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Background: Te Tiriti o Waitangi was negotiated between the British Crown and Indigenous Māori leaders of Aotearoa New Zealand in 1840. Māori understood the agreement as an affirmation of political authority and a guarantee of British protection of their lands and resources. The Crown understood it as a cession of sovereignty. The tension remains, though legal and political developments in the last 35 years, have established that the agreement places a mandatory obligation on the Crown to protect and promote Māori health. It also requires that Māori may exercise rangatiratanga, or responsibility and authority, in relation to health policy development and implementation. Methods: Te Tiriti is, then, an instrument against which health policy is justly and efficaciously evaluated. This paper introduces critical Tiriti analysis as such an evaluative method. Critical Tiriti analysis involves reviewing policy documents against the Preamble and the Articles of te Tiriti o Waitangi. The review process has five defined phases: (i) orientation; (ii) close reading; (iii) determination; (iv) strengthening practice and (v) Māori final word. Results: We present a working example of critical Tiriti analysis using the New Zealand Government's Primary Health Care Strategy published in 2001. This policy analysis found poor alignment with te Tiriti overall and the indicators of its implementation that we propose. Conclusion: This paper provides direction to policy makers wanting to improve Māori health outcomes and ensure Māori engagement, leadership and substantive authority in the policy process. It offers an approach to analysing policy that is simple to use and, inherently, a tool for advancing social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Zealand state developed from a treaty between the British Crown and hapū (sub-tribes) in 1840. The te Reo (Māori language) text and the English version of the agreement are fundamentally different. Breaches of this treaty and tension over how the political relationship between Māori and the Crown should proceed are ongoing. In 2019, the Cabinet Office issued a Circular instructing bureaucratic advisers of the questions they should address when providing advice to ministers on the agreement's contemporary application. In this article, we use Critical Tiriti Analysis (CTA) – an analytical framework applied to public policies – to suggest additional and alternative questions to inform bureaucratic advice. The article defines CTA in detail and shows how using it in this way could protect Māori rights to tino rangatiratanga (a sovereignty and authority that is not subservient to others) and substantive engagement, as citizens, in the formation of public policy. This article's central argument is that the Circular reflects an important evolution in government policy thought. However, in showing how the Circular privileges the English version (the Treaty of Waitangi) over the Māori text (Te Tiriti o Waitangi), the article demonstrates how Māori political authority remains subservient to the Crown in ways that Te Tiriti did not intend. We show through the conceptual illustration of the care and protection of Māori children, despite the significant evolution in government thought that it represents, these rights are not fully protected by the Circular. This is significant because it was Te Tiriti, with its protection of extant Māori authority and sovereignty, that was signed by all but 39 of the more than 500 chiefs who agreed to the British Crown establishing government over their own people, but who did not agree to the colonial relationship which may be read into the English version. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]