Director of New Zealand’s pharmaceutical funding agency quits over rollback of Māori rights

A director of New Zealand’s Pharmac medicine funding agency has resigned over the right-wing government’s targeting of policies that aim to improve the lives of Māori. Photograph: Dave Lintott/AFP/Getty Images

A director of New Zealand’s medicine funding agency Pharmac has resigned in protest of a government directive telling the agency that it no longer needed to consider the Treaty of Waitangi, the country’s founding document which upholds Māori rights, in its funding decisions.

In a letter to Pharmac, the associate health minister and leader of the libertarian Act party David Seymour set out his expectations of the government agency, including his thoughts on how the principles of Treaty of Waitangi, or Te Tiriti o Waitangi, should be applied.