The Hui is ending after 11 seasons. Here’s what Aotearoa is losing

After seven years telling Māori stories on The Hui, reporter John Boynton is preparing to say goodbye. He reflects on the people, the stories and the legacy of a show that gave Māori communities a voice.

After 11 seasons of telling Māori stories, challenging those in power and giving a voice to communities too often overlooked by mainstream media, The Hui is coming to an end. The long-running Māori current affairs programme will screen its final episode on December 7, after losing crucial funding from Te Māngai Pāho amid a wider shake-up of Māori broadcasting.

The show's funding from Te Māngai Pāho fell from $1 million in 2024/25 to $364,000 in 2025/26, before it missed out on funding for another season. The agency says budget pressures have forced difficult decisions, including a greater focus on te reo Māori content. But while the numbers might explain why The Hui is ending, they don't capture what's being lost. For more than a decade, the show has given Māori communities the time, space and care to tell their stories on their own terms. And for those of us lucky enough to have worked on it, saying goodbye won't be easy.

Making cold calls to strangers is a non-negotiable for any journalist. Sometimes, it’s our only chance to make an impression, and secure a story.

“Kia ora it’s John Boynton here. I’m a reporter from The Hui,” I usually say.  

After a small pause, I can always sense people racking their brains. “What hui are you talking about? Have I missed a hui?”

Hui is the Māori word for meeting, hence the confusion. I often elaborate: “The Hui – we’re the Māori news and current Affairs show on TV3.” The confusion usually subsides. Then the tone of the conversation shifts in any one of many different directions, from hōha: “Oh yes! What do you want?” To far more pleasant: “I love your stories and that Ma-hi-nga-rangi Forbes”, or “how is that Julian Wilcox going?” in more recent years.

The Hui first aired in 2015, created by my old boss Annabelle Lee-Mather and fellow journo aunty stalwart, Mihingarangi Forbes. I left RNZ and joined The Hui in 2019. As a viewer, I was always impressed by the quality of the storytelling, the beautiful pictures and the craft poured into every story. The show is a platform for Māori communities and voices, especially those who often don’t have a presence in mainstream media. It’s journalism with empathy, integrity, patience and heart.

I’ve been lucky over the last seven years to have the show as a training ground in current affairs and long-form journalism. Current affairs requires a different set of skills, like having the stamina to follow people and stories over months and even years, or building trust and relationships with vulnerable and hard-to-reach communities.

No matter the story, I suggest having a good long kapu tī and kōrero before shooting a single frame, so long as you’ve got the time to. One of my favourite kapu tī sit-downs was with two kuia from the Bay of Islands hapū of Ngāti Torehina ki Matakā. They were reviving the art of creating kahukiwi, korowai made from kiwi feathers. 

Their whare – a beautiful old homestead – sat on the water’s edge of the picturesque Purerua Peninsula. It was just around the corner from Marsden Cross, where the first permanent Pākehā settlement in New Zealand was established in 1814. Today, luxury pads owned by the wealthy are spread out across the landscape.

As I was talking to the kuia I noticed a little kororā, or blue penguin, on the rocky shore in the distance. “You should hear them at night under our floorboards,” one of the kuia said. Afterwards, my camera operator came up to me and said how nice it was to have the time to start off a shoot like this. 

Working for The Hui, I have learned the complexities of working in Māori communities, especially in places where I had to show my face again and again. This could be really hard when dealing with tragedies that had devastated hāpori. There’d often be huge divisions within hapū, marae and whānau. I’d be left balancing very difficult situations, while still trying to tell a story.

Getting growlings from kaumātua and being told you’re being disrespectful is all in a day's work for a Māori journalist. But it’s worth it when you have the ability to tell powerful stories. My favourite stories have always been the ones where I can thread through the impact of history on communities today – things like the confiscation of land or having your culture and language beaten out of you. These are the very real consequences of colonisation – the ones some people want Māori to just “get over”.

In my first year at The Hui, I was privileged to tell a deeply personal story. In 2019, Tūhoe prophet Rua Kenana received a pardon from the government. I’m an uri of Rua Kenana, one of his proud great-great-great mokopuna. The pardon cleared his name more than a century after his arrest at Maungapōhatu on April 2, 1916. A police invasion that day resulted in his son Toko Rua and uncle Te Maipi Te Whiu being killed.

Growing up, I remember the photo of Rua Kenana that sat in my nan’s whare. Some cousins have recalled thinking he was Bob Marley. My nan would sometimes share stories of her time at Maungapōhatu. When I pitched the story to the team, I was told it’d be great to make it first person, tell it through my own eyes. I could hear my nan’s voice in my head: “You don’t talk about him – he’s in you. You don’t need to show him to the world.”

Despite my initial hesitancy, I’m glad the story made it out into the world. I still have people telling me how much they learned from it: The history, injustice, consequences of Crown actions that ripple through communities today. 

What’s happening to The Hui is symptomatic of what’s happening to journalism and current affairs in Aotearoa. Publicly funded broadcasting pūtea is drying up. We’ve been supported by Te Māngai Pāho and NZ On Air for 11 seasons, which we’re hugely grateful for. But there’s still a need – and a hungry audience – for long-form story telling.

We started uploading our archived stories to YouTube a couple of years ago. They’ve had millions of views collectively and our social media accounts attract hundreds of thousands of views per story. The appetite is there for current affairs with high-end production values and engaging storytelling. There’s still a need for local stories, the stories of Aotearoa. And our audiences deserve it.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll have to change the way I introduce myself on the phone, which makes me pōuri to think about. “It’s John Boynton here from…” Even though people would get a bit confused by our name at first when they picked up the phone, they eventually clicked. “Oh yeah I know The Hui.” They’d tell us about the stories they’d seen over the years, the stories they connected with. Powerful, beautifully crafted stories, which held those in power to account. 

That’s our legacy. And it’s a lot to say goodbye to.