Trade Me has cancelled every listing of raw, unprocessed pounamu on its site and blocked new ones, effective Tuesday. Finished pendants and carvings can still be sold. On paper this is a cultural story. In practice it is a platform quietly taking on an enforcement job the state has struggled to do, and every New Zealand business running a marketplace should pay attention.
The state wrote the rules, a website enforces them
The legal position on pounamu has been settled for decades. The Ngāi Tahu (Pounamu Vesting) Act 1997 vests ownership of natural-state pounamu in Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, with Arahura catchment stone owned by Māwhera Incorporation. In 2024, then-Customs Comptroller Christine Stevenson said exporting pounamu had been illegal for over 70 years.
The current rule, the Customs Export Prohibition (Pounamu) Order 2021, bars exporting raw or partly processed stone without ministerial consent backed by written iwi advice, exempting finished articles and consignments under 5kg. In 2021, Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee confirmed the prohibition and ordered MBIE to review it by September 2024 to keep it fit for purpose.
Yet the first successful prosecution under that Order only landed in 2026, when a mother and son were found guilty of trying to export almost 18kg to China through Auckland Airport. Five years of a dedicated order, one conviction. That is not a deterrent, it is a rounding error.
Why a blanket ban beats case-by-case checks
Poutini Ngāi Tahu Rūnanga co-chair Francois Tumahai told RNZ the decision was “a major breakthrough” and that it sends a clear signal: “It’s not okay to sell illegally sourced pounamu. Full stop.” He argued a blanket ban was the pragmatic option because proving legitimate sourcing listing by listing is “long-winded and drawn out”. He also linked the surge in recovered stone to gold prices pushing demand for West Coast mining permits, with pounamu turning up more often as a by-product.
That logic is commercially sound. Trade Me cannot verify a rock’s provenance from a photo. Its previous approach, monitoring listings and giving iwi a process to flag suspect stone, put the cost of policing on rūnanga. In April, Ngāi Tahu Pounamu manager Chantal Tumahai said dubious selling had risen significantly since Covid across Trade Me, Facebook groups, Marketplace and Etsy. When verification costs more than the category earns, cutting the category is the rational call.
The mole just moves offshore
The weakness is obvious. In April, Kara Edwards, pouārahi of Te Rūnanga o Makaawhio Ngāti Māhaki, described pounamu protection as “a little bit like the whack-a-mole game”, where shutting one channel simply opens another. She named Trade Me, Facebook Marketplace and Etsy as the sites undermining legitimate sellers.
Trade Me has now stepped out of that list. The other two have not. Tumahai conceded iwi outreach to other marketplaces had gone nowhere, noting “Trade Me’s our baby here in New Zealand and the others are foreign”. A locally owned platform is exposed to local reputation, local media and local relationships. Meta and Etsy face none of that pressure in the same way, which means the illicit trade likely just shifts address.
Provenance is the real product
The more interesting business lesson came years earlier. In 2022, Ngāi Tahu researcher Dr John Reid documented how the iwi built a legitimate supply chain with registered mining partners, approved carvers and an eight-digit traceability code on every authenticated piece. The result, he said then, was that Ngāi Tahu pounamu fetched a 30-100% premium over competitors.
Professor Paul Dalziel framed it at the time as turning “a commodity into a taonga” by connecting consumers directly to producers and the values behind the product. That is a playbook any exporter fighting grey-market or counterfeit competition should study. Traceability did more for the legitimate market than enforcement ever managed.
What platform operators should take from this
Three things. First, “we just host the listings” is getting harder to defend whenever ownership or legality is contested, whether the goods are taonga, wildlife products, antiquities or medicines. Second, being locally owned cuts both ways: it makes a platform the easiest target for pressure, but also gives it the chance to own the reputational upside. Third, a clean category ban is often cheaper than a half-hearted moderation regime that satisfies nobody.
Trade Me has set a domestic standard. The test now is whether Facebook Marketplace and Etsy match it, and whether the government treats a private company doing its enforcement work as a prompt to tighten its own. If neither happens, the stone will keep moving, just not through Wellington’s favourite auction site.
Sources
- RNZ: Trade Me decision to ban raw pounamu ‘a major breakthrough’, Ngāi Tahu says (2026-10-20)
- RNZ: The ‘whack-a-mole’ of protecting pounamu (2026-04-24)
- 1News: Fears over rise of stolen pounamu being sold on black market (2026-04-10)
- NZ Customs: Customs returns 60 kilograms of pounamu to rightful guardians (2024-11-01)
- Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu: Pounamu
- AERU: From stone to taonga, capturing the value in pounamu (2022-05-12)
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