We know the right don't care about people

[Olive]

One vessel...

Waka kotahi means to travel together. I can see the difficulty for those with a penchant for the literal, but language isn't like that. If it was Social Welfare would mean just that. Health Department would be another...

But hey, it's just te reo that has to be put under the magnifying glass, eh?

Yes, and put under a magnifying glass by people who have no understanding of metaphor, nor of the fact that languages rarely translate literally (transliterate) unless they both come from the same root and share the same syntax.   Expecting Te Reo Māori terms to have word-for-word equivalents in English is like expecting Icelandic to do that.   That's one of the reasons that Google Translate can come up with such hilarious and misleading results.