Zoran Rakovic: Whose Land Is It Anyway? New Zealand’s Property Rights Farce

“Property rights are not about hugging a fencepost. They’re about knowing who’s in charge, who gets the bill, and who reaps the spoils.” — Alchian & Allen, paraphrased for clarity and sanity.

Let’s drop the pretence. New Zealand is fast becoming a textbook case in how to muddle up a perfectly decent nation. The latest chapter in our decline? A slow, clumsy dismantling of one of civilisation’s most basic and boringly essential inventions: clear property rights.
You see, in the grown-up world, ownership isn’t some abstract moral badge or spiritual whakapapa echo. It’s a practical, cold-blooded agreement about who gets to do what with what—and who’s left holding the can when things go pear-shaped.

That’s the basis of every investment decision, every land deal, every productive farm, factory, and fishery. It’s what separates a functioning economy from an elaborate anthropology project.

And yet, here we are: using race-based politics and reinvented Treaty theology to saw away at the very legal floorboards we stand on. It’s not brave. It’s not bicultural. It’s bewilderingly stupid.

Alchian and Allen 101: Markets Need Certainty, Not Smoke Signals

Back in the 1970s, two Yanks by the names of Armen Alchian and William Allen wrote Exchange and Production, a no-nonsense economics textbook that, had Treasury mandarins bothered to read it, might have spared us a generation of regulatory spaghetti.

Their core insight? Property rights aren’t just about exclusion—they’re about coordination. About enabling decisions, investment, risk-taking, and exchange. Without clear rules on who owns what, you're not running an economy. You're playing musical chairs with a ticking time bomb.

Now guess what happens when you start attaching special racial qualifiers to property—water, land, rivers, regulatory powers, even “spiritual relationships with biodiversity” (a real phrase from actual legislation)? The signal gets garbled. The chairs vanish. The bomb ticks louder.

The Great Treaty Reimagining: A Legal Ouija Board

Let’s be frank. The Treaty of Waitangi, whatever one’s view of its moral heft, was not a constitutional framework for 21st-century co-governance. It was a political compromise scribbled down to stop people from shooting each other. Admirable? Certainly. Divinely prescriptive for eternity? Hardly.

But somewhere between the Waitangi Tribunal, the Supreme Court, and an endless supply of cultural consultants, we’ve managed to turn a historical footnote into a magical entitlement factory—churning out “rights” that would make even Mugabe blush.

From freshwater claims to biodiversity vetoes, what began as recognition of Māori grievances has ballooned into a parallel legal universe where ancestry determines authority and governance depends on whakapapa rather than democratic mandate.

We’re no longer “all equal before the law.” We’re equal before the law unless someone’s cousin sat near that river once in 1835.

Water, Land, and the Coordination Trainwreck

Alchian and Allen would have a field day. As they point out, markets rely on known, enforceable boundaries. Investors need to know what they own, what they can do with it, and who to blame if it floods, fails, or bursts into flames.

Now take the New Zealand model:Water rights? Maybe iwi own them. Maybe not. Depends on the latest court decision and what someone thinks “taonga” means this week.
Land consents? You’ll need to consult with the local hapū authority, the iwi liaison officer, and probably a kaumatua who once saw a taniwha on the hill. Good luck budgeting for that.
Heritage overlays? Entire paddocks frozen from development because someone mumbled “cultural landscape” at a council hearing.

This isn’t stewardship. It’s a Kafkaesque game of Guess Who, where rules are made up, never written down, and always subject to spiritual reinterpretation.

Competition vs Co-Governance: One Involves Actually Doing Stuff

Alchian and Allen love competition—not because it’s “fair” or “inclusive” but because it works. It’s messy, brutal, and marvellously efficient at weeding out nonsense.

Now compare that to New Zealand’s new model, where contracts, governance rights, and planning approvals are handed out not to the best bidder, but to “Treaty partners.” Translation: if you have the right whakapapa, you don’t have to compete—you’re in the room by default.

This isn’t “equity.” It’s tribal corporatism in a hi-vis vest, dressed up in the language of justice but functioning like a 1970s banana republic.

Control Without Cost: The New Sacred Cow

The final Alchian and Allen lesson? He who controls must bear the cost. Simple. Obvious. Unless you live in New Zealand, in which case it’s been turned on its head.

Today, iwi entities are increasingly given decision-making power—over resource consents, environmental flows, land use policies—without any corresponding obligation to bear the financial or legal consequences of those decisions.

If an iwi-appointed board delays a vital infrastructure project, guess who pays? Not them. If a co-governed river authority underdelivers on water quality targets, who’s accountable? Nobody.

This is the bureaucratic version of a student flat: everyone wants the Wi-Fi, nobody takes out the bins.

The Unravelling Social Compact

Here’s the real danger: we are not just distorting markets. We are undermining trust. In law, in government, and in each other.

Because when property rights depend on bloodlines instead of ballots, when contracts are overridden by oral tradition, and when governance is sliced into racial fiefdoms—you’re not honouring the Treaty. You’re replacingthe state with a slow-motion tribal confederacy.

And the worst part? Nobody voted for it.

Final Word from the Ghost of Armen Alchian

Let me channel the great man one last time: “The problem is not scarcity, it’s coordination.”

New Zealand has resources. We have people, capital, ideas, and still—just barely—a reputation for fair play. But none of that matters if no one knows who owns what, who decides what, and who foots the bill when it all collapses.

This isn’t “biculturalism.” It’s legal schizophrenia. And we’ll all pay for it—first in investment decline, then in race relations, and finally in open conflict over what should be settled matters of law.

So yes, by all means, recognise the past. Say sorry, build monuments, fund language programs, have ceremonial pōwhiri at Parliament. But don’t turn property law into spiritual improv theatre.

It’s not noble. It’s not just. It’s a bloody expensive way to ruin a nation.

Zoran Rakovic is a structural engineer with nearly 30 years of experience, who has helped design and strengthen buildings across New Zealand—particularly in Christchurch’s earthquake recovery - while balancing life as a dad, granddad, and outdoor enthusiast. He blogs HERE.