This year, a new commemorative day has been announced: 13th September 2025 is officially “Thank a Coloniser Day.”
The purpose is simple – to give Māori the opportunity to reflect on the undeniable benefits that colonialism brought. While Māori supremacists like to claim colonisation was nothing but destruction, the reality is that without it Māori would still be living in a Stone Age society, never having invented basic technologies such as the wheel.
Instead, colonisation brought infrastructure, medicine, and opportunity. Today, Māori can sit in cushy government jobs paying $150,000 a year while doing next to no actual work. That privilege would never have existed without colonisers building the modern institutions that sustain it.
Things Māori can thank colonisers for:
Matua Kahurangi is just a bloke sharing thoughts on New Zealand and the world beyond. No fluff, just honest takes. He blogs on https://matuakahurangi.com/ where this article was sourced.
Things Māori can thank colonisers for:
- The wheel – without which cars, bicycles, trains and modern transport wouldn’t exist.
- Cars and roads – making travel possible far beyond tribal boundaries.
- Modern housing – with walls, insulation, heating, and running water.
- Clothing – replacing scratchy flax skirts with warm, durable fabrics.
- Healthcare – antibiotics, surgery, dentistry, vaccines, and a life expectancy far higher than pre-colonial days.
- Electricity and heating – no more huddling around smoky fires.
- Schools and literacy – Māori didn’t have a written language before colonisation; now they can write down their own history.
- Protecting native species – from kākāpō breeding programmes to kiwi sanctuaries, largely funded and organised through colonial systems.
- Computers and the internet – allowing Māori activists to complain about colonisation on technology that only exists because of it.
- Jobs in Parliament – paid six figures for pushing identity politics, a luxury unimaginable without colonial systems of government.
Matua Kahurangi is just a bloke sharing thoughts on New Zealand and the world beyond. No fluff, just honest takes. He blogs on https://matuakahurangi.com/ where this article was sourced.
13 comments:
They could well THANK and be grateful to the original "colonisers", here in the 1800s, who brought bed linen, blankets, pots and pans, and made mud huts and slept on bracken beds, while they formed roads/tracks, fenced etc daylight till dusk. Do you think they did that for spite, or because of extreme poverty in the home country? No Social Welfare then. Start THINKING..........
Thanks for Toilet Paper, too !
Nothing new there Matua, except as you point out, an absence of gratitude from the highly privileged descendants of the Neolithic nazis who benefitted from the civilizing influence of British and later, settlers. The late Robert Jones suggested maori gratitude day instead of Waitangi day and was vilified by some for such an outrageous, yet eminently sensible suggestion. Your idea, although valid will not get traction, more's the pity.
What did maori wear pre colonialism? Simply flax ( dried or some sort of linen) feathers for the privileged? Fish,dog,rat or bird leather??? Leaf and/or bark clothing? No wool because no sheep or other wool producing animals. No cotton. How did they keep warm?
They were hardy buggas
As Allen points, the late Sir Bob Jones would have been a supporter.
Of course, those colonisers also gave them a written and reasonably defined legal system that protected them and their property; a system that enabled self-determination and a life away from serfdom and slavery; and, of course, civility and one free of warfare and cannabilism. I would also have included protection from infanticide but, regrettably, that's something they haven't quite adjusted to yet. It also enabled them to double their life expectancy.
So in all, a 'thank you' and some 'gratitude' would seem very much in order.
But, no - they just want more money and power. Little different from what a visiting British Envoy recorded in 1835. "...The whole of these Chiefs, as well as the tribes to which they belong, have one and the same distinguishing features, of which a rapacious, thieving, and greedy disposition is a principal one. ..."
So, despite the historical facts and the very justified sentiments, I predict the silence will be deafening, Matua.
Protein rich diet prob helped... some.
Those who condemn colonisation forget that, since all 'Maori' have some coloniser ancestry, they owe their very existence to colonisation. How ironic is that?
Did Bob Jones not propose something similar a few years ago? He was to take a court case against some maori who objected in florid language. But then in a day representing the end of humour in NZ he dropped the case, presumably in consideration of his empire, much of it leased to govt departents., then all blindly pro maori..
Kept warm by running around killing and pillaging. Food.... rats, birds etc...and - don't forget infanticide and cannibalism. SLOW food they had then... not KFC.
Anons@10.12 & 11.03, of course they were hardy, they liked the cold so much they even ventured to Antarctica. It does puzzle me though, why they liked the colonists blankets so much?
Not to forget that the arrival of the 'colonists' led to the supply of the breeding stock that has been responsible for the modern day Maori.
Maori should be eternally grateful that the Brits beat the French, Germans, Spanish, Dutch , Russian colonists to NZ.
Under any of those other nations, Maori would have been absolutely subjugated , not treated as equals, but relegated to slave status.
In the extremely unlikely situation, where Maori and NZ had continued to exist as an incoherent group of islands, how would they continue to defend themselves from any of the above ?
Be assured that the Brits arriving was the very best outcome for Maori.
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