Geoff Parker: Ngāi Tahu History Isn’t What 'The Press' Claims

The Press’s latest Ngāi Tahu puff piece — complete with misty-eyed claims about “Crumbs from the white man’s table” — is yet another exercise in historical distortion masquerading as journalism. It parrots the modern Treaty-industry script while ignoring the most basic historical facts, many of which sit openly in Crown archives. Either the reporter didn’t look, or didn’t want to.

Let’s start with what The Press refuses to acknowledge: Ngāi Tahu, originally from the North Island, had already sold much of the South Island before the Treaty of Waitangi was even signed.  The Treaty commitment to investigate pre-1840 sales didn’t expose some grand colonial fraud — it simply enabled the same chiefs to sell the same land ‘again’. Over the following 20 years from 1844, Ngāi Tahu entered ’ten separate land deals’, pocketing £14,750. That’s not the behaviour of an oppressed, tricked population — that’s a group quite comfortable with the terms. The payments appeared satisfactory at the time because they kept doing the deals for two decades.

And let’s be brutally honest about the nature of the land exchanged. The iwi sold undeveloped wilderness — land largely stripped of forest by earlier generations burning it off to flush out game. There were no towns. No farms. No roads. No schools. No industry. No capital investment whatsoever. The only reason that land later ballooned in value is because settlers poured in the labour, capital, engineering, agriculture, infrastructure, education, health systems and commercial development that transformed barren terrain into a functioning economy. To now retroactively claim the iwi were “robbed” because the land later increased in value is economic absurdity.

Yet, incredibly, modern governments — staffed by officials who appear unable to think this issue through and won’t even consult their own archival records — keep funnelling money, assets and special privileges to tribal corporations who cry poverty while sitting atop billion-dollar portfolios. The Treaty settlement process has morphed into a toxic mix of greed, dishonesty, and government stupidity.

This is exactly the pattern Alan Everton exposed in his analysis of the Ngāi Tahu grievance machine. The iwi have perfected the art of retelling history with themselves as perpetual victims, while the Waitangi Tribunal obligingly rewrites 19th-century agreements using 20th-century political jargon. “Partnership,” “fiduciary duty,” “development rights,” “Crown obligations”—none of these concepts existed in 1840. They were engineered decades later to justify modern wealth transfers.

The Press, of course, mentions none of this. Instead, it repeats the well-worn fiction that Ngāi Tahu were “stripped” of promised reserves, ignoring that many reserves were declined, underused, or later sold by Ngāi Tahu themselves. Whenever outcomes were favourable, iwi leadership claimed credit; when they weren’t, blame shifted entirely to the Crown. Tribal agency vanishes — because it doesn’t serve the grievance narrative.

And spare us the nonsense that the modern settlements are “only a fraction” of what tribes “should” be receiving. Anyone who believes that is either ignorant or lying — or both. Ngāi Tahu today operates as one of the richest corporate entities in the country, with political leverage and commercial reach far beyond what any ordinary citizen enjoys. That prosperity didn’t come from oppression — it came from a grievance model that rewards constant accusation and perpetual victimhood.

What New Zealanders deserve is honest journalism, not propaganda that romanticises a heavily sanitised version of events while shaming anyone who asks hard questions. The Press is pushing mythology, not history — and New Zealand is paying for it, literally and politically.

Geoff Parker is a passionate advocate for equal rights and a colour blind society.