Geoff Parker: Bastion Point, Rewritten History, and the Politics of Permanent Grievance

Hana Pera Aoake’s article in The Post reads less like history and more like advocacy presented as reflection. It leans heavily on symbolism and emotion while relying on selective memory and the omission of inconvenient facts—choices that serve a predetermined grievance narrative rather than an honest accounting of the past.

Start with Bastion Point itself. In 1886, 5.3 hectares of land were acquired under the Public Works Act for declared military purposes. This was neither a confiscation nor an unpaid seizure. Ngāti Whātua received £1,500 in compensation—roughly equivalent to about NZ$570,000 in today’s terms. On a per‑hectare basis, that payment was approximately twice the median value of today’s undeveloped New Zealand farmland. By any reasonable standard, the compensation was generous. Calling this “theft” obscures the basic facts: it was a lawful acquisition, accompanied by substantial payment.

That context matters because the article repeatedly implies illegality and dispossession without acknowledging the legal reality. With regard to the 1977–78 occupation, Justice Speight was explicit: the land was Crown land, and the occupiers had no legal right, title, or licence to be there. That finding alone undercuts the claim that Bastion Point was stolen land being “reclaimed.” Whatever its symbolic power, the occupation was unlawful on land the courts recognised as legitimately owned by the Crown.

The broader historical framing is equally problematic. From 1840 onwards, Ngāti Whātua sold most of their Auckland land. These were voluntary transactions, often initiated by Māori themselves, at a time when land carried limited commercial value and when engagement with the Crown was sought for trade, income, and security. Recasting those sales, with the benefit of hindsight, as confiscation is historical revisionism rather than careful scholarship.

Nor is this pattern unique. By the late nineteenth century, Māori landowners had sold at least 90 percent of New Zealand’s land to the Crown. Some of that land was later subdivided for settler farms—a fact frequently cited as evidence of injustice while overlooking the foundational reality that the land had already been purchased. The Crown cannot steal what it legally bought.

This brings us to the Treaty itself, which is routinely invoked as though its breach by the Crown were an established and uncontested historical fact. It is not. Noted historian Dr John Robinson, in Who Really Broke the Treaty?, documented that the major Treaty breaches in the nineteenth century were not committed by the Crown at all, but by chiefs who rejected the authority they had agreed to in 1840. The Crown’s actions, Robinson argued, were consistent with the acquisition of sovereignty and the extension of British law promised under the Treaty.

Robinson pointed to a series of clear violations by Māori leaders: the Wairau massacre of 1843 led by Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata; armed rebellion in the Wellington region in 1846; Hōne Heke’s war against the government in the north 1845 - 1856; Wiremu Kingi’s armed resistance at Waitara in 1859 despite a lawful land sale; and the establishment of a rival Māori kingship in1859 that explicitly rejected Crown authority and led to open warfare. These were not misunderstandings or cultural clashes. They were direct challenges to sovereignty.

In that context, firm government action during the New Zealand Wars was not a betrayal of the Treaty but an enforcement of it. A state that declines to uphold its own authority ceases to be a state at all. Likewise, land confiscations following rebellion were not Treaty breaches; they were penalties imposed under the law of the time against those who had taken up arms against the Crown. To describe these consequences as illegitimate theft is to erase the preceding acts of rebellion that led to the confiscations.

From there, the article pivots to contemporary outcomes—health disparities, incarceration rates, educational underachievement—and attributes them almost entirely to colonisation and supposed Treaty violations. This is less analysis than ideological reflex. Welfare dependency, family breakdown, and chronic educational failure produce similar outcomes in every society, regardless of ethnicity. These dynamics do not discriminate by race, and neither do their consequences. To explain everything through colonisation is to strip people of agency, excuse failure, and lock Māori communities into a narrative of inherited helplessness.

The assertion that Māori are “denied full citizenship privileges” is especially detached from present‑day reality. Today, Māori receive a wide range of race‑specific advantages across health, education, broadcasting, political representation, legal processes, funding access, and governance structures. No other ethnic group in New Zealand has race‑exclusive seats in Parliament, race‑exclusive health authorities, or race‑exclusive funding pathways. This is not marginalisation; it is institutional preference.

Finally, the article repeats the now‑orthodox claim that the Treaty was intended to establish a Crown–Māori “partnership.” This idea is constitutionally incoherent. A sovereign cannot form a partnership with its own subjects. Article Three of the Treaty granted Māori the rights of British subjects, placing all signatories under a single sovereign authority. Equal citizenship is not partnership; it is subjection to the same political and legal framework. That is how states function.

Art exhibitions are free to provoke and to challenge. History, however, is not free to be invented. When grievance becomes identity and mythology displaces evidence, society is not enlightened—it is misled. Bastion Point does not demonstrate land theft; it demonstrates how selectively arranged facts can be used to sustain a narrative that collapses under scrutiny.

If we are genuinely serious about moving forward together, the first step is intellectual honesty—starting with telling ourselves the truth about how we got here.

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