Steven Gaskell: Colonialism Apparently Invented Mortgages

According to the latest fashionable academic theory coming out of the University of Auckland, Māori housing struggles today can largely be traced back to colonialism introducing private property, debt and home ownership systems that supposedly “reshaped Māori life”. In other words, the modern housing market is now apparently responsible not only for interest rates and rent increases, but also for rewriting centuries of history into a permanent grievance narrative where every social problem somehow traces back to Captain Cook personally inventing mortgages.

The problem with these theories is they conveniently skip over an awkward historical reality: pre-colonial housing standards were hardly the utopian communal paradise modern academics like to romanticise. Traditional Māori housing largely consisted of small raupō, timber and earth structures with dirt floors, smoke-filled interiors, little insulation, minimal sanitation and limited protection against disease or harsh weather. Life expectancy was dramatically lower than modern standards, tribal warfare was common, and entire communities could be displaced, enslaved or wiped out through conflict, famine and scarcity long before Europeans arrived.

Pretending nothing improved post European requires wilful blindness. Colonisation also introduced large-scale infrastructure, modern medicine, sanitation systems, permanent timber housing, steel tools, roads, plumbing, electricity, literacy, organised commerce, banking and legal property rights. Over time New Zealand went on to achieve one of the highest home ownership rates in the developed world during much of the twentieth century. Millions of ordinary working-class families, Māori included, benefited from those systems.

Yet modern academia increasingly talks as though private property itself is some sinister colonial conspiracy imposed on innocent collectivist societies living in harmony until capitalism arrived to ruin everything. Apparently having legal ownership of your own home, the ability to borrow capital, accumulate wealth and pass assets to your children is now considered evidence of oppression rather than progress. By that logic, the bank manager is basically the new imperial governor.

The real issue facing Māori, Pacific and non-Māori families alike today is not “colonial housing structures” but the same brutal economic pressures hammering every working household in New Zealand: inflated house prices, endless bureaucracy, restrictive planning laws, mass immigration pressures, construction costs, stagnant productivity, high interest rates and decades of political cowardice from governments terrified of upsetting the property market. None of those problems are solved by another taxpayer-funded thesis blaming nineteenth-century colonisation for twenty-first-century zoning regulations.

But universities keep circling back to the same ideological comfort blanket because it is easier to blame history than confront present-day policy failure. The formula is now painfully predictable: capitalism bad, colonialism worse, Western systems inherently oppressive, more public funding required for further research. Entire academic careers now appear to depend on stretching colonialism far enough to explain literally everything from housing affordability to supermarket prices.

At some point New Zealanders are entitled to ask whether universities are still researching solutions, or simply producing increasingly elaborate ways to turn the past into a permanent political industry.

Steven is an entrepreneur and an ex RNZN diver who likes travelling, renovating houses, Swiss Watches, history, chocolate art and art deco.