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.
7 comments:
If the msm would ridicule maori claims the whole industry would lose credibility.Maori housing requirements were eased by infanticide. The tribe provided for all within. They did not rely on support from other tribes, except by the use of captives as slaves. The state now does the capturing of input from the colonist inspired tribes on maori behalf. Very many non maori plan families to match their ability to provide. A disproportionate fraction of maori seem to willfully proliferate to ensure support from others..
Apart for the fact that maoris living in state houses (fashionably called social housing now) don't require mortgages, the occupants of some let them fall into a level of filth and untidiness that mirror the pre-1840 housing maori occupied. If no one believes me have a look at the flats on Randwick Rd in Lower Hutt just south of the small shopping centre of Moera. An absolute graffiti-scarred disgrace. Add in those on a marae near Ohau and Manakau and it is clear nothing much has changed.
Yes, Steven, it is "those same brutal economic pressures..." - it's just that Maori are disproportionately NOT working households and are in fact way too often dysfunctional ones. It's not surprising that they find home ownership difficult and, as Allen accurately notes, too few know how to maintain them even when they have one provided. Those lack of appropriate role models and other familial dysfunction all comes at a cost. It's a just pity everyone else has to bear it both financially and socially. It all comes back to a lack of personal responsibility - a concept these neo-Marxist modern University academic types seem unable to grasp in their pursuit of claimed research, to justify their worthless degrees.
Colonialism and mortgages.
As global expert Clooney says: What else?
Attacked your neighbour, cannibalized him, taken his wife, enslaved the family, taken his primitive whare - who needs a mortgage ?
"....entire communities could be displaced, enslaved or wiped out through conflict, famine and scarcity long before Europeans arrived."
The academics at UoA must think that the rest of us cannot read. Many of us are well aware of what pre-European NZ was like for the indigenes.
Steven Gaskell, like all people who think that we have arrived at the highest possible stage in the development of human society, fails to think historically.
Yes, pre-European Māori society, like all early societies, rested on communal property. Yes, it was in material terms an impoverished society, at a low technological level which, like all other early societies, could not develop the forces of production without the institution of various forms of private property to give individuals the incentive to lead that development. But private property, having fulfilled its historical role, can now give way to a higher form of society, one again based on collective ownership, but at a much higher technological level.
Frederick Engels described this wide sweep of human progress (he is talking here about ownership of agricultural land, but the same idea applies to land for housing):
“All civilized peoples begin with the common ownership of the land. With all peoples who have passed a certain primitive stage, this common ownership becomes in the course of the development of agriculture a fetter on production. It is abolished, negated, and after a longer or shorter series of intermediate stages is transformed into private property. But at a higher stage of agricultural development, brought about by private property in land itself, private property conversely becomes a fetter on production, as is the case today both with small and large landownership. The demand that it, too, should be negated, that it should once again be transformed into common property, necessarily arises. But this demand does not mean the restoration of the aboriginal common ownership, but the institution of a far higher and more developed form of possession in common which, far from being a hindrance to production, on the contrary for the first time will free production from all fetters and enable it to make full use of modern chemical discoveries and mechanical inventions.”
The housing shortage is real (except for those who own multiple properties of course). It can never be solved while housing land remains a commodity to be bought and sold on the market. All housing stock need to taken into public ownership and allocated on the basis of need. The entire rents and mortgages system should be abolished.
Does this mean that every middle-class family in Mt. Eden should be thrown out of their home? Of course not. People who demonstrate an attachment to a dwelling should be guaranteed security of tenure, including the right to pass it on to their children. China's President Xi Jinping may be a neo-Stalinist dictator, but he got one thing right when he said " Houses are for living in, not speculating with."
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