Geoff Parker: Land Back? The Greens’ Dangerous Rewrite Of New Zealand’s History

The Green Party says “returning land to Māori is the right thing to do”. It sounds morally compelling — until you ask the obvious question: which land, taken from whom, and owned by whom today — and on what legal and historical basis?

There is no question that New Zealand's nineteenth-century land history was complex. There were land purchases, sales, disputed transactions, confiscations following the New Zealand Wars, and later changes in the way Māori land ownership was administered. Some transactions were contested then and remain contested today.

But that history cannot simply be reduced to a story of Māori land being “stolen” by the Crown and therefore remaining subject to an automatic claim for return.

Land changed hands for many different reasons and under very different circumstances. Māori themselves sold substantial areas of land, sometimes to the Crown and sometimes to private interests. Other land was affected by war, legislation, the Native Land Court and subsequent sales. To treat all of those different circumstances as one continuous act of dispossession is to impose a modern political narrative on a complicated historical record.

More importantly, even where a historical transaction is judged to have been unjust, that does not by itself establish an automatic right to the land as it exists today. The crucial question is how historical grievances should be dealt with while respecting the property rights and legitimate interests of people who acquired land generations later.

But historical redress cannot reasonably mean creating an open-ended hereditary claim to property based solely on ancestry.

That is where the Green Party’s argument becomes dangerous.

Its Hoki Whenua Mai policy proposes investigating land dispossession, reopening historical claims, giving the Waitangi Tribunal the power to recommend the return of privately owned land or its acquisition by the Crown, giving mana whenua a right of first refusal over land deemed wrongfully alienated and revisiting Treaty settlements.

That is not simply “putting right an old wrong”. It potentially turns historical grievance into a permanent claim over present-day private property.

And there is another inconvenient part of the history that tends to disappear from the “stolen land” narrative.

A very substantial proportion of Māori land was sold, rather than confiscated. Te Ara records that before 1844, Crown pre-emption applied, and after it was temporarily lifted Māori could sell land directly to settlers. Later, the Crown became the dominant purchaser, acquiring millions of hectares through purchases.

Some of those purchases were possibly problematic. Others were legitimate transactions between Māori owners and the Crown. The historical record is complicated. It cannot honestly be reduced to the simplistic proposition that “Māori land was stolen and therefore should now be returned”.

There is an even bigger problem.

Māori were not one unified landowning corporation. Land was held through whānau, hapū and iwi, with overlapping customary interests. Different groups had competing claims and interests in the same territory. Early European observers themselves recorded radically different understandings of what a land transaction meant.

So who exactly gets the land back?

The descendants of the people who held the land in 1840? The iwi that later claimed it? A hapū? A whānau? Or a modern tribal corporation?

And what happens to the innocent New Zealand family who bought their home decades later, paid the mortgage, paid the rates and taxes, maintained the property and had absolutely nothing to do with the original transaction?

The Greens have no convincing answer.

New Zealand has already spent billions settling historical Treaty claims. Those settlements were explicitly designed as settlements of historical grievances. The Greens now want to challenge the concept of “full and final” settlement itself.

That changes the entire proposition.

If settlements are never actually final, then there is no point at which New Zealand can say: the historical account has been examined, redress has been provided, and we now move forward as equal citizens.

Instead, every generation inherits the disputes of the previous one.

Yes, history matters. Yes, genuine historical injustices should be acknowledged and, where appropriate, compensated.

But justice cannot mean creating a permanent hereditary claim over property based on ancestry.

New Zealand belongs to all New Zealanders today.

Our challenge is not to keep reopening the past until somebody gets the country they believe their ancestors should have possessed.

It is to build a country where the rights of citizens are determined by law, not race; citizenship, not ancestry; and evidence, not historical speculation.

That is not denying history.

It is refusing to turn history into a permanent constitutional and property claim.

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