John Robertson
By 2025, New Zealand’s public discourse has hardened into something resembling a ritual: colonisation is invoked, rehearsed and recycled with near-religious regularity, as if repeating the word itself constitutes historical insight. What began decades ago as a necessary reckoning has metastasised into a narrow, obsessive framework that treats colonisation not as a universal human process, but as a uniquely modern moral crime – conveniently stripped of global context, scale and historical precedent. This is not serious history. It is ideological repetition dressed up as moral sophistication.
Here is the inconvenient, immovable fact that refuses to go away: every society on Earth has been colonised, conquered, absorbed, displaced or overwritten. Europe was carved up repeatedly – Roman expansion erased entire cultures and later invasions by Goths, Huns, Vikings and Ottomans dismantled and rebuilt the continent by force. Asia’s borders were forged through dynastic conquest, mass migrations and brutal imperial expansion; Mongol campaigns alone killed millions and reordered half the known world. Africa’s pre-colonial kingdoms expanded violently at one another’s expense, absorbing land, people and resources long before European arrival. The Americas were dominated by empires that conquered and subjugated neighbouring peoples centuries before Europeans entered the picture. New Zealand is no exception: Māori settlement involved displacement, warfare and territorial consolidation well before British administration layered another system of power on top. None of this is controversial – it is basic historical literacy.
Yet modern New Zealand politics, media and institutional culture behave as though history conveniently begins in the 1800s and ends with perpetual grievance. Parliamentary debates return to colonisation like a stuck record. Public broadcasters frame contemporary issues through the same moral lens, regardless of relevance. Local councils, policy documents and educational materials repeat the same narrow narrative until it calcifies into orthodoxy. The result is a historical monoculture – one story endlessly retold, while the rest of human history is quietly ignored because it complicates the moral theatre. This isn’t education: it’s narrative enforcement.
The deeper problem is not that colonisation is discussed, but that it is discussed selectively, emotionally and without proportion. Colonisation is treated as a singular stain rather than a structural force that shaped every civilisation on Earth. This selective fixation produces a warped worldview in which history is flattened into villains and victims, present politics are moralised beyond recognition and complexity is treated as betrayal. It also breeds exhaustion – because societies cannot function indefinitely on recycled outrage and truncated history.
Acknowledging colonisation as universal does not excuse injustice, but it destroys the fantasy that history can be morally simplified. Civilisations are built on conquest, collapse, adaptation and inheritance. Borders are scars. Nations are palimpsests. Every society lives atop layers of prior displacement, whether it admits it or not. New Zealand does itself no favours by pretending otherwise. A mature country confronts the full, brutal sweep of history – not just the chapters that flatter its current political mood. Until that happens, the conversation will remain loud, repetitive and fundamentally dishonest.
