Is the Crown really the villain of this story?
- Grant McLachlan - Column
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Liam Ratana aims his King’s Birthday anger squarely at the monarch. The historical record keeps pointing somewhere closer to home.
In a King’s Birthday column for The Spinoff, Liam Ratana wrote that the Crown “has built its wealth on stolen land, exploited resources, slavery and genocide”, a charge he insisted was fact rather than opinion. Much of the underlying grievance is real, and worth stating plainly. The harm done to Maori in the nineteenth century was vast, deliberate and, in places, monstrous.
But a grievance can be entirely real and still be aimed at the wrong target. Before we renounce a King over a long weekend, it is worth asking a colder question: when Maori land was seized and Maori communities were broken, whose hand actually held the blade — the distant imperial Crown, or the settler government the Crown reluctantly handed the country to?
Contents
The grievances are not in dispute
Start with what Ratana gets right.
Under the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863, the colonial government confiscated more than three million acres — roughly 1.2 million hectares, about 4.4 percent of the country — from iwi judged to have rebelled. In Taranaki, the thriving pacifist settlement of Parihaka was invaded and dismantled, its people scattered. None of this is myth, and none of it should be softened.
The question is not whether it happened. The question is who did it.
What London actually instructed
William Hobson did not sail south with orders to plunder.
His 1839 instructions, issued by Lord Normanby — the Secretary of State for the Colonies — directed him to shield Maori from lawless Europeans and the evils of unregulated settlement. He was told to deal with rangatira in “sincerity, justice, and good faith”, and forbidden from buying any land that Maori needed to live on. At the time there were perhaps 2,000 Europeans among some 100,000 Maori.
Whatever else they were, those were not the marching orders of an empire bent on extermination.
The arms race the Treaty froze
Nor was pre-Treaty New Zealand a peace that British arrival shattered.
From 1818, tribes across the north and through the Waikato, Hauraki and Taranaki armed themselves in a musket-fuelled arms race, and the inter-tribal Musket Wars killed an estimated 20,000 Maori — on some counts more than New Zealand lost in the First World War — from a population of only around 100,000. By the late 1830s those campaigns were burning out, exhausted and ruinously expensive, and warfare was giving way to trade. But by the late 1830s, Te Rauparaha was still raiding, commissioning British ships to plunder Ngai Tahu. As Hobson loaded the HMS Herald in Sydney Cove bound for New Zealand, it was abundantly clear that some tribes were rearming and preparing for utu.
The Treaty did not interrupt a flourishing peace; it arrived during a lull in the violence and helped freeze a fragile one, with tribal boundaries fixed roughly as they stood in 1840.
The grim irony is that much of that firepower was turned on the Crown a generation later, in the 1860s — by then muzzle-loading muskets and tupara hopelessly outclassed by the rifled Enfields and Armstrong guns the colonial forces brought to bear.
A treaty sold as protection
Did Maori cede sovereignty?
The Waitangi Tribunal’s 2014 ruling on the northern claims found that the rangatira who signed te Tiriti in February 1840 did not. The same inquiry found that Hobson and his agents presented the agreement as a means of bringing unruly British settlers under control, and so protecting Maori, while chiefs were assured they kept their tino rangatiratanga. In other words, the Crown was pitched to Maori not as a conqueror but as a shield.
This interpretation of history is tangental to what the Treaty actually says. The Treaty explicitly mentions the United Tribes of New Zealand as it recognised their sovereignty as declared by the 1835 Declaration of Independence (He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni). That document used terms like Kingitanga, Kawanatanga, and Rangatiratanga, referring to the King of England as their matua. Hobson sought out the signatories of that declaration for the explicit purpose of asking for sovereignty (kawanatanga) to be ceded in exchange for protecting their property (rangatiratanga) and human rights (tikanga).
The issue isn't whether Maori ceded sovereignty but what the Crown did with it.
The betrayal, when it came, was a betrayal of that promise — and it did not come from London.
When the Crown let go
For two decades the imperial Crown deliberately kept “native affairs” out of settler hands — precisely because officials in England feared elected colonists would put their own interests ahead of Maori. That changed when Britain conceded 'responsible' government in 1856, instructed the governor in 1862 to follow his settler ministers on Maori matters, and surrendered full control by 1865.
What followed was no coincidence. The Waikato invasion and the great confiscations came in the 1860s, and land-purchase officials such as Donald McLean leaned ever harder on reluctant sellers.
The harm to Maori did not climb with the Crown’s power. It climbed as that power was handed to the settlers.
Parihaka, with the governor away
The pattern is starkest at Parihaka.
On 5 November 1881, around 1,600 Armed Constabulary and volunteers, led by Native Minister John Bryce (himself the local MP and former militiaman) marched on the settlement and arrested its prophets Te Whiti and Tohu. The proclamation that licensed the raid was rushed through while the governor, Sir Arthur Gordon — a known critic of the government’s Taranaki policy — was away in Fiji. Gordon landed back in Wellington barely two hours after it was signed, and was furious.
Four years earlier, Chief Justice James Prendergast had supplied the legal licence, dismissing the Treaty as “a simple nullity”.
The villains here have names, and they sat in Wellington, not Windsor.
The signature on the apology
And the Crown? It is the institution that eventually said sorry.
The 1995 Waikato-Tainui settlement returned land and $170 million and carried the first apology by a British monarch to Maori, signed by Queen Elizabeth II herself.
Treaty settlements since have allocated some $2.24 billion.
There is even an irony in Ratana’s preferred alternative: he suggests honouring 28 October, the signing of He Whakaputanga. Yet that 1835 declaration was drafted by the Crown’s own Resident, James Busby, and its signatories explicitly sought the protection of King William IV.
The King keeps turning up on the side Ratana thinks he is arguing against.
Nu Tireni, not Aotearoa
There is a sharper irony still, and it sits inside the very document Ratana wants to elevate.
He Whakaputanga does not call the country Aotearoa. Its full title is He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni, and the te reo text names the land Nu Tireni throughout — a transliteration of “New Zealand.” The name the signatory rangatira chose, in the founding assertion of their own authority, was a rendering of the European one.
Aotearoa, the word Ratana prefers, did not originally mean the whole country at all. It was the Maori name for the North Island alone; the two islands together, where they were named as a pair, were “Aotearoa me Te Waipounamu”.
So Ratana reaches for a label that once described half the country to stand in for all of it, while stepping past the name his own chosen document actually used.
The further back he reaches for authenticity, the more the record talks back.
The discipline of empathy
None of this makes the opposite error any safer.
There are revisionists at both ends of this argument — some who would shrink the confiscations and the killings into a footnote, others who would pin every wrong on a Crown that spent two decades trying to prevent them — and both work the same way. They count on a claim being repeated often enough, and loudly enough, that it hardens into received fact, and they treat a dissenting voice as something to be drowned out by numbers rather than answered with evidence.
Populism is not a method of history; it is a substitute for one.
The harder discipline is empathy: not sympathy, but the effort to stand inside the moment and weigh the parties, the actions and the outcomes as the people of the time actually faced them. It means granting Hobson his instructions and the settlers their hunger for land, the rangatira their reasoning and the Crown its later remorse, without flattening any of them into a hero or a villain to suit a long weekend.
Get the context right and the blame usually sorts itself — and it rarely lands where the loudest voices insist it must.
The Crown Liam Ratana wants to disown is the same Crown whose signature sits at the foot of the apology.
The blade that did the damage was sharpened a good deal closer to home — and it is worth knowing which hand held it before deciding whose birthday to boycott.
