Immigration back to the colonial future

“They died for New Zealand.” That is what is inscribed on the memorial stone at the military cemetery in Opotiki. None of the original Government invasion force of September 1865 suffered fatalities – the soldiers buried here were due to their own later misadventures. The stone was probably erected about 1900. The place is neglected, but from memory the NZDF has taken some responsibility by having some bronze plates put on some of the unmarked graves.

They died for New Zealand. Gave their lives for New Zealand. Not for Queen or Empire, but for New Zealand. That’s the official line. But we know that they really died for the promise made to them by the Government that if they invaded Opotiki and subdued the local tribe they would be granted land from that which would be confiscated. They died for land – some else’s land they were paid to take by force – the Raupatu. They were mercenaries. But, they died for New Zealand.

It begs the question, if the fallen Government soldiers who invaded and occupied Opotiki – and indeed the whole coastal Eastern Bay of Plenty – were seen from the stand-point of the surviving veterans in 1900 to have died for “New Zealand” then what did the Maori tribes opposing the invasion die for? They were killed because they were against New Zealand. They died because of New Zealand. They died for their land – and that was not New Zealand.

There is another memorial in connection with the Raupatu. A stone next to the gas pipeline alongside State Highway 2 on the Waioweka straight a few kilometres from Opotiki township acknowledges the fallen Whakatohea of the Tarata battle which happened a month after the Government invasion. This stone was erected by the local Hapu. The stone doesn’t record which agenda they died for.  The Maori who died there defending their pa against an array of British artillery were buried in the trenches. All of the agricultural land of that valley was put in the confiscation zone. The farmer later built a diary unit over the top of it.

My guess is that the Land Wars of the 1860s was the turning point where the appellation of “New Zealander” went from being applied to Maori to being applied to the settlers. My guess is that by 1900 it made sense to them to think of themselves as New Zealanders rather than simply as British and it made sense to define the reason they died as clearly a nation-building exercise. The Government were by this stage going to start paying these veterans a war pension.

So, 160 years later, in 2026, at this general election, a party called “New Zealand First” is promoting New Zealand as a nation which should retain that name and increase the value of its citizenship. What would you expect of proudly half-caste kupapa? Both Winston Peters and Shane Jones do hold to an idea of a bicultural nation – but it’s asymmetrical: Pakeha-first, Maori-second. Winston’s oafish retort to Dr Xu-Nan, a Chinese-NZ MP, in the House to go back home “where they lie like flat fish” just reminds us that Winston behind his pin-striped suit and international rolodex is a hokey  provincial bigot. No fans of “multi” anything, NZ First is very much Asians last.

The problem is that NZ First’s overt racism has prevented any meaningful public discourse on immigration and national and nationalist objectives over the last 30 years. Fraught enough with racial sensitivities and choked with existential angst and rife with academic woolliness and in the no-man’s land of the culture wars, the media doesn’t feel comfortable criticising immigrants or immigration and public discourse has been resultingly anaemic and superficial.

Prof. Spoonley has suffocated every other voice for a generation, advocating for mass migration. I once had an on-air discussion with Spoonley and Mark Sainsbury where I made the point that it was the Pakeha population that was below natural replacement, not Maori. They both refused to acknowledge it. They kept saying New Zealand has this problem – that New Zealanders aren’t having enough kids. No – white people have this problem, Maori do not have this problem. It’s a ‘you’ problem. But they didn’t want to attempt to understand it. Maori projected to out-number Pakeha is the clanging gong of death for the settler colony of New Zealand and that’s why they have cloth ears all of a sudden. That’s white privilege – communal obtuseness. How can we have a real conversation about these things if the thought leaders are unable to defend the basis of their thoughts? The political rhetoric is worse.

The debate is instantly poisoned with brainless xenophobic accusations by conservative politicians and brainless xenophilic excuses by liberal politicians and the nature of New Zealand can never be examined rationally. Take the word “colony” for example. The Lefties like to deploy the word “colonisation” like confetti, but they don’t seem able to follow through on what that enables us to see. The essence of colonisation is immigration – without immigration it will cease to be a colony, and it will, over time go native. But stopping immigration means the white liberals won’t have the diversity they value. And stopping immigration means the politicians and the wealthy won’t have the votes and the money they value. It is not in the interests of these groups to stop immigration, however because it is also the primary mode of colonisation this makes their stance antithetical to decolonisation. How far in any discussion will parties ever hope to get on colonisation if they lose their shit at the concept of “citizen” voting?

The human storm flood of mass migration since the 1990s has come despite opinion polling running against immigration. The gap between public opinion and the politicians’ actions is explained largely as corruption of one sort or another. Recent polling has seen a softening on immigration we are told; yet it seems obvious that because so many immigrants are themselves being polled they are bound to influence public opinion. Dr Xu-Nan made reference to the increasing proportion of foreign-born population in his The Bradbury Group interview last week:

MB: “What does ‘go back to where you came from’ mean to all those migrant Kiwis living in New Zealand?”

LXN: “I mean a third of Aotearoa New Zealand were not born in New Zealand, […] another third’s parents were not born in New Zealand.”

These ratios are by definition colonial.

The earliest date at which NZ could in any way be considered not a colony anymore was the title change to Dominion in 1907. At the census of 1906 the total population (European and Maori) was 1,008,468 of which 308,600 were born outside NZ, ie. 30.6% were immigrants (UK almost entirely).

The NZ census results for % of foreign-born population:

1. 2023 — 28.8%
2. 2018 — 27.4%
3. 2013 — 25.2%
4. 2006 — 22.9%
5. 2001 — ~22%
6. 1996 — ~19–20%
7. 1991 — ~17–18%

1987 – Immigration Act

1. 1986 — ~16–17%
2. 1981 — ~16%
3. 1976 — ~15–16%
4. 1971 — ~14–15%
5. 1966 — ~14%
6. 1961 — ~13–14%
7. 1956 — ~13%
8. 1951 — ~12–13%

NZ Citizenship Act

1. 1945 — ~11–12%

1. 1936 — ~18–20%
2. 1931 — ~19–20%
3. 1926 — ~20–22%

1. 1921 — ~22–23%
2. 1916 — ~21–22%
3. 1911 — ~23–24%

1907 – NZ goes from Colony to Dominion

1. 1906 — 30.6%
2. 1901 — ~28–29%

If the last time the proportion of foreign-born settlers was 30% of the population was when NZ was actually officially still called a “Colony”, then isn’t NZ by this fact alone still practically a colony?

The census records that the low year was 1945 – after 15 years of economic depression and a world war the immigrant population was about 12%. My guess is that this would be the only time the Maori population would have been equal (but not greater) than the foreign-born population since the numbers crossed over in about 1860 to being majority European (the vast majority of them being born in the UK).  A bi-ethnic and bi-cultural reality existed for the period from 1945 – 1991 before the effects of the 1987 Immigration Act were felt. Decolonisation was a prospect during this period as the Maori proportion of the population climbed due to the modest immigration levels. This has all slowed as the gates have been opened to larger numbers. Decolonisation is simply impossible with mass migration.

It’s not a real country if it has always had to import people to survive. It is a Colony. The moment it stops is the moment it starts a repatriation process to Maori majority. And when that Maori majority is achieved all the Pakeha thievery and oppression that sustains their elites economically and the other classes of settler socially and culturally gets reversed and they will lose their status over time. That is the big picture.

So, when I hear the non-white immigrants attempting to demonise the Europeans and lecture people on “Treaty values,” “decol” and racism etc I still regard them as tau iwi settlers the same as the demonic white man. They have the same arrogance as all settlers have, that NZ should be grateful to them for improving this backward country. They may claim to suffer the same victimhood at the hands of the evil European for intersectional identity alignment, but these are squabbles amongst the settlers – those tribulations have nothing per se to do with Maori. They are the same class of person vis a vis Tangata Whenua.

There seems little appreciable difference between the white liberal and the non-white liberal immigrant who both know everything about the society they just moved to. Both have self-serving concepts of justice that presume Maori endorsement for their presence and political involvement, only the non-white liberal lacks the self-awareness of the white liberal making them particularly precious. The ultimate act of solidarity of the immigrant with Maori would be not to have arrived in the first place and help defeat the NZ Government from their own country.

I’ve heard “Tangata Tiriti” being used to name the 180+ years of settler waves. This is cute, because it implies that Maori have consented to them; but they are really “Tangata Kawanatanga” – people of the Government. The wanky “Treaty educators” who grift off the immigrants by telling them what they want to hear are only undermining the cause of the Treaty.

As the immigration levels continue unabated the Faustian, Orwellian, Kafkaesque bargain of the Pakeha elite to import a replacement population to pay their superannuation and keep the Maori vote swamped plays out until the last Boomer is dead. The challenge is for the media to report on this in an honest way (as Dr Xu-Nan has said he wants “an honest” debate) and for immigrants of every persuasion to consider who invited them and why.

Christopher Finlayson, for example, has said repeatedly that he wants to invite in “a million Indians.” Why? So they can do all the service jobs (he doesn’t think for a moment they would end up threatening his white bastions of course). Finlayson seems to be the only one up for an honest debate on the Boomer plan.