GEOFF PARKER: Colonisation Is Not What’s on the Dinner Plate

A new university-backed study claims Māori food insecurity is “not the result of individual choice or lifestyle” but a “direct and ongoing consequence of colonisation”. It is a claim that sounds humane and progressive — and one that creatively explains everything while proving very little.

No fair-minded person denies that history matters. The problem is that colonisation is treated not as one factor among many, but as the decisive and permanent cause of present-day outcomes. It becomes an all-purpose explanation that absolves individuals of responsibility, shields current policy from scrutiny, and discourages honest discussion about what actually drives food insecurity today.

That is ideology, not health science.

The study relies on qualitative interviews with Māori “kai [food] experts” operating entirely within a kaupapa [ideological] Māori framework. There is no attempt to test competing explanations or compare outcomes across income levels, household structures, regions, or behaviour. Colonisation is assumed at the outset and rediscovered at the end. This is narrative reinforcement, not inquiry.

The article also avoids an obvious question: if colonisation is the primary driver, why do Māori with similar historical backgrounds experience very different outcomes today? Why do some Māori families and communities achieve food security and good health while others do not? History does not operate as a uniform force acting equally on everyone.

The romanticised portrayal of pre-colonial Māori food systems deserves scrutiny. Māori were skilled food producers within a subsistence economy, but that economy was constrained by climate, seasonality and vulnerability to crop failure. Life expectancy was low and famine was not unknown. To contrast a selectively idealised past with the modern food environment — refrigeration, global supply chains, year-round availability — is not analysis. It is mythology.

More importantly, it distracts from the central reality that food insecurity today is overwhelmingly correlated with income, household structure, spending priorities and local food prices, not with ancestral land tenure or spiritual disconnection from traditional food.

The article insists obesity and diabetes should not be framed as “lifestyle diseases” because not everyone has equal choices. Unequal choices, however, do not eliminate choice altogether. Fish and chips are not cheaper than basic home-cooked staples. Rice, potatoes, oats, frozen vegetables, eggs, chicken portions and mince remain among the most affordable foods in New Zealand. Supermarkets do not deny Māori access to them.

Yes, some harmful products arrived with European settlement — tobacco, alcohol and refined sugar among them. But exposure does not equal compulsion. Colonisation did not force anyone to smoke, drink to excess, or base their diet on sugar and processed food. Suggesting otherwise strips people of the ability to make their own choices and replaces responsibility with inevitability.

European settlement also brought institutions of self-reliance: wage labour, education, savings, enterprise and personal responsibility. Those tools were available to Māori as much as to anyone else. That outcomes differ today is not proof of colonial determinism; it is evidence that behaviour, family stability and economic choices still matter.

What the article leaves out is revealing. There is no discussion of alcohol expenditure, smoking rates, or the strong association between food insecurity and single-parent households. There is no engagement with educational underachievement, work participation, or the repeated failure of race-based social programmes to materially improve outcomes.

Instead, readers are offered the familiar solution: “decolonising the food system”. This slogan sounds radical but is strategically vague. In practice, it means more race-based policy, more regulatory exemptions, more public funding channelled through identity-based structures, and less accountability for results — an approach already tried across health, education and housing with little success.

There is a deeper harm here. By framing poverty and poor diet as an inherited condition rooted in colonisation, this narrative normalises failure and lowers expectations. It tells people their circumstances are not really changeable without sweeping political transformation. That is not empowerment. It is treating people like children dressed up as compassion.

Colonisation is history. Food insecurity is present. Confusing the two may be emotionally satisfying, but it is a dead end for good decision-making — and a disservice to the people this research claims to help.

Geoff Parker is a passionate advocate for equal rights and a colour blind society. This article was first published at Breaking Views