Maori and the State

Crown–Maori Relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa, 1950–2000

Richard S. Hill

• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780864736734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Presenting the most recent research and written by an expert in the field, this examination explores the principal interrelationships between the British Crown and the Maori people in the 1950s and 1960s when Crown assimilation policies intensified—and during the 1970s—when the pressure of the Maori renaissance encouraged policies and goals based on biculturalism. A subject central to New Zealand's culture, this is an important and historical analysis of the country and the wider issue of indigenous peoples' rights.

Chapter 1

Challenges for Crown and Maori

Urbanisation

During the Second World War, many Maori served overseas or migrated to the cities and big towns to contribute to the war effort, intensifying an ‘urban drift’ which had begun before the war and which partly reflected a thriving Maori population growth. This was the demographic backdrop to the fundamental socio-racial developments of the post-war years. In 1946, a traveller on the East Coast could still write of Maori children ‘watching the strange pakeha’ arrive. But the two separate peoples of Aotearoa/New Zealand were already coming closer together, mostly as a result of the movement of tangata whenua, the people of the land, to the urban spaces in search of better opportunities. With increasing numbers of young Maori workers joining those enjoying the perceived benefits of new lifestyles in urban centres, the withdrawal of the ‘other New Zealand’ into rural isolation – much observed in the first decades of the century – was being reversed. In 1926, 8.7% of Maori lived in urban areas. By 1951, the figure had risen to around 30%, and had reached 46% ten years later. By 1966, the proportion of urban dwelling Maori had escalated to 62%, and it was continuing to rise rapidly.

While urban migration was often prompted by ‘pull’ factors, such as work and excitement in the cities, it was also driven by an overarching ‘push’ factor. By the beginning of the war, the Maori birth rate was already double that of the pakeha, and colonisation and its aftermath had left little Maori-owned land to provide sustenance in the countryside. The land, then, was increasingly unable to sustain the rising Maori population. Rural-based land development projects could not provide sufficient jobs for the growing numbers of young Maori workers, and Maori needed to seek employment in the cities as the indigenous birth rate continued to burgeon. By 1961, the Maori population of some 200,000 was more than double that of a quarter-century earlier. In the first half of the 1960s, three quarters of Maori in their mid to late teens migrated to urban areas. By the mid-1960s, over half of Maori children were being born in the big towns and cities, and a decade later only a quarter of Maori lived in rural areas. In one (typical) assessment, ‘the rate of urbanisation, in the decades after the war was … arguably the most accelerated shift for a national population anywhere’.

The state had encouraged the move of Maori to towns and cities in wartime to fill chronic labour shortages. This migration had been expected to be temporary, with officials and politicians generally thinking that after the war most Maori would return permanently to their home communities, frequently based at pa/villages centred upon marae/meeting place complexes. After some immediate post-war worry about negative implications of the ‘urban drift’, however, politicians and officials began to welcome Maori urban migration. Maori provided much-needed labour for post-war reconstruction and industrialisation. From 1948, the government began to encourage the migration.1

Wartime urbanisation had already reinforced the Labour government’s pre-existing focus on Maori social and economic development. New city dwellers lived, as various reports noted, in unsatisfactory conditions, and this could potentially lead to stresses or tears in the fabric of society. Labour’s ‘full equality’ policies for eradicating, or at least minimising, class disparities became all the more urgent with respect to Maori. But these policies were essentially assimilationist in conception, socio-economic rather than ‘socio-racial’. The government and its officials downplayed the repeatedly expressed Maori desire not only for affirmative action to offset the marginalisation which had come about through colonisation, but also for politico-cultural autonomy. A 1943 election pamphlet on Maori policy listed five ‘Milestones of Progress Under the Labour Government’. While charting issues related to socio-economic equality, which Maori voters undoubtedly appreciated, the pamphlet avoided discussion of autonomy in outlining policy on ‘future security and future welfare’.

The Maori Social and Economic Advancement Act

Yet during the Second World War, autonomy had been much discussed in the context of the Maori contribution to the war effort. Some 300 tribal committees had been established nationwide as part of the Maori War Effort Organisation (MWEO). Coordinated by several dozen tribal executives, the committees operated independently of government, rallying support, recruiting Maori into wartime employment, fundraising, and engaging in activities which exceeded their official brief, such as community-based welfare work or cultural revival. Towards the end of the war, Maori leaders had attempted to get the government to recognise the ‘self administration and discipline’ their people had demonstrated in contributing to the war effort. In arguing that the committee system should supersede the official state agency for Maori, they envisaged vibrant tribally-based committees operating at community or marae level and reporting to superior, but equally autonomous, bodies. At very least, Maori leaders (including the Maori MPs, all four of whom were Labour after Sir Apirana Ngata lost his seat in 1943) argued, the department in charge of Maori affairs should be reorganised along similarly decentralised lines to those of the MWEO. Maori, in other words, could run their own affairs autonomously, albeit within the parameters of Crown sovereignty.

The Maori Social and Economic Advancement Act (MSEA Act) of 1945 has usually been portrayed as ‘a compromise’ between those who advocated a certain autonomy for Maori and those who wanted Crown–Maori relations to revert, essentially, to pre-war modes. In reality, the Act gave Maori only a small degree of what their leadership had sought. Government authorities had been frightened off by the very successes of the Maori War Effort Organisation: its demonstration that Maori could run their affairs autonomously – a concept most pakeha of the time found difficult to accept – and its fostering of kotahitanga or Maori unity. While community-building activity was better provided for in the MSEA Act than in previous legislation, then, the blueprints proposed by Maori leaders proved too problematic for the legislators. The government’s policy focus for Maori would remain socio-economic ‘uplift’. This would be superintended by what was generally seen by Maori as a paternalistic bureaucracy: the old Department of Native Affairs was retained and placed in charge of all operations under the Act. To great Maori disappointment, tribes were thus denied control and decision-making functions. If communities wanted official recognition for their tribal committees, they had to opt into the new system. Such committees would be incorporated into departmental structures as constituent parts of Native/Maori Affairs, their activities overseen by departmental officers.

The new committee structure became operative from 1 April 1946, part of the department’s new Maori Social and Economic Welfare Organisation (soon generally called the Maori Welfare Organisation, and from 1952, the Welfare Division). The key people in the hierarchy were to be the department’s district officers, in full charge of all issues and structures in their regions. The committees were to be bound by strict procedural rules and operating parameters. All bodies, from marae-based komiti/committees to hapu-or iwi-based executives, had to ‘follow European administration and meeting procedure’. Decisions were to be ‘taken by a majority vote, minute books to be kept, and audited annual balance sheets to be submitted. For many communities this was the first time such procedures had been introduced’. The Board of Native/Maori Affairs retained ultimate bureaucratic control, and the committee system was denied regional (‘district’) or national levels, which would have enabled Maori to place stronger pressure on the state. The committees did not get the comprehensive economic, social and political power that Maori had asked for; in fact, the system disempowered them relative to the position they had attained in the political economy during the war.

Rather than representing any sort of compromise, then, the system put in place by the MSEA Act was in many ways a victory for powerful forces in governing circles (and, more broadly, in ‘mainstream society’) which opposed the prospect of the MWEO being transformed into a peacetime embodiment of rangatiratanga. The 1945 legislation did, however, provide the basis for broadening the work of the department in such a way that it had little choice but to take some account of Maori views. A now ailing government was particularly conscious that it could not afford to alienate Maori. To assist its chance of surviving in office, it needed to retain the four Maori seats in Parliament, which it held in alliance with the Ratana movement. While the two principal peoples of New Zealand were eventually supposed to become one, the MSEA Act and its system of tribal committees would meanwhile permit a coexistence of cultures along lines long urged by Ngata and other Maori leaders. In the words of the Acting Prime Minister, Walter Nash, it was ‘not for you to be as we are, but for you to be as you could and would be’, enhanced by ‘all the advantages’ possessed by pakeha.2

At the very beginning, Maori were slow to join the new system, and a number of the wartime tribal committees disappeared. Many Maori soon realised, however, that the official structure did provide some advantages, and allowed them, generally, to run their own affairs at the local level. It could, for example, be utilised to gain subsidies for community development initiatives. Before long, tribal committees constituted under the Act, ‘located in and representative of their respective communities’, were revived or created, and tribal executives followed later. By 1949, the Department of Maori Affairs (DMA) was describing the workings of the system thus: ‘The tribal executives and committees work in the closest possible contact with the communities they serve. The ancient Maori custom of full public discussion on the marae of all the problems of the tribe ensures close integration between the executives and committees and their people.’

That Maori continued to opt into the official committee system indicated that a certain degree of truth underlay this idealised depiction. By mid-century, Maori leaders all over the country had signed up their people to the Maori Welfare Organisation. There were 72 tribal executives and 430 tribal committees by 1950, and by then the new institutions technically covered all Maori in New Zealand. The system was already producing some discernible results in terms of improvements to meeting houses, marae complexes, sports facilities and the like, usually carried out by voluntary labour using subsidised materials. Committees entered into numerous and often involved interactions with the Department of Maori Affairs, and numbers of them began to go beyond their official briefs. Some would ‘take an interest in anything at all’ which helped advance the aspirations of their communities. The Crown generally tolerated this, given that the whole set of arrangements was perceived to be temporary – pending the advent of an assimilationist world of supposedly race– free communities, something that would be hurried along by urbanisation. ‘The departmental goal’, therefore, ‘may have been to harness Maori wartime energy and apply it to post-war concerns, but that did not … preclude Maori from applying that same energy to their own concerns’. In official eyes, this could be accommodated if those concerns assisted state goals, such as preventing social discontent through instilling (as the permanent head of Maori Affairs noted) pride in ‘Maoritanga’.3

The Maori Welfare Organisation

Crown policies had once contained strong ‘divide and rule’ resonances for tribes. Policy developments from the mid-1930s had increasingly emphasised Crown responsibilities to ‘the Maori people’ as a whole, as opposed to tribes. These privileged ‘equality for all citizens’ above rangatiratanga. But there were gains as far as the pursuit of Maori autonomy was concerned. While Maori urbanisation encouraged the official mind to conceptualise ‘Maoridom’ as an alternative to ‘tribalism’, the emerging paradigm also provided more leverage for Maori as a national force. The increasing importance of Maori as a people with political power was epitomised by the removal of the word ‘Native’ from official discourse in 1947, and the appointment in the following year of the first Maori to head the department, Tipi Ropiha. Partly as a result of their contribution to the war effort, Maori were now seen as a people not only to be engaged with, but also to be shown respect as integral members of a country which had finally proclaimed its nominal independence from the imperial power. Policy-makers in Wellington could no longer see Maori as a series of tribes hidden in the countryside, to be patronised from time to time. The government also remained aware, however, of the ongoing importance to Maori of their tribal links, as the word ‘tribal’ in the institutions established by the MSEA Act indicated. It recognised, for example, that the Maori contribution in wartime was in many ways successful because it was based upon tribal structures. The best way of harnessing Maori energies in the post-war world, the Crown believed, was to utilise tribal structures in the short-term, in the interests of their long-term disappearance beneath the dominant culture.

There were precedents for the concept underpinning the new structure. Both the new institutions and their powers were resonant of those of the Maori councils established in 1900 and whose last remnants were abolished under the 1945 Maori Social and Economic Advancement Act. The Maori Councils Act had granted ‘powers comparable to [those of] local government’. The councils had been permitted to pass approved by-laws, which the village committees that operated under them, and their own policemen, enforced. The committees had ensured the observance of sanitary regulations, controlled undesirable drinking and gambling practices, and fulfilled other functions under the watchful eye of the state (such as collecting taxes, on which Maori councils depended). The system had allowed, in principle, for the exercise of a certain degree of Maori autonomy, for the state had appreciated that unless the councils were ‘designed to draw their energies from the rhythms of everyday tribal life’, they would not get the support of their communities. But denied ‘meaningful rangatiratanga’, and insufficiently resourced, the system had languished. While it had remained useful in some circumstances and areas, only six councils were still operating when it was superseded in 1945.

At first Maori were cautious about using the institutions of the Maori Welfare Organisation (MWO). Scant advantage was taken, for example, of the potential of tribal executives (and, from 1947, of tribal committees) to pass and enforce by-laws. Nonetheless, increasing numbers of communities were prepared to accept that the new structures might be used for their own purposes as well as for the Crown’s – that the benefits could be mutual. Working through the only system proffered by the Crown, for example, could help to preserve some of the collective gains made during the war. It might also be used as a vehicle to re-establish and secure a certain degree of autonomy, although here there were many frustrations. The old departmental bureaucrats generally ran things much as before, and with niggardly resources available for Maori communities. While committees were able to get state funding for specific, approved projects in fields such as welfare, most projects needed to be resourced from local efforts. The type and extent of committee activities thus often reflected their fund-raising capacity.4

The post-war Prime Minister/Minister of Maori Affairs, Peter Fraser, had a higher degree of empathy with Maori autonomist aspirations than many others within the state apparatus. In 1948, he declared that the welfare organisation over which he presided should be ‘practically … autonomous’ and ‘to a very large extent independent and self-reliant’. The organisation was not merely to be just another branch of Maori Affairs but one that ‘should be looked upon by the Maori people as their organisation which they control locally as a form of local expression, direction, and control, and up to a point [it would provide] even a measure of local government in matters affecting the living conditions, housing, health, and the general welfare of the Maori people’.

There was, in fact, a considerable degree of official acceptance that, so far as the foreseeable future was concerned, some significant degree of Maori culture as well as organisation would, even should, survive. One of the stated aims of the new structure which proved to be enduring, for example, was to ensure the ‘preservation of Maori culture’, or at least (in the words of the department) to help ‘develop in the Maori an appreciation of the modern content of his own culture’. The idea was based on an acknowledgement that the ‘history of other races has show...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 : Challenges for Crown and Maori
• Chapter 2 : Adjustments by Crown and Maori
• Chapter 3 : Autonomy and Official Institutions
• Chapter 4 : Autonomy and Voluntarism
• Chapter 5 : Rangatiratanga Challenged
• Chapter 6 : Rangatiratanga under the Maori Welfare Act
• Chapter 7 : Protest and Response
• Chapter 8 : Towards Rangatiratanga?
• Chapter 9 : Principles and Partnership
• Chapter 10 : Rangatiratanga: the Continuing Quest
• Conclusion and Prospects
• Endnotes
• Bibliography of Cited Sources
• Index
• Copyright