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Reports and Consultations

By 1984, Maori and Treaty matters that had previously seemed esoteric for ‘mainstream New Zealand’ were increasingly common topics of national debate, and the Waitangi Tribunal was becoming a significant factor in counter-hegemonic processes. The Tribunal had been disposed to take greater account of indigenous aspirations following the 1980 appointment of a Maori chairperson, E T J Durie, who was also made the Chief Judge of the Maori Land Court. Durie’s double appointment both reflected and heralded social and political changes. He had joined the Maori Land Court in 1974, helping propel its development away from being an institution which protected individuals’ interests in land towards a body assisting the retention of land within the various tribal and other collectivities of Maoridom.

The Waitangi Tribunal’s future discursive significance was signalled with its Motunui Outfall Report of 1983. This took seriously claims that traditional fishing grounds had been contaminated. The Tribunal had used tribal protocols in the course of proceedings, and made recommendations which clashed with government policies. From that time onwards, its hearings and reports gained enormous publicity. In 1985, the Tribunal’s new direction was firmed up with the Manukau Report, which presented a strong message relating to the interconnections between present circumstances and past happenings. Manukau iwi, having found the Planning Tribunal ineffective in countering pollution of their harbour, had turned instead to the Waitangi Tribunal.

The Tribunal’s report went into history in some detail, and expanded on its Motunui findings about the Crown’s obligation to protect Maori cultural values. It discussed the meaning of the Treaty and found that the kawanatanga ceded in Article One was ‘something less than’ the western concept of absolute sovereignty, but rather ‘the authority to make laws for the good order and security of the country but subject to an undertaking to protect particular Māori interests’. The Crown needed to ‘restore the mana of the tribes’ whichpage 188 had rights to the harbour by consulting and working with their authorities. In their general thrust, these and other reports affirmed the rangatiratanga or self-determination assured Maori in the Second Article of the Treaty and ‘tested the boundaries’ on Treaty principles. One academic commentator has gone so far as to argue that the Waitangi Tribunal’s reports of this period ‘played a crucial role in liberating the treaty from the colonial mentality, and irrevocably affirmed the right to tino rangatiratanga and the challenge to British legal sovereignty’.¹

The government rejected the Tribunal’s key Motunui recommendation, which called for preventing waste disposal from a synthetic fuels plant from polluting Te Atiawa’s traditional sea fisheries. The recommendation was seen to threaten National’s ‘think big’ economic development strategies and, more generally, to pose a challenge to the state’s longstanding adherence to ‘indivisible Crown sovereignty’. But the Muldoonite dismissal of the report generated heated public debate at a time when pollution was of increasing concern throughout all sectors of New Zealand society. Both Te Atiawa and other coastal tribes gained a great deal of pakeha support for their cause. Eventually, after much negotiation, Te Atiawa won considerable protection for its mahinga kai/food gathering areas near the plant. In the context of the grand struggle for autonomy, this might have seemed a small step. But Maori were cognisant of the fact that the importance of rangatiratanga had been endorsed by an independent commission within the state. By this step alone, the cause of rangatiratanga had been advanced.²

Moreover, the relatively successful outcome showed that pressure on the government within a Treaty context could produce satisfactory results, however reluctant the Crown in the first instance. The Muldoon government, indeed, had already succumbed to Maori pressures in other areas. New legislation, for example, required the state to take into account issues of significance to Maori in such matters as town and country planning. After the 1978 elections, the Prime Minister appointed Ben Couch as the first Maori National Party Minister of Maori Affairs. He and other ministers frequently utilised the channels provided by the New Zealand Maori Council, whose increasing radicalism was symbolised in its president’s public opposition to a proposed 1977 All Black tour of South Africa (which never eventuated). The council was being taken ever more seriously by the government on matters of relevance to Maoridom, and provided input into a number of reforms.

In 1978, the NZMC made extensive submissions to Parliament’s select committee on the consolidatory Maori Affairs Bill. As a result, the draft legislation was rewritten and went out for nationwide deliberation under the council’s auspices. The episode has been assessed as ‘a major break-through inpage 189 Maori/government relations’. It suited the state to be able to negotiate with Maori institutions, coordinated at a national level, which eschewed extreme demands and tactics. But the council and its bodies were less inclined than in the past to compromise on fundamental issues. It was mounting pressure from below that led the NZMC to convene the Conference of Maori Committees in 1978. This sought to reconcile the conflicting pressures of activism, cooperation and containment. One of the themes to emerge was the particular efficacy of the Maori associations in pursuing collectivist aspirations in areas, especially the urban spaces, where traditional tribal structures had been weakened or fragmented. Another was the need for better coordination within the official sector, and between it and the quasi- and non-official sectors, if full Crown recognition of rangatiratanga was to be achieved.

The ensuing years saw an increasing propensity within Maoridom to appreciate that although tactics and strategies might differ, aspirational goals were often similar. In 1983, the NZMC was again asked by the Crown to examine legislative matters relating to land, and its feedback stressed the continuing significance of whenua for the various and varied Maori communities. However bastardised the collective land tenure system, and however urbanised the population, land continued to provide Maori ‘with a sense of identity, belonging and continuity’ – expressed through concepts such as turangawaewae and kaitiakitanga. The NZMC submission essentially constituted a warning to Muldoon and his ministers to avoid any residual thoughts they might have to revert to legislative proposals resembling any of the coercive measures of the hated Maori Affairs Amendment Act of 1967. The Crown, already well apprised of the universal Maori wish to retain or regain both their land and their collective responsibility for it, now conducted its ongoing discussions with Maori on the issue within a retentionist and non-prescriptive framework.³

Meanwhile, within the Department of Maori Affairs itself, changes had been occurring as the Maori Renaissance grew in strength and conservative leaders joined radicals in rejecting the many residual assimilationist elements left in departmental policies, guidelines, practices and attitudes. Under such pressures, in 1977 Duncan MacIntyre had commissioned the State Services Commission (SSC) to conduct a survey of the DMA. On the surface, its policies had seemed relatively sound from a rangatiratanga perspective even during the period of intensified assimilation following the Hunn report. Its quest to engender integration had encompassed efficiency and pride in ‘Maoriness’ as necessary ingredients of ultimate assimilationist goals. Soon after the passage of the Maori Welfare Act in 1962, for example, the DMA had put its own interpretation to the legislation. The Act encouraged, it stated, ‘the Maoripage 190 people to exercise control and direction of their own communities in the essentials of good citizenship and civic responsibility’, placing ‘responsibility for the advancement of the race on the Maori people themselves’.

But the fact remained that in the wake of the Hunn report, the DMA had been obliged to pursue ‘integrationist’ measures as a matter of urgent and overarching policy. While these imperatives were now seen as unrealistic, if not as undesirable, many of their systemic and functional resonances remained within the bureaucracy. The DMA, too, was still widely seen as paternalistic, despite its employment of the language of self-reliance. Its increasing advocacy of Maori agency, for example, was tempered by its stress on ‘the State providing trained officers to guide and help’. The State Services Commission’s report found that the DMA’s Welfare Division embodied a ‘paternalistic, centralised bureaucracy’ removed from its clients’ cultural and developmental needs. Reflecting longstanding Maori criticisms that the DMA failed to meet Maori needs and wants, the report declared that reform was essential. What was particularly needed was the development of policies promoting ‘greater community participation and autonomy’.

The Muldoon government was not averse to such messages. These, indeed, reflected National’s philosophical emphasis on ‘self-reliance’, an ideological stance which focussed on individuals’ independence from state tutelage and assistance, but which could be expediently extended to cover self-reliance by collectivities. From its beginning in 1975, in fact, the third National government had worked with both traditional Maori leaders and Maori urban leaders who were not radical in orientation to develop ways of promoting greater self-reliance. Its continuance of marae subsidies, for example, was designed to help build stronger communities which could then ‘liberate’ themselves from the need for further assistance.

Its approach to the NZMC on land issues in 1983 had been preceded by considerable discussion over the years. It had soon abandoned thoughts of trying to repeal Labour’s land legislation, instead opting to enquire into specific difficulties while also commencing a process to eventually consolidate Maori land legislation. In 1979, the government had authorised officials to begin working on ideas which would incorporate Maori aspirations, and it was this process which had led to the significant consultations of the new decade. Essentially, the days of coercive rationalisation of Maori land holding and use were over. The processes that were set in place in the 1970s and strengthened in the 1980s were eventually to lead to the retentionist Te Ture Whenua Maori Act of 1993. Despite a shaky beginning with a Prime Minister versed at ‘playing the race card’ among his many populist tactics, discussion and consultation with Maori did improve under National, even if in fits and starts. Prospects of greater Maori control over Maori affairs were improving.⁴