Feature
Moving on up
by Tim Watkin
National says Maori have developed “a culture of dependence and grievance”. But there is now crucial evidence that the Maori renaissance and ethnicity-based policies have led to profound change – and all within just one generation.
The Avondale College students sling their bags on the floor and squeeze around the table. The four boys slide low into their chairs, the four girls sit upright, as they talk about their futures and wait to have their photo taken. They are shy and laugh nervously, but they have plans. Big plans. Kahn, the deputy head boy and junior Tall Blacks trialist, is chasing a US basketball scholarship. Taylor is tossing up being a child psychologist or a teacher. Jacqueline thinks she wants to be a flight attendant. Aroha, whose sister is a med student, is more certain about what she wants to do: “Law. A judge. High Court.”
The teenagers, aged 15 to 17, are young, Maori, and a living argument against the despair surrounding race relations in New Zealand today.
When National Party leader Don Brash spoke to the Orewa Rotary Club at the end of January, he painted a bleak picture of Maori-Pakeha relations, which, he said, were in a “dangerous drift towards racial separatism”. Although he did not use the phrase on the night, he criticised what he now calls “race-based funding” and suggested such policies have discouraged Maori from building “their own future with their own hands”.
“We’re going downhill,” he said.
On National Radio, National Party Maori Affairs spokesman Gerry Brownlee took up the cry. Angry at support from Anglican and Catholic bishops for ethnicity-based funding, he shouted, “They’re [Maori] still at the bottom. They’re still at the bottom.”
Unquestionably, Maori are over-represented at the bottom end of social statistics. But National has painted a picture of a people who have stalled; a people with “a culture of dependence and grievance”, as Brash put it that night in Orewa. That picture is simply false. Statistical evidence gathered by the Listener and Statistics NZ (see page 19) shows that, over the past 30 years, Maori have been moving on up. To argue in absolutes about whether Maori are doing well or badly misses the crucial point that, although no one is satisfied with the place of Maori in the social statistics, Maori are doing better.
Contrary to Brash’s claim that we are going downhill, the past generation is marked by improving social statistics. And as one leading Maori doctor says, that lays the ground for more equality and, in turn, better race relations.
Ironically, analysts agree, it’s only the economic restructuring of the late 80s and early 90s – for which Brash as Reserve Bank Governor was such a cheerleader – that stopped Maori advancing even more rapidly. Go back 30 years – to the start of the Maori renaissance, to the time when the Pakeha mainstream was first confronted with Maori issues – and you find a very different New Zealand.
Maori were worse off – in terms of education and economic development, and most health criteria. What’s more, Maori culture was marginalised. The place of Maori in New Zealand has changed so as to be “unrecognisable” from the early 70s, says Professor Mason Durie, assistant vice-chancellor-Maori, at Massey University. “We’ve come miles and miles.” What’s more, Durie and other analysts agree: much of that progress has been encouraged – not discouraged – by ethnicity-based policies.
The Maori path to the bottom of the social statistics is a long, complicated one that wasn’t recognised by government until 1960. The Hunn Report that year tentatively brought the disparity between Maori and Pakeha to mainstream awareness and prompted the first New Zealand examples of ethnicity-based funding, with the introduction of a handful of Maori scholarships.
“By that time,” Michael King writes in the bestselling Penguin History of New Zealand, “some dysfunctional Maori families were two generations into the poverty trap.”
It took the Maori renaissance of the early 1970s – including the Nga Tamatoa protests at Waitangi, the 30,000-signature Maori language petition, and the rise of writers such as Witi Ihimaera and Hone Tuwhare – to prompt action.
In 1974 – just 30 years ago – the Maori Affairs Amendment Act recognised Maori as an official language, promoted the preservation of Maori culture and the retention of Maori land in Maori ownership. More, it signalled that the Pakeha mainstream was taking an interest in Maori issues.
That continued with the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975, following the Dame Whina Cooper-led Land March, and took on new momentum with the 1984 Hui Taumata, or Maori Economic summit, which planned for a “decade of Maori development”, including expansion of the ethnicity-based policies now under attack by National.
“[Change was] brought about largely by Maori activists, who were determined that Maori ought to be able to behave as Maori in wider New Zealand life, rather than submerge their identity in favour of Pakeha mores and values,” writes King.
It was cemented – or so they thought – by more mainstream-friendly Maori such as Patu Hohepa, now chair of the Maori Language Commission. “[Our parents’ generation] had a relationship with the government that treated them like great white fathers. We were the ones that formalised that there had to be dialogue, submissions, and groups who could go and meet government on a professional basis.”
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