And what of the future?

15 May 2015

As we look into the future from the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, what do we see for the future of the relationship between those New Zealanders who have at least one Maori ancestor and those who have none?

I am deeply fearful of the direction in which we are now travelling.  We have of course had separate Maori electorates for almost 150 years – rather longer than the five years for which they were originally established in 1867.  Despite the Royal Commission on the Electoral System recommending in 1986 that separate Maori electorates be scrapped if we adopted the MMP electoral system, and despite the National Party committing to scrap separate Maori electorates under the leadership of both Bill English and me, there seems no sign of any move to scrap those electorates.

And in recent years, we have seen more and more moves to create legal or constitutional preferences for those with a Maori ancestor.

We have the Resource Management Act requiring local governments to consult with their communities and with Maori, as if Maori were in some way not part of the community.

We see legislation passed enabling the creation of separate Maori wards in local government, and the creation of the Independent Maori Statutory Board in Aucklandgiving unelected people with a Maori ancestor voting rights on all Auckland Council committees.

We see more and more settlements of historical grievances involving not just financial recompense for those grievances, but also “co-governance” arrangements, giving those with a Maori ancestor rights on a par with all the rest of the community in determining policies about the use of important natural resources.

We see the so-called “principles of the Treaty” routinely written into legislation even though there is absolutely no agreement about what “the principles of the Treaty” entail, and the strong suspicion that those who advocate such language intend it to imply that those who have a Maori ancestor, though clearly a minority in the total community, should nevertheless have rights equal to the majority because, they claim, the Treaty of Waitangi created some kind of “partnership” between two races.

We long ago saw the creation of quotas giving a preference to those with a Maori ancestor for entry into certain university courses, and accepted that the boards of all government agencies and state-owned enterprises should have at least one person with a Maori ancestor.

In 2010, the Key Government signed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, thus signalling their support for indigenous people having “the right to self-determination” and by virtue of that right having both the right to “freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development” and the “right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, as well as ways and means for financing their autonomous functions”.  The Maori Party, and no doubt others with a Maori ancestor, celebrated this signing as if it suddenly gave Maori additional political rights, even though calling Maori “indigenous” stretches the meaning of that word in a situation where the ancestors of Maori today arrived in New Zealand little more than half a millennium before those of European descent, where all “Maori” living today have at least some non-Maori ancestry, and where the Treaty of Waitangi clearly established, in Article III, that all Maori should have exactly the same rights as all other citizens.  No more and no less.

When the Environmental Protection Authority was set up by legislation in 2011, it was required to “proactively take into account Maori interests and the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”.  The Authority has a Maori Advisory Committee and a Maori Policy and Operations Group.  The Authority’s website makes it clear that the Authority is guided by “four key Treaty of Waitangi principles” of partnership, protection, participation and potential.  Not one of these words can be found in the Treaty of Waitangi.

And too often this seems to mean giving weight to the animist views of pre-European Maori.  Some years ago, the Labour Government refused to take action to clear a channel so that the crater lake on Mount Ruapehu could drain safely, despite failure to do so risking the kind of disaster which destroyed scores of lives at Tangiwai in 1953.  Why?   Because some Maori felt that to do so would offend the spirit of the mountain.

At about the same time, GNS Science, a Crown research institute, went to considerable expense to bring a mini-submarine all the way from Germany to the shores of Lake Taupo to explore the floor of the lake for geothermal, and potentially volcanic, activity.  At the last minute, the local iwi forbade GNS to explore the floor of the lake – this despite the fact that knowing more about volcanic activity under Lake Taupo is of fundamental importance not just to those who live on the shores of that lake but also to all those who live in New Zealand.

More recently, Judge Joanna Maze fined a helicopter pilot $3,750 for hovering over the summit of Mt Cook.  In passing sentence, the judge said that the offence was “seen as one of sacrilege to those to whom Aoraki/Mt Cook is of central cultural importance”.   In the summary of facts read to the court, the Department of Conservation said that the 3,754 metre peak represented, to Ngai Tahu, “the most sacred of ancestors, from whom Ngai Tahu descend and who provide the iwi with its sense of communal identity, solidarity and purpose”.  If anybody in New Zealand actually does believe they are descended from a mountain, our education system is failing even more seriously than I had imagined!

For some years we have seen a requirement to subscribe to a particular interpretation of the Treaty being necessary to qualify for employment in professions such as teaching and nursing.

We see the increasing use of Maori language in mainstream radio programmes such as Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report, though not 1% of those who listen to Morning Report have the faintest clue what the words mean.  We also see it on many other occasions – such as university graduation ceremonies – where long drawn-out speeches in te reo leave the vast majority of the audience fidgeting impatiently, having not the faintest idea what is being said.

We see an increasingly vociferous demand to make the teaching of te reo compulsory in the school system, even though for most New Zealanders being able to read or speak te reo would have absolutely no value, and would of course reduce the scope for learning other parts of the education curriculum, such as English and mathematics, or another language with greater value for most New Zealanders.

We see the use of Maori protocol in situations where it has absolutely no place.  When the Auckland Council met for the first time in 2010 after the amalgamation of the seven separate territorial authorities, women councillors were relegated to the back row, even though the meeting was held in the Town Hall– in other words, in a facility paid for by all ratepayers – not on a Maori marae.

I have been one of those who have supported the payment of compensation to iwi where it can be established with a reasonable degree of certainty that the Crown confiscated the property of those iwi in the 19th century.  But it is deeply concerning that there is increasing evidence that some of these claims for compensation have been settled in the past, some on several occasions.  And I worry that too many Maori do not see the current round of compensation as “full and final”. 

On a TV3 programme a year or so ago, John Tamihere argued that the compensation paid was “just 2%” of the value that Maori had lost by the actions of the Crown in the 19th century, the clear implication being that very much more should be being paid.  Other Maori have been heard to say that they settled claims for as much as could be obtained “at this stage”.  And this despite the fact that, before 1840, what a Maori tribe lost in battle was lost permanently, with not even the slightest hint of compensation being payable!

In defending the Maori Party’s support for the National-led Government, notwithstanding that the Maori Party felt that the Marine and Coastal Area Act 2011 did not give Maori as much right over the foreshore and seabed as the Party thought appropriate, the Party put out a flyer early in 2011 commenting that “the decision to support or oppose the Bill is a matter of strategy: do we take a step forward, knowing that we still have a long way to go?  Or do we retire from the battlefield, and try to re-join the fray some time in the future?”

I am delighted that the payment of compensation has enabled some iwi to substantially improve their economic status, though it would have been good to see more of the benefit from those payments filtering down to those who most need support.  But why have many Maori organisations been given favourable tax status?  Ngai Tahu Charitable Group, for example, is a registered charity with dozens of limited liability companies and three trusts as part of the group, including Ngai Tahu Property and Ngai Tahu Holdings.   According to the 2012/13 annual report, the Group made a profit before tax and additional Crown settlements of $51.0 million.  After further Crown settlements of $68.8 million and some other adjustments, the Group made a profit of $121.8 million, and paid just $162,000 in tax.

And some local authorities grant rates remission on Maori freehold land when the land is unoccupied and is not generating income.  No such concession is issued to land owned by other ethnicities.

A major part of the problem we face as a country is the Waitangi Tribunal, set up in the mid-seventies and empowered in 1985 to investigate Maori claims dating back to 1840.  Especially since the mid-eighties it has increasingly become a taxpayer-funded organisation which seems to sees its role not as an independent and objective arbitrator of historical disputes but as an organisation whose main function is to promote Maori interests without much regard for the truth.  According to Tribunal chair Justice Eddie Durie in 1999, some claimants have asked researchers to alter findings that were unhelpful to their cases, while other tribes have tried to make payment for researchers conditional upon findings being altered.[1]

Commenting on the Tribunal’s approach to history, Elizabeth Rata has observed that “history is demoted from an academic discipline with its justifying procedures and methods to self-interested ‘narratives’ that mix truth, half-truths, and opinion, foregoing the scrutiny and criticism to which real historical inquiry must be subjected.  The Waitangi Tribunal stands guilty of this as its interpretation of our past provides biculturalism’s creed.”[2]

Dr Michael Bassett, one of New Zealand’s foremost historians and a former member of the Waitangi Tribunal himself, noted in 2008 that “Rorting the Tribunal process has become the name of the game…  Quite small family groups now call themselves tribes; personal disagreements with relatives get blown into major claims.  And the taxpayer keeps paying up…   There are few futuristic ideas that have lost their sheen as quickly as the notion that settlements of Maori grievances would improve New Zealand’s race relations.”[3]

If the Government were to accept any of the recommendations of the Waitangi Tribunal on the so-called Wai262 claim, Maori authority over New Zealand’s fauna and flora – and indeed, over many other aspects of New Zealand life – would be massively extended.  Among other things, the Tribunal has recommended a new Maori Advisory Commission to control patents and plant variety rights, with the power of veto over applications; a new Maori Conservation Authority for dealing with all conservation matters; all decisions made by Maori under the Maori consultation processes of the RMA to be binding; all public sector agencies being required to prepare Maori language plans; and an expansion of the role of Maori in the negotiation of international treaties.

And of course, recently we had the Tribunal “finding” that Ngapuhi had never surrendered sovereignty to the Crown when Ngapuhi chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. It doesn’t get much more absurd than that.

If we continue down this path of creating more and more distinctions between those with a Maori ancestor and those without, I see a very bleak future. 

Most New Zealanders are deeply hostile to this trend – and by “most New Zealanders” I mean the overwhelming majority of those without a Maori ancestor as well as many of those with a Maori ancestor.  And I should stress this latter point.  Many of those with a Maori ancestor want no part of this steady drift to providing legal preferences for some on the basis of race.

Ron Mark, now a New Zealand First MP but until recently mayor of Carterton, is strongly opposed to the current policy direction, insisting that he as a Maori won election as mayor on his merits, not because of his race.  He has noted that Georgina Beyer, another Maori with what she herself describes as a “colourful past”, won election to Parliament in the conservative rural electorate of Wairarapa against Paul Henry, the National Party candidate.

A Maori friend of mine who drives logging trucks – by no means a highly-paid occupation – struggles to pay the fees so that his son can go to a private school where he can learn Mandarin, rather than go to the local high school where he would learn te reo.  Yet another Maori friend – one related to Titewhai Harawira in fact – is strongly opposed to special treatment based on race.

So there is widespread and growing anger, albeit most of it is just below the surface given that anybody who questions the current direction is immediately accused of being racist, or in some way anti-Maori.  There has to be a serious risk that at some stage this anger will erupt.

And it could erupt quite violently.  Many of those without a Maori ancestor are getting thoroughly fed up with what they rightly perceive as a totally unwarranted and ever growing series of special preferences for those with a Maori ancestor.  And some of those who do have a Maori ancestor are increasingly indoctrinated with the notion that they are absolutely entitled to have a preferential voice in the way the country is run, and to extract “rent” for giving their permission to the rest of the community to build a dam, or a road, or an office building, or a house.  This is an exceedingly dangerous mix.

Of course, there is another scenario, and that is one where those without a Maori ancestor simply give up in disgust and move to a country where all citizens are treated equally under the law.  Although most of the New Zealanders who have moved to Australia in recent years did so for the chance to earn substantially higher incomes, there is undoubtedly a minority who moved because they were fed up with what they saw as an increasing trend to load the dice in favour of those with a Maori ancestor.  In this scenario there might be no violent confrontation, just a steady loss of those with initiative and capital to more friendly climes and a gradual deterioration in the quality of life in New Zealand, to the huge cost of everybody left behind.

But if current policies are materially helping Maori, perhaps these risks are worth running?  Surely these legal and constitutional preferences are justified by the fact that, on average, Maori are poorer than other New Zealanders, are less well educated than other New Zealanders, and are more likely to be unemployed or in prison than other New Zealanders?

On the contrary, current policies are harming Maori in two quite different ways.

First, they lead many Maori to assume that the road to economic prosperity is through extracting compensation for real or imagined past wrongs and through various forms of rent-seeking behaviour rather than through enterprise and hard work.

But as others have pointed out, even if total compensation paid for past wrongs amounts to $3 billion, and that is invested at, say, 5% after tax, this would generate annual income of just $150 million to be shared between some 600,000 people with a Maori ancestor – just $250 per person, not remotely sufficient to make a dent on the difference between the average incomes of those with a Maori ancestor and the average incomes of the rest of the community.

More serious still, seeking prosperity through demanding special preferences or through extracting payments for allowing investments by others to proceed distracts attention from the true causes of Maori under-achievement.  These are essentially four.

First, our education system has failed to ensure that Maori teenagers leave school with sufficient literacy and numeracy skills to participate in a modern economy – in a 1995 survey, 66% of Maori adults lacked the literacy skills to participate in the modern economy, and I strongly suspect the situation is no better now.

Second, our labour laws prevent employers taking on relatively unskilled people at a wage which makes sense for employers – no employer is going to take on somebody who can’t read and can’t do basic arithmetic at today’s adult minimum wage; and every time the adult minimum wage is increased relative to what a person with few skills can produce the problem gets worse.  (It’s worth noting that in March 2014 New Zealand’s adult minimum wage was, according to the OECD, the highest in the world relative to the average wage.)

Third, the communal ownership of much of the land owned by Maori is another major problem.  Maori own a great deal of land in New Zealand, and where that land is owned and controlled by Maori incorporations it is often used very productively.  But too much Maori land lies almost entirely unused because, with scores and sometimes thousands of owners, it’s simply impossible for anybody to put the land to productive use.

And fourth, enormous damage is done by the welfare system, both in undermining the traditional two-parent family and in trapping too many people into unemployment indefinitely.

These are the fundamental causes of the over-representation of Maori in all the worst social statistics, and until those fundamental causes are dealt with, Maori will continue to be amongst the poorest, the most socially deprived, and the most imprisoned members of our society.

Apirana Ngata warned of the damage which welfare would do to Maori at the very beginning of the welfare state, in the late 1930s and early 1940s.  He was right.

More than 20 years ago, a prominent South Auckland Maori leader told me that, in her considered opinion, the only way to deal with Maori unemployment was to abolish the unemployment benefit completely – “Too many of my people”, she said, “have relatively few skills.   They can’t live well on the dole, but with three or four sharing a house, and doing a few cash jobs under the table, they can live adequately on the dole.”  And she saw that as a disaster.

Whatever you think of that rather extreme view of how to deal with Maori unemployment, don’t let anybody argue for special constitutional status for those with a Maori ancestor on the basis that such a status would reduce Maori unemployment, or repair the Maori family, or reduce the number of Maori in prison.  It hasn’t done so in the past and won’t do so in the future.

But what would our future as a country look like if we took Article III of the Treaty seriously – the clause which promised that all Maori would have the rights and privileges of British subjects, in other words the same rights and privileges as those who were increasingly arriving from Europe?  We too often forget the significance of this clause.  It was an extraordinary promise for 1840.  Governor Hobson would have seen before him a primitive and violent people, a people with no written language prone to enslaving or eating their enemies.  He would have regarded himself as the representative of the greatest Power on Earth.  But he nevertheless promised that all Maori would henceforth have the rights and privileges of British subjects.

Suppose we started taking that clause seriously.  Gone would be all of the constitutional preferences which have insinuated themselves into our laws in recent decades.  Maori would be appointed to SOE boards on their merit.  Maori would get into Medical School on their merit.  Maori would increasingly recognise that demanding payment from those wishing to build a new housing development, or commercial building, or farming enterprise is not the way to sustainable prosperity.  Hopefully we would immediately start dealing with the real causes of Maori disadvantage.

But, I have sometimes been asked, how would the Maori voice be heard in that kind of world – with no Maori electorates in central government, no Maori wards in local government, no rights to be consulted when urban plans are drawn up or new buildings approved beyond those enjoyed by all other citizens?

And of course my answer is always that the Maori voice would be heard in exactly the same way as the European voice, or the Asian voice, or the Pacifika voice.  Is that realistic?  Absolutely.   When I was in Parliament, there were then (as now) just seven Maori electorates, but there were more than 20 people in Parliament with a Maori ancestor – people like Paula Bennett, Tau Henare, Winston Peters, Georgina Beyer, Ron Mark, and Georgina re Heu Heu.  In the 2014 election, some outstanding Maori were elected to Parliament – people like Shane Reti.  None of those named got into Parliament in the Maori electorates – they got there on their merit.

When the first 20 councillors were elected to the Auckland Council in 2010, three of them happened to be Maori, which by chance coincided fairly accurately with the proportion of Maori in the Auckland population.  That won’t always be the case of course – sometimes there may be more Maori councillors than correspond to the proportion of Maori in the Auckland population; sometimes there will be fewer.  There are currently no Asians on the Auckland Council: so what?  All councillors have a responsibility to serve all the citizens in their ward.

I want New Zealand to be a country where every citizen is valued, irrespective of when they or their ancestors arrived in this country, and that can only happen when we take Article III of the Treaty seriously.

Some years ago, when I was still Leader of the National Party, I tried to recruit as a candidate a prominent citizen of Ngai Tahu descent.  He was initially keen but in the end decided against getting involved in politics for personal reasons.  But at one stage I asked him about his vision for New Zealand in 50 years’ time.  He told me that his vision was that, in 50 years’ time, an educated New Zealander would be familiar with the Biblical writings, with the writing of the great Greek philosophers, with the works of Shakespeare, with the works of Apirana Ngata, and with the writing of Confucius.  That’s a vision that I share.



[1] “Judge queries ethics of Treaty demands”, New Zealand Herald, 17 November 1999.

[2] “Democracy and diversity”, speech to the New Zealand Fabian Society on 23 May 2013.

[3] “The Waitangi Industry”, Michael Bassett, 19 April 2008.

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