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 teenspage 12 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’.