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 topage 13 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’.page 14 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.²2

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 discerniblepage 15 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