The Land

Even with respect to development of Maori-owned land, the Holland government restricted the opportunities for the owners to exercise autonomy. Large tracts of Maori-owned lands were controlled by the Maori Trustee and other official or officially franchised bodies. Much was on long-term lease to pakeha farmers. With many leases nearing expiry in the post-war years, severe problems began to surface. Under the 1909 Native Land Act, for example, leases on the bulk of the lands had been vested in Maori Land Boards (MLBs). Maori had often put their trust in them, but MLBs proved essentially to be creatures of the Crown, operating primarily in the interests of the perceived ‘public good’ rather than on behalf of the Maori owners. As leases were due to run out, hopes of re-establishing collective control of communally-owned property were high. But the leases contained provisions for compensation to lessees for any permanent improvements they had made, and complexities of title, lack of collective access to loan capital and other problems meant that the Maori lessors faced significant difficulties in regaining control.

Moreover, Maori owners had long hoped to take back thriving ‘going concerns’, but many lessees – expecting non-renewal – neglected the propertiespage 30 in the final years of their leases. Owners thus faced the prospect of farming lands that were, say, weed infested or bereft of recent fertilisation. The potential problems had been recognised after the war, and a royal commission into ‘vested lands’, established in 1949, recommended that committees of beneficial owners be established so they could be consulted on the future of their land. But a 1951 official enquiry into the MLB-vested leases found that the boards were neither adequately consulting owners about the use of the lands, nor planning for the future of the land in the event of non-renewal of leases.

The Crown’s ‘basic policy’ from the end of the 1940s, when significant post-war land development recommenced, continued in fact to be that of ‘public good’ productivity. In this pursuit, even the Board of Maori Affairs paid scant regard to the desire of many Maori, collectively and individually, to retrieve or enhance whatever connection they could with the land. In 1949, Prime Minister Fraser wrote that ‘the full utilization of all available Maori land is of national importance’. That year, the Crown authorised the improvement of more than a quarter of ‘unproductive’ Maori land. The concern with productivity, however, meant that before Maori-owned and Maori-controlled land could be accepted for developmental aid, owners would have to agree in advance to DMA control of operations. This meant essentially that they would have to sign up to an arrangement that was antithetical to many collective tribal aspirations: subdivision into ‘economic farm units’, on which lessees (who might or might not be Maori) would be placed and granted long-term tenure. In this way, it was expected that more Maori-owned rural property would be brought to its full potential production. There would be the added advantage, in the words of a Maori historian, that such policies would help bring Maori people ‘into the mainstream, thus silencing public criticisms of the perceived idleness of Maori land’.

The Crown’s renewed attempts to develop long-term leasing arrangements under official auspices in effect invited many owners to shed any vestiges of control over their land far into the future. For many iwi, this would mean yet another protracted delay in the very long struggle to exercise rangatiratanga over their land in a meaningful way, even if they retained ultimate ownership. Holland’s Cabinet endorsed its Labour predecessor’s productivity-based policies by adding extra incentives to produce. But the various official plans for Maori-owned land already faced difficulties of both implementation and resistance.

The National government early adopted more coercive techniques to promote developmental and ‘national interest’ imperatives. These included using the concept of trusteeship to acquire a tighter degree of control. The Maori Purposes Act of 1950 allowed the Maori Land Court to authorise the Maori Trustee to lease out any Maori lands deemed to be ‘unproductive’, a measure not matched with respect to state powers over pakeha-owned land. Inpage 31 1952, the Maori Trustee gained greater power over Maori-owned land. The Maori Land Boards – which, for all the difficulties associated with them, had helped ensure the retention of Maori land – were abolished, and their assets and administrative functions assigned to the Trustee. After 1954, the Maori Trustee’s powers were enhanced even further regarding the management of vested lands.⁶

Despite the combination of such developments and urbanisation, the Crown was well aware that land remained ‘an important part of the Maori social structure’. For purposes of social harmony, therefore, it conceded that Maori should be enabled to ‘retain the bulk of their remaining lands’. But a reluctance on grounds of the ‘national good’ to trust Maori to farm had become rooted in bureaucratic culture. Officials would typically suggest that it was premature to hand back a finished Maori development scheme to its owners. If transfer were insisted upon, they would contend that the farm should be placed with an incorporation rather than returned directly to those with interests in the land. Maori frustrations at such attitudes were intensified by bureaucratic inertia, and there were long delays in returning developed land to any form of non-departmental control. All the same, as a Maori scholar pointed out later, returning control to incorporations not only allowed retention of ownership but also frequently enabled shareholding control to go to tribal, sub-tribal or whanau groupings. By the early 1970s, three quarters of shareholding entities defined themselves by use of tribal-based terminology.

Meanwhile, officials had long recommended that the escalation of individual titles on blocks of Maori-owned land needed addressing. This system, imposed on Maori by the Crown in the first place, did have seriously adverse ramifications for Maori owners as well as for ‘national productivity’. In 1952, when the Maori Land Court’s progress on consolidating land titles was reviewed, public attention was drawn to the problem of multiple ownership of land. ‘Chaotic’ title fragmentation made it difficult to use land economically and efficiently at a time when the ‘national interest’ required greater outputs for the international market. Multiple title also made it hard for owners to fulfil their responsibilities to the state in such matters as paying rates or clearing noxious weeds. Because of the large numbers of very tiny shares, retaining the land in Maori hands often brought costs rather than productivity benefits. Reform was widely said to be urgent in the interests not just of Maori but of all New Zealanders.⁷

And so officials set to work on solutions. The DMA claimed to have ‘discussed the question [of title fragmentation] with Maori leaders and organisations’. In reality the consultation was selective, and in any case the recommendations made to government ‘disregarded traditional Maori values’. Without significant consultation, then, a ‘revolutionary’ (as a later official report put it) new approachpage 32 to Maori land title was developed and adopted in the 1953 Maori Affairs Act. The legislation’s measures to ‘halt, or at least slow down, fragmentation’ focussed on ‘conversion’. The Department of Maori Affairs later explained it thus: if ‘a satisfactory arrangement’ between successors as to land use could not be found, ‘interests may be vested in the Maori Trustee and due compensation paid to the successors from whom the land has been acquired’. In other words, the Maori Trustee gained powers, under certain circumstances, to buy up interests in land which the state deemed to be ‘uneconomic’ (those under £25 in value) and on-sell them.

There were supposedly safeguards for Maori: ‘The intention is that the Maori Trustee will dispose of the interests in such a way that they are kept in useful Maori occupation or ownership.’ But the state’s rationale was really to create ‘economic farms from uneconomic holdings’. While the minister argued that this would improve race relations by removing pakeha criticism of Maori landowners, the main goal remained that of increasing national production. The Maori Land Court, too, was given wider powers under the 1953 Act to effect new arrangements among successors to interests in title, a development of pre-war consolidation policies. The new measures were aimed at preventing the splitting-up of interests to such a degree that the land could not be farmed or otherwise profitably used. Officials were tasked, for example, with ‘encouraging successors to agree to one of them succeeding to the whole interest of the deceased owner, buying out, if necessary, the interests of his cosuccessors’. That way, it was argued, all parties would benefit. Owners could control and manage their land more effectively, especially by consolidating or creating farmable units; state agencies would be able to disengage gradually from the management of Maori land and revenues; and the public would benefit from greater employment, taxes and productivity.⁸

Because the Maori Affairs Act attempted to address the very real problems arising from the multiplication of fragmented interests in Maori-owned land, there was less opposition to bureaucrats gaining coercive rights than might have been expected. But even before passage of the legislation, there was recognition among Maori leaders that it held the potential to finally sever many tangata whenua links with their ancestral lands. Strong opposition to conversion came from the Maori MPs and other leaders. Opponents often appealed to ancestral bonds to the land. The smallest link to the earth, Eastern Maori MP Tiaki Omana argued, even if only a few shares in its ownership, enabled a person to retain both interest and speaking rights in the tribe. Whatever the practical arguments presented by the Crown, the provision in the Act for the Maori Trustee to convert ‘uneconomic interests’ was ‘a horrifying breach of the Maori principle of turangawaewae [the tribal ‘place to stand’] because it ignored the need for every Maori to retain ownership of some ancestralpage 33 piece of land’. Many Maori regarded conversion as akin to confiscation. The Crown’s power to compulsorily remove land-based property rights certainly meant the undermining of mana and, ultimately, rangatiratanga.⁹

Some government land reforms, however, insofar as they allowed for voluntary rationalisation, could lead to a significant exercise of rangatiratanga at local level. Whatever the Crown’s intentions and the political environment, tangata whenua were not deterred from continuing to fight to have their aspirations met. As in the past, that included making use of state-provided institutions, however marginal the opportunities. In 1949, following Maori representations, the Board of Maori Affairs had recommended that committees of ‘practical men’ be set up to advise on land development. Officials could see that this would benefit national productivity, and the new government agreed. As a result, District Maori Land Committees (DMLCs), holding delegated powers from the board, were established in 1950.

The Crown’s main aim was essentially to facilitate enterprise and development schemes, and when DMLCs had first met in 1951, Maori found themselves in a distinct minority. The standard c composition was to be three officials and ‘one reputable Maori farmer well-known in the area’. A government publication noted in 1964 that ‘[v]isits to schemes by these committees, with a Maori of proved competence in their midst, makes for smooth relations between the owners and farmers and the administration’. Rural and tribal Maori communities, although dismayed at their lack of greater representation, were often able to get their views heard through the committees. It is clear that Maori gained a number of practical and empowering benefits from the new system, especially after 1952 when the committees gained greater powers.

There were other modes of land-based collectivised empowerment at local level. When the Maori Trustee acquired accumulations of ‘uneconomic interests’, Maori incorporations and other groupings were able to purchase them, enhancing the economic base – and therefore the influence – of indigenous rural communities. Bureaucratic inefficiency, together with the sheer complexity of the title system, also helped preserve landed rangatiratanga. The policy of partitioning out Crown interests and then selling these to people (often not Maori) who would develop farms and promote settlement often took many years to effect. Meanwhile, Maori shareholders continued to have a stake in their ancestral land, and some could use the opportunity to plan for a future in which their rangatiratanga might be acknowledged. Both unavoidable delays and bureaucratic inertia gave Maori trusts, incorporations and other entities time to prove that they could effectively manage multiply-owned land through committees appointed by the owners. The DMA itself also often helped the collectivities to manage and develop properties. Such developments increased over time, with ‘Section 438 trusts’ under the 1953page 34 legislation, for example, becoming popular in the 1970s and 1980s. The trusts were able to manage blocks as if they were single owners but on behalf of many Maori landowners. Thus, while Maori had to work within relentlessly assimilationist official parameters, sectors of officialdom provided them leeway in pursuing their aspirations to control their own destinies.¹⁰