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Maori and the State: Crown-Māori relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa, 1950-2000

Labour in Office

Labour in Office

When Labour won, Maori received an early sign of the policy difficulties ahead when the veteran Labour/Ratana MP Eruera Tirikatene, chair of the Maori Policy Committee, was passed over for the Maori Affairs portfolio. That Prime Minister Nash took it up himself, as Peter Fraser had done in the previous Labour government, could be depicted as an acknowledgement of thepage 60 importance of Maori issues in the body politic. But this move, many Maori believed, was essentially a reflection of the perceived need to constrain the Maori aspirations that had been heightened by Labour’s electoral success. Maori had long been uneasy about Nash: when Arnold Nordmeyer had challenged him for the party’s leadership in 1954, the Maori MPs had abstained (to Nash’s hurt and surprise). Tirikatene was to be on the Board of Maori Affairs, through membership of the Executive Council, and a new position was created for him of ‘Associate to the Minister of Maori Affairs’. But his allocation to the lowly forestry ministerial portfolio in Cabinet was widely seen as an insult to Maoridom, some commentators presciently viewing it as a prelude to the government’s ignoring of election promises. Shouldering a sense of betrayal, the Maori MPs, members of the Maori Policy Committee and other prominent Maori and Ratana leaders within the Labour Party nonetheless set about trying to persuade the government to engage in meaningful dialogue on its Maori policies and actions.

Nash and his inner core, however, were soon positively rejecting, rather than just ignoring, such pressure, sometimes against officials’ advice. When the DMA, having listened to representations from Maori leaders, had recommended recognising a national Maori representative body, the idea was dismissed out of hand by the politicians. Before long, the Maori Policy Committee felt it had no choice but express no confidence in the Prime Minister. Its secretary, who was on the Labour Party National Executive, noted that while ‘plenty’ was happening in government on indigenous issues, this was ‘in a totally different direction to that expected by the Committee’. In other words, Labour had essentially reverted to treating Maori issues as little more than class issues to be resolved by socio-economic uplift, without consultation with Maori and ignoring key requirements of rangatiratanga.

While seeing socio-economic development as necessary but very far from sufficient, Labour’s Maori activists pressed their demands vigorously upon the government. One strand of pressure stressed the many land claims and other historical grievances that remained unaddressed, all of them revolving around breaches of the 1840 promise to respect rangatiratanga. In the absence of a sympathetic holder of the Maori Affairs portfolio, Labour’s Maori membership called for re-establishing something akin to Tirikatene’s former position of Minister Representing the Maori Race, with the incumbent to be advised by not only the Maori Caucus in Parliament but also by the Maori Policy Committee. This, of course, cut across Westminster parliamentary conventions, and when Tirikatene put the proposals before Nash, the response was one of angry rejection.

In the summer of 1958, race issues were to come to public prominence through New Zealand’s rugby connections with South Africa. When an All Black tour of the apartheid country was announced, many predicted thatpage 61 the team would be a totally pakeha one, and opposition gathered. When, in mid-1959, the predictions were confirmed, Maori (including Kingitanga) took a prominent role in the mass and biracial ‘No Maoris, No Tour’ protest campaign. The Maori Women’s Welfare League secretary, who was also secretary of the Citizens’ All Black Tour Association (CABTA), stated that ‘our battle is a domestic one against an act of racial discrimination committed by a New Zealand sports organisation’. Nash refused to intervene even to put pressure on the rugby authorities, to Maori and liberal pakeha anger. Though the tour proceeded, the denial of ‘equality of opportunity’ to Maori raised consciousness of issues of both national and (especially after the South African police massacre of civilians at Sharpeville) international indigeneity.

Meanwhile, at the 1958 Labour Party annual conference, the Maori Policy Committee had severely criticised the government for non-implementation of the party’s Maori policies. Conference delegates unanimously pressed for action on conference policy resolutions, and in the following months the Maori MPs and the MPC kept up the pressure. But to little effect. In 1959, there was essentially a rerun of the same events (and non-events), and in such disappointing circumstances a number of new Maori voluntarist organisations began forming – especially among urban-dwelling and educated Maori. Pan-tribal or non-tribal gatherings of various types were held, and interest in non-official ways of organising kotahitanga revived – 25,000 signatures to a petition on the issue were reportedly collected. In this general context of feelings of both betrayal and revival, a second Young Maori Leaders’ Conference was convened, following on from that held in 1939.

The Maori Policy Committee’s report to the 1960 Labour Party conference was later described as the ‘most pointed criticism levelled at the Government regarding lack of recognition and action on Maori policies’. It stated that ‘mere words cannot even describe the void that is obvious in [Labour’s] activities’. It declared that the government’s contempt for policy adopted unanimously at the previous conference meant that the ‘practicable effectiveness of this Committee is completely nullified’. For an election year this was extraordinary wording, a revelation of the depth of Maori yearning for the honouring of election pledges and, more broadly, for political recognition of Maori authority. Party officials tried in advance to get the report withdrawn. Eventually, a compromise was reached that it would be published only in part – and for the sake of election-year unity, strong words at the conference were averted. But the discontent continued. The Maori MPs were not consulted in drafting that year’s Maori Purposes Bill, and when they deemed the wording to be unsatisfactory, their protests went unheeded.

In theory, the Maori MPs held the balance of power and could threaten, in a two-party system, to bring down the government. They were often vocal, andpage 62 Tirikatene was particularly critical of the South African rugby tour going ahead without government intervention or even protest. But they found themselves in a painful dilemma. The Labour Party, for all its faults, continued to provide sites for debate and action relevant to furthering Maori aspirations in a way that National did not. Tirikatene noted that he had ‘not lost sight of the Treaty of Waitangi’ since entering the House: progressing rangatiratanga seemed still to be possible under the Labour banner. Because of its stronger welfarist history and orientation, too, the Labour government was seen to offer the bulk of the Maori population considerably more by way of socio-economic advancement than the opposition. Certainly, judging by consistent voting patterns, most Maori deemed it better to be with Labour than to switch to the only real electoral alternative.

Hence the Maori MPs were trapped rather than liberated by their strategic positioning. They, the Maori Policy Committee and other Maori leaders knew that Nash was fully aware that Maori, however frustrated, would not (in the foreseeable future, at least) desert ‘their own’ party. Members of the MPC had themselves noted that the consistency with which its ‘requests have been ignored’ by ministers was not unrelated to the fact that the government ‘publicly states that the Maori adherence will remain loyal to it’. Labour lost office in 1960.