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

After the Labour Government

After the Labour Government

At the party’s 1961 annual conference, the Maori Policy Committee scathingly indicted the Nash government’s record: the Labour leadership’s acceptance over several years of the MPC’s annual report had been but ‘empty gestures’. The actual policies put in place, the committee stated (with more than a hint of irony), were ‘forced on the Maori by pakeha experts as a patronising measure because the Maori was too improvident to know what is good for himself’. Some ‘higher power’ in the Labour Party had apparently decreed that ‘the Maori would never be given the opportunity to analyse himself’. But for all that, Maori had been able to work inside Labour en masse and in a structured way, and had even been able to make some policy headway – occasionally more than merely in theory. Some of their leaders noted, for example, that towards the end of its period in office, the government had begun to succumb to membership pressure. Its concessions that district councils at regional level needed to be properly authorised and that a national body with appropriate resources should be formally established were manifestations of this.

The fact remained that the words of condemnation of the Nash government by the MPC and other Maori leaders were harsh – essentially because of the sense of betrayal after the 1957 election, which, after years of National rule,page 63 had raised hopes enormously. During the three years of the Nash government, some Maori Labour Party members decided in despair or disgust to work outside parliamentary politics – or to abandon politics altogether. But while the results to date were disappointing for the MPC and those it represented, the possibility of influencing a future Labour political executive remained. Maori wanting to work to effect change through the parliamentary system had little choice but to stay with Labour, especially since the new government of Keith Holyoake seemed to embody National’s old aversion to Maori input into decision-making. Support for National continued, in fact, to decline among Maori (except for a brief surge in 1963), as it had done ever since the positive effects of Labour’s welfarism began to become evident after 1938. By 1969, National was winning only an eighth of the Maori vote.

While often dispirited, then, many Maori activists decided to continue working within the Labour party, focusing on securing progress through changing their own party’s stances. As a corollary to this, many opted to work on boosting the potential of the committee structures established under the 1945 Act, especially given the recent concessions on higher level organisation. Moreover, a cautious practice of building on what already existed seemed a prudent course to take in countering the new government’s rapid assimilationist agenda: there was a discernibly reinforced attitude within ‘official New Zealand’ under National that the absorption of all things Maori into the western political economy and culture was not just inevitable but should be vigorously encouraged and hastened.

Despite this, Holyoake’s government did not reject the recent developments in, and plans for, the official committee system. In the past, the state under National had viewed any devolution to Maori as the most temporary of expedients within the grand assimilationist strategy – or, alternatively, as a minor departure from the norm, one involving the antiquarian preservation of ‘outmoded’ but emblematic and touristic customs and practices. While the Maori migration to urban areas was seen as speeding up the goal of full assimilation, the ‘spectacular’ growth in the Maori population (considerably more than a tripling over four decades) presented National with a problem of critical mass pending that desired goal. It had no choice but to consider the needs and wishes of Maori, especially those newly arrived in the towns and cities.

There were very practical matters to address. With increasing numbers of low-paid (relative to the pakeha norm) Maori youth accumulating in urban areas, some of them fuelling the problems of disorder and crime that punctured the official/liberal paradigm of the times, few officials believed the situation could any longer be downplayed. Finding ways of dealing systematically with the difficulties posed by Maori urbanisation, and seeking the best means ofpage 64 phasing out rural tribalism, remained pressing issues for various agencies within the Crown. With any institutional assistance for these tasks appreciated, the post-election focus of a number of Maori leaders on expanding and enhancing the existing official committee structure held some attraction for the Holyoake government and its advisers. They were aware, too, that a number of Maori leaders inside the official system had always been conservative or, if not, had become profoundly disillusioned with the Labour leadership. All this helped National politicians and their officials make up their minds. Significant developments, albeit based upon ideas and plans emerging in the last days of the Labour government, were quickly to occur.10

10 Love, ‘Policies of Frustration’, p 442ff (p 457 for ‘in a totally different’ quote), p 481 (for ‘most pointed criticism’, ‘mere words’, ‘practicable effectiveness’, ‘requests have been ignored’ and ‘the organisation’ quotes), p 484 (for ‘not lost’ quote), p 487 (for ‘empty gestures’ quote), p 488 (for ‘forced on the Maori’, ‘higher power’ and ‘Maori would never’ quotes); Brown, Bruce (Private Secretary to Nash, 1954–9), personal communication (on Nordmeyer’s challenge to Nash’s leadership), 30 Jul 2008. The circumstances of the 1954 leadership bid by Nordmeyer remain confused: see the differing treatments in Sinclair, Keith, Walter Nash, Auckland, 1976, pp 293–4 and Logan, Mary, Nordy: Arnold Nordmeyer: A Political Biography, Wellington, 2008, pp 280–81. For the South African tour issue, see Richards, Trevor, Dancing on our Bones: New Zealand, South Africa, Rugby and Racism, Wellington, 1999, p 20ff and Sinclair, Nash, pp 334–6; Butterworth, ‘Aotearoa 1769–1988’, ch 10, p 21; McLeay, Elizabeth (ed), New Zealand Politics and Social Patterns: Selected Works by Robert Chapman, Wellington, 1999, pp 241, 243; Poulsen and Johnston, ‘Patterns of Maori Migration’, p 150 (for ‘spectacular’ quote).