Responses to the Hunn Report

Maori continued to have little influence in formulating official Maori policy, although the situation did improve after the release of the Hunn report. An historian of Maori policy would later conclude that the ‘main problem’ with the report was ‘its failure to consult adequately with the Maori community and to include a proper Maori perspective’. Despite the relative lack of Maori engagement in the Hunn recommendations, however, in the early 1960s Maori reaction was generally positive. This reflected a number of factors: the Hunn report’s identification of the large socio-economic disparities between Maori and pakeha; its call for action to achieve ‘equality’ between the races by closing these gaps; Hunn’s endorsement of special state measures to assist this aim, and politicians’ willingness to address the matter seriously; the consideration the report gave to at least some Maori views; and Crown willingness to engage in some degree of Maori consultation at the implementation stage of the report.

In general, immediate Maori response to the Hunn report coincided with that of pakeha who identified themselves as progressive on race and other issues. James Ritchie, who had conducted fieldwork among people who ‘feel themselves to be Maori, call themselves Maori, and speak Maori at least some of the time’, summed up the report as being ‘wise, balanced and fair’. Alongpage 98 with many Maori and pakeha, he endorsed the report’s emphasis on affirmative action to bring about Maori socio-economic uplift at a time of demographic upheaval and transition, and applauded a seemingly new willingness to listen to Maori views (if not to bring Maori into decision-making processes).¹⁵

The report’s rapid endorsement ‘in principle’ by the Minister of Maori Affairs on behalf of the Crown gave hope that a bright social and economic future for Maoridom might finally be achievable. This ambition was summed up in a newspaper headline (in an inadvertent indication of pakeha stereotyping): ‘Minister wants to put motor behind Maori canoe’. Officials believed Maori were poised to take up fully not only the tools of the pakeha but the attributes that were seen to accompany their proper use. In 1963, Hanan declared that the country was giving ‘the world a lead in showing how two ways of life can become one, each enriching the other. Maori and pakeha, though having two different pasts, have one common future’. The permanent head of Maori Affairs applauded Maori-run youth and other clubs in cities welcoming pakeha particiaption, rejoiced that Maori and Europeans worked, travelled and danced together, and saw a rosy future based on the propensity for inter racial marriage in the towns and cities. While these harmonious prospects were seen to rest on urban-based socio-economic uplift for Maori, the emergence of ‘one New Zealand’ was often presented as a logical continuation of the golden race relations that were supposedly characteristic of New Zealand’s past.¹⁶

By the middle of 1961, however, second thoughts about official aims were emerging in some quarters as the import of Hunn’s message began to sink home. A number of Maori who had benefited from the new educational opportunities in the cities, for example, while welcoming the Hunn report’s thrust regarding socio-economic equality for Maori, also saw that it embodied (albeit relatively benignly) the politics of assimilation. Ritchie noted in 1966 that there had been ‘deep suspicion’ that its endorsement of ‘integration’ was a cover for full assimilation. The report’s concessions to Maoriness were increasingly seen to be tokenistic – even, in the eyes of some, to be touristic. Maori analysts such as Bruce Biggs came to criticise it for lacking any interest in Maori culture and for failing to recognise Maori aspirations for rangatiratanga. A number of pakeha public intellectuals, such as Richard Thompson, argued that the report was ‘representative of an essentially European point of view’.

The Maori Synod of the Presbyterian Church was particularly critical of aspects of the Hunn report soon after its publication. This grouping was all in favour of socio-economic advance, and applauded the report’s commitment to this. But it saw Hunn’s lauding of integration to be based on the dangerous ethnocentric assumption that Maori, not pakeha, needed to do all the adjusting. ‘A race cannot be forced into taking steps towards its own elimination’, thepage 99 authors wrote. In any case, if the policy of integration really did allow for a meaningful Maori identity and presence, it was the tangata whenua who should decide the pace and degree of their adoption of European ways. Conversely, pakeha needed to adjust to Maori ways of seeing and doing. Some Maori, imbued with the experience of being seen as ‘queer’ neighbours in the city, were already looking sceptically upon the desirability of joining the more materialistic and individualistic way of life of the pakeha. One wrote to the editor of the Listener that ‘the biggest problem for the Maori is not how he can master the European way of life, but trying to decide whether or not it is a way of life worth mastering. And a lot of us are convinced that it isn’t’.¹⁷

Increasingly, commentators added caveats to their general approval of Hunn’s acknowledgement of the need for accelerating government intervention on socio-economic, educational and other issues concerning Maori. Many felt that the Hunn report ignored the ‘elementary rules of community development’ among tangata whenua. In a 1967 textbook, an historian noted that while Maori had never wanted total physical segregation, neither did they want assimilation. People would continue to make their own choices as to whether they identified as Maori. ‘So long as this separatism of spirit persists, assimilation will never come about.’ Criticisms of the integrationist thrust of the Hunn report and government policy, and of their ultimate assimilationist goals, slowly became mainstream in Maori interpretation and, eventually, in liberal pakeha thought. The report’s essential premise of rapid Maori socio-economic and educational progress in the cities, together with its rejection of ‘rural segregation’, were seen to stem from a deep-seated desire by the Crown to detribalise and de-maorify. Maori were to constitute little more than ever-whitening individuals of the urban proletariat.¹⁸

A decade after the Hunn report, dissenting voices were becoming increasingly loud and insistent. Hugh Kawharu would bluntly state, with regard to the Hunn prescription to work through ‘individualised aid’ rather than ‘tribal organisation’, that ‘when the Pakeha says “integration” he really means “assimilation”’. In the 1970s, Hirini Mead criticised the Crown for continuing the ‘one people, one nation’ policy, which he believed to have largely been successful in ‘alienating us from our own culture’ ever since 1840. In 1978, Pat Hohepa firmly rejected all policies posited upon assimilation or integration. We are, he stated, ‘one nation of two peoples’, arguing that colonisation had not ‘really affected Maori attitudes – the things of the heart, the mind and the spirit’. An anthropologist declared in 1985: ‘To Maori leaders the conclusion was inescapable: both assimilation and integration shared a common political objective, that is, the creation of a uniform society, united under a conformist set of political and social values, and shorn of cultural distinctiveness except in the most trivial sense of the term.’¹⁹