The Maori Associations in Operation

When Hanan launched the revised structure for the centralised official committee system at a hui on 28 June 1962, he did so with a Maori proverb:page 118 ‘The old net is cast aside – the new net goes a’ fishing’. But the New Zealand Maori Council’s beginnings were not auspicious. The minister emphasised that the system had been established by the Crown, and made it clear that he expected Carroll to be elected the founding president. In his turn, Carroll stated that ‘the councillors must not offend the government’. Despite this, many Maori looked forward to making use of the system to promote causes of their own at all levels, from flaxroots initiatives to developing a united Maori perspective on issues of national significance. There was considerable optimism that what might be seen as a ‘rather toothless’ legislative mandate to discuss with, advise and assist the government could be turned into something proactively Maori. There was some appreciation that, in various ways, the NZMC structure was built on the accomplishments of the 1945 system in improving ‘bicultural political relations’, ensuring ‘greater collaboration between Maori leadership and Pakeha administration’, and (whatever the political and bureaucratic decision-makers would have preferred) preserving and enhancing Maori socio-cultural distinctiveness.

Although they often had few resources, the Maori associations developed lobbying expertise and worked hard on issues in which the government was not necessarily much interested, such as preserving Maori language and customs. At central level, efficiency was boosted by the appointment of the DMA’s anthropologist, John Booth, as a fulltime secretary for the NZMC. While some believed that this move was symptomatic of the Crown’s controlling agenda, Booth became an essential conduit in faithfully passing on Maori wishes to the government. Within a short period, the NZMC came ‘to be viewed as a significant and thoroughly “Maori” institution’. When, in mid-decade, the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation established a policy on pronunciation of Maori place names that was deemed to be unacceptably compromised, Booth helped bring ‘organisation to the spontaneous resistance’ which occurred within Maoridom. Given the strength of flaxroots feeling on a number of issues, the conservative leadership was sometimes compelled to take over leadership of spontaneous protest campaigns to calm things down and forge a compromise acceptable by both sides; the NZMC secretary was generally in the foreground of such efforts.⁷

To be sure, at first much of the council’s work was done on the government’s terms, seemingly vindicating state impulses to appropriate Maori organisational energies. Many of the initial activities carried out within the system in fact amounted to administrative assistance to the government. The district councils, for example, prioritised the applications for state subsidies for marae-building programmes. When difficult questions were raised by the associations, or they gave ‘wrong’ answers to questions posed by the state, the government and officials might well ignore or marginalise them. When the NZMC waspage 119 consulted on the role the Treaty of Waitangi might play in a proposed Bill of Rights, ministers baulked at the council’s views (expressed on behalf of its constituents) as to how the ‘the spirit of the Treaty’ should be applied to modern circumstances, seeing these as advocating discrimination in legislation rather than removing it.

But the official associations system also proved to offer much to Maori. A number of committees in the cities throve, providing an enhanced level of representation and advocacy for urban Maori – some of the 13 committees in greater Wellington, technically representing more than 50,000 Maori, were forthright in their work on behalf of the migrant population of the area. For many contemporary Maori (and later scholars), the organisational legislation of the early 1960s, which gave ‘birth to the first statutory, government supported, national Maori organisation’, amounted to ‘a major breakthrough for the Maori people’. At its regional and national levels, the NZMC system acquired considerable status among both Maori and pakeha publics, as well as with the Crown, as an articulator of Maori interests. It assumed responsibility for some issues over which the Maori Women’s Welfare League had once had the main franchise, such as land and housing. Observers were soon claiming that ‘the League assumed a secondary leadership role and somehow lost its momentum’ as the NZMC gained in influence. Certainly, the Crown was soon routinely consulting with the Maori associations on matters of relevance to their constituents, and flaxroots committee members often took steps to ensure that their voices were heard inside the whole structure. In one assessment, the Maori associations represented a ‘hybrid of both European and Maori traditional forms’. Their key figures acquired ‘specialised skills in brokerage and negotiation’ with various state and other organisations, while remaining ‘true to tribal principles’.⁸

Whatever the official role of the institutions established under the Maori Welfare Act, moreover, Maori began to take them in new and informal directions – just as they had with predecessor committees of various types. Many of their members believed that now ‘the power was really in the hands of the people’. Some set out to subvert assimilationist aims by using the facilities on offer through the system. As in the past, then, a structure which suited the government also provided sites of autonomist opportunity. The Tauranga area executive, for example, headed a regional struggle for reparations from the Crown for nineteenth-century land confiscations. Ultimately this led (in 1981) to a lump-sum ‘full and final’ settlement and the establishment of the Tauranga Moana Maori Trust Board to control the monies. This settlement was a precursor to later negotiated settlements with iwi elsewhere.

Generally the government tolerated members taking the committees in directions more or less as they wished, so long as their activities were not toopage 120 ‘extreme’ and the required functions were also carried out. Departures from the rules included unauthorised organisational forms as well as operational matters (as had happened in the 1945 system), such as having a larger membership than permitted by law. In some sub-districts, Maori committees decided not to elect Maori executive committees, instead choosing to have a direct relationship with the district councils. Even the latter developed operating parameters of their own, often quite independently of the NZMC to which they both contributed representatives and were formally accountable. One scholar has argued that, in fact, each DMC ‘was a politically discrete and autonomous unit’. It is certainly clear that local committees and their executives ‘maintained a remarkable degree of autonomy’. In all, the NZMC represented a ‘segmented democracy of … various units’, with ‘greater coherence’ within local segments than between them. The central council did not have ‘the power to command’, but remained ‘essentially a mechanism for co-ordination … and a channel for influence’ to government, public service and other agencies. It was also a ‘symbol of a will towards unity’.⁹

Some aspects of both the 1962 legislation and its implementation held out considerable potential for both Maori development and the retention or reconfiguration of Maori identity. Official committees in the cities and towns were building Maori community groupings across tribal barriers. This in itself did not derogate from tribal links. But increasing numbers of individuals and families had been urbanised for so long that their ties with their home marae were fading. As tribal bonds loosened, people began identifying ever more closely with the community in which they lived and with pan-tribal groupings within it. The official and quasi-official pan-tribal associations, in conjunction with voluntary associations, helped keep ‘being Maori’ a ‘going concern’ even for those who were subjected to ‘detribalising’ influences.

Adjustment processes were particularly aided by a new aspect of the official system. While the MWA removed departmental welfare officers from the NZMC structure, it sanctioned the establishment of voluntary Maori Welfare Committees within it. Those set up by urban-based Maori began to complement other Maori support mechanisms, and in some cases provided the sort of support to new arrivals previously afforded by kinship networks. In conjunction with the official Maori committees and other organisations, welfare committees were soon instrumental in helping expand a pan-Maori collective consciousness in urban, or more specifically suburban, spaces. Increasingly, experience in the cities produced an emergent sense of ‘Maori’ identity that was superimposing itself upon tribal affiliation.

The quasi-official welfare committees, along with the informal voluntary associations, assisted the Maori associations to fulfil both official roles and unofficial functions. Urban dwellers, especially, would often contact them topage 121 help cope with difficult circumstances, and significant numbers participated in their activities. With increasing legitimation in the eyes of the people, the committees became a vital part of community life. By the 1970s, it was being argued that the MWA’s granting of statutory authority to voluntary committees ‘provides for a form of self-government and makes legitimate leadership in a multi-tribal situation’. While Maori associations were still seen by many to be integrally part of the official machinery, however independently they operated, the close working relationships between the informal and official committees helped make the latter more acceptable. Although the welfare committees were authorised to operate by the Act, for example, they inhabited the same quasi-official spaces as the MWWL, and few saw them as being completely ‘official’.

The Maori associations’ work was most needed by those who struggled to adjust to the cities, and by the 1970s there were over three dozen official Maori committees operating under the umbrella of the Auckland District Maori Council. In the pepper-potted environment of a new housing estate, they would assist with the creation of Maori welfare committees, which in turn helped consolidate the base of the NZMC structure. Such modes of ethno-social adjustment to urban living became a means of forging or enhancing collective or cultural relationships with and between displaced Maori families. The welfare committees, comprising seven to eleven people elected triennially, were in fact tasked with functions that were more broad-based than their titles might suggest. Their brief amounted, in effect, to improving the social, economic and cultural situation of Maori. Among other things, they sought to ‘promote harmonious race relations’, assist in ‘physical, economic, social, educational, moral and spiritual well-being’, and ‘help the Maori enjoy the full rights, privileges and responsibilities of New Zealand citizenship’.¹⁰

More specifically, welfare committees engaged in activities such as promoting health and sanitation and preventing excessive drinking, functions which were once the province of the Welfare Division’s tribal committees. They could nominate Maori wardens to take on complementary ‘additional duties’ such as ‘patrolling streets, hotels and places of public assembly’. They could also appoint Honorary Welfare Officers (HWOs) to assist them in their role, and by 1968 there were 30 of these. The HWOs were, along with the wardens, among the most visible of the voluntary workers associated with the official system. In one contemporary assessment, ‘[m]ost of the department’s welfare work … relies heavily on voluntary assistance’. The honorary welfare officers had the same powers as salaried DMA welfare officers – whose numbers had reached 81 by 1970. An increase in demand for HWOs can be seen by the fact that their numbers had by that time reached 46. Government departments and other official institutions were authorised, even encouraged, to cooperatepage 122 with Maori welfare committees and their volunteer staff, and the committees in turn were expected to cooperate with state agencies.

Some of the functions of welfare committees formally overlapped with those of the DMA. Maori would reportedly compare favourably the work of the HWOs with the activities of departmental staff, who (especially those who were pakeha) could be seen as ‘outsiders and representatives of officialdom’. For example, after sundry officials had failed to gain entry to the house of a ‘problem family’, an honorary welfare officer knocked on the door and said in te reo Maori: ‘Greetings, I am a Maori’. This was sufficient to gain her entrance, and when she ‘spoke kindly and gently and in a spirit of goodwill’, the way was opened for the suburb’s welfare committee to help the family. This case, concerning a family whose children were reportedly ‘dirty, poorly clothed and hungry’, was just one of very many recorded in the literature and archives. Such assistance to migrants making the difficult, even traumatic, adjustment to urban life was welcomed by most to whom it was offered, partly because the official powers of the volunteer staff and committee members were exercised lightly. The committees were effective, in short, because they were an integral part of their communities.

However, urban adjustment assistance on a large scale, so clearly necessary for the physical well being of very many families and individuals, was provided within a general context of ‘appropriate’ (westernised) ways of behaving and viewing the world. These might include, for example, wearing particular kinds of clothes and the abandoning of customary hospitality practices. In other words, the social control functions assigned by Parliament to the whole system of Maori committees, honorary welfare officers, welfare committees,wardens and the MWWL (together with some of the less formal and entirely non-official which liaised with them) was posited upon the demands of the assimilating processes. While they had undoubtedly quickly gained community support, Maori associations can be seen on one level of analysis as operating on behalf of a state whose overarching priority was to ensure its own, culturally specific definitions of ‘peace and good order’ and private as well as public behaviour.

As formal, semi-formal or informal assistants of the Crown in this task, the committees and volunteer workers linked with them helped impose hegemonic mores, codes of behaviour and modes of thought upon their own people. An honorary welfare officer’s statement is indicative of the types of values she upheld on behalf of the state: ‘a man’s duty is to go out and earn money. A woman’s duty is to cook the food and clean the house’. Under such guidance, social organisation and rhythms of life of the dominant culture, including a mode of family organisation as near as possible to that of the ‘ideal’ pakeha nuclear family, were seen as integral to the future development of the Maori people. Thepage 123 Maori Welfare Act’s purpose, from the legislators’ perspective, was to fast-track Maori migrants to become ‘irrevocably integrated into the economic system of mainstream society’ – to become assimilated as far and as fast as possible.¹¹