Official Committees and Rangatiratanga

Within the paradigm of the hegemonic state, many Maori argued, a successfully operating official committee could further, or even embody, a community’s wishes to assert and control that which was important to its members: ‘realpage 140 power lay with the people who were prepared to support it, participate in its affairs and accept its authority and leadership’. Whatever the formal duties it was tasked with, a committee could be the focal point in the lives of local Maori people. It could support individuals and families who were finding it hard to transfer to the urban political economy, and provide such services as budgetary advice for maladjusted households. Its secretary might guarantee creditors that accounts would be paid, contact local authorities to have cut-off water and power restored, negotiate with court staff and other officials, and fight to avert repossessions, summonses or eviction orders. Maori associations, then, could become powerful embodiments of collective hopes and aspirations when people put their trust in them. Official committees were vehicles of one-way social control generally only in specific circumstances, such as when individuals were reported to the ‘pakeha authorities’ for transgressing the law (although even with transgressors, the system could formally handle the cases of minor offenders who chose to be sanctioned under committee auspices).

Communities or their representatives would replace committee officeholders if they proved unable to properly represent and assist the people, although in a number of rural areas the entrenched power of customary rangatira precluded much possibility of significant leadership change. In the towns, however, the committees provided ‘an adaptive mechanism to urban life’ that might well owe little to traditional kin inheritances. ‘New’ leaders who arose within the urban committee structure often used techniques better suited to the dominant political economy than those traditionally used by iwi, hapu, whanau or marae leaders in the countryside. City-based elections led to a greater turnover than at rural marae, and to a much higher percentage of non-rangatira members and officeholders.

That urban committees were adaptive, however, does not mean the system was without problems, some of these caused by the sheer number of constituents compared with rural areas. City or suburban committee members were often personally unknown to those who voted for them, and many they supposedly represented might not even have heard of them or been aware that the committees formed part of the wider NZMC structure. Even many Maori working at local committee level would fail to take advantage of the ‘opportunity for input into the upper levels’, often because of the pressures of urban life and work.

On the committees themselves, as in organisations everywhere, quarrels and personality conflicts were not uncommon. Members often reportedly lacked the skills and resources required of their office, were ‘uncertain of their duties and powers’, or allowed personal or tribal relationships to unduly influence their public roles. Officeholders were sometimes accused of authoritarianism or of ‘stacking’ majority-vote meetings with kin, or those who owed them favours,page 141 or those who were in ‘official relationships’ with committee members such as ‘budgetees’ or wardens. Such actions generated dissent within committees and/or their communities, and led to tensions, counter-stacking and resignations. The emergence of consensus, the preferred Maori way of reaching decisions on issues, could be a very lengthy process, although it could also be highly effective, with observers noting that customary modes of decision-making often seemed to provide the best way of proceeding.

While there was disquiet in many quarters about the quid pro quos necessary to receive Crown help, those who operated and supported official committees were often more concerned about insufficient state support or such matters as the shortcomings of committee memberships. The problem for many Maori was not that the committee system was embedded in the state, but that the state provided inadequate resources to enable committees to develop their services in ways that fitted local community circumstances. Whether flaxroots committees developed their own trajectories – often independently from the higher echelons in the system – or fully pursued Crown guidelines, all needed resources to do so. But state funding was limited, with the government reluctant to fund committees even to the level needed to carry out their statutory responsibilities. Traditional Crown parsimony towards Maori had been exacerbated when, early on, opposition to state policies had come from Maori leadership quarters which the government had expected to be quiescent.

Committees were required to compete with other bodies for ‘welfare’-based funding, a burden which often diverted their attention away from other activities. Since only officially approved activities would be financially supported by the state, moreover, those wanting to branch out into other domains had to spend inordinate amounts of time fundraising. Poor resourcing especially affected those in urban areas who were assisting in the establishment of ‘new communities’. As networks of mutual support developed, both official and non-official committees worked together to put pressure on the Crown for adequate infrastructural, project-based and other assistance. There was a consciousness that the stakes were high. A National Conference of Maori Committees held in August 1978 declared the common objective of the committees to be nothing less than ‘the welfare of our people’.

While more resources were frequently sought from the state, there remained a deep awareness that such support held dangers of further state appropriations of Maori organisational energies, forms and culture. Communities engaged in many discussions on ways of ensuring that assistance was provided without too great a degree of state prescription. Requests for Crown support often involved attempts to ensure jurisdictional autonomy for use of resources. Such approaches tended to bring scant results, given both the Crown’s need for publicpage 142 accountability for state monies and broader issues of control. It was much easier, both within the NZMC structure and outside of it, to receive state funding if projects and their implementation were amenable to the Crown’s agenda and the applicants showed preparedness to cooperate with the appropriate state authorities over concepts and details. Organisations or leaders critical of state policy, or seeking projects which did not meet Crown requirements, were likely to meet with delay or rejection.²⁷

There were ongoing reservations in many quarters of Maoridom, including from ‘insiders’, about the very existence of the official structures of representation. During the process of establishing what became the NZMC system, some critics had declared that, along with the Maori Women’s Welfare League, the official committees were designed essentially to transmit state policies ‘downward’, whatever Hunn’s insistence that national and district councils were to be vehicles for ‘two-way’ communication. The Maori associations were seen to be resonant of the institutions of 1900 in this respect, and some critics depicted them as acting as creatures of government, noting that the state hosted the NZMC at its pleasure and on its terms – including designating it to be the legal representative of all Maori.

The national body’s secretariat, in particular, was seen to be under Crown influence by dint of the fact that it was both relatively heavily state-subsidised and hosted by the Department of Maori Affairs. Observers were soon noting that the New Zealand Maori Council!leadership ‘seems to talk only for the more conservative elements within Maori society’. This perception was strengthened because the more radical individuals among the NZMC’s central and regional leadership had little choice but to move cautiously until the political climate was more auspicious. Another strand of criticism related to the NZMC’s ‘hierarchy of structure’, which was said to entrench a culture of central-or regional-level decision-making within the official system. The ‘most serious criticism of the Maori Council’, a scholar reported in 1971, was that it ‘tends to have strangled communication from the local level’.

As noted above, a discernible tendency towards criticism of aspects of government policy by the NZMC had developed even in the early years of the council. But despite this, many tangata whenua (and sympathisers in the pakeha world) continued to perceive it to be both too top-heavy and too heavily state-influenced. With rural-based district councils dominating the national body’s membership selection procedures, the ‘elderly males’ in charge of the Maori Council were often regarded by younger and urban Maori as dupes of government. For some, indeed, the NZMC was akin to a ‘puppet organization’.²⁸

Overlooking the system remained the paternalistic Department of Maori Affairs. Hunn’s assimilationist policies had envisaged that the departmentpage 143 would gradually wind down as integration proceeded. The institution would increasingly contract out its programmes to mainstream departments on the way to, ultimately, disappearing altogether. But with ‘Maoriness’ continuing to be affirmed, organisationally and culturally, the government saw value in the DMA surviving, at least in the meanwhile, for monitoring and control purposes. Under a strong head between 1963 and 1975, Jock McEwen, it continued much as before, including hands-on intervention in all Maori Welfare Act processes and policies.

Appreciation within many Maori circles of the autonomist potential offered by the NZMC system, however, meant that criticism of the official infrastructure for Maori affairs was often tempered. The DMA and the NZMC, for all their faults, presided over a system that could work well for Maori on a number of matters at both high level and low. Verdicts in urban Maori courts, for example, would be accepted as ‘just and proper’ not because of Crown authorisation but because the whanau of the accused welcomed reconstituted disciplinary channels within an environment which had enabled (especially young) people to break free of tribal ties and constraints. Family and tribal members were able to participate in the committee proceedings, and tribunal strictures and punishments often reflected traditional sanctions. In effect, the Maori committees and their adjuncts operated as expressions of ‘a collective moral force’ within local Maori communities, and often served to reinforce the importance in Maori life of ‘personal contact, a life-giving component of Maori politics’. The committee system, therefore, could be – and frequently was – the formal and/or informal point of reference for Maori life at a local level. It provided for something akin to communal self-governing mechanisms, and offered a training ground for leadership at flaxroots and higher levels.²⁹