Land and Struggle

The ‘ferment of political activism’ of the early 1970s ‘coalesced into a Maori land rights movement’ towards mid-decade. But the scene for confrontation over land issues had already been set by developments in the 1960s. The longstanding Maori desire – including among Maori who had settled in the urban areas – to preserve and restore tribal turangawaewae, the traditional underpinning of Maori communal life, had suffered much in the aftermath of the Hunn report. Hunn had detailed the problems associated with the administration and utilisation of Maori-owned land. He recommended moving away from what was left of communal ownership, on grounds that multiple title impeded efficient use. His report recommended empowering the Maori Trustee to compulsorily alienate land deemed uneconomic because of fragmented ownership interests. Not only would this make economic sense, Hunn andpage 156 others thought, but urban migration indicated that Maori had become both less attached to their land and positively welcoming of detribalisation. If they wished to continue aspects of a collective approach to life, the many official and unofficial committees and other associations in the cities ensured that this was possible in an environment far from ancestral soil.

Some went further than Hunn and like-minded officials in their reasoning. The problems of Maori land stemmed, as Hanan saw it, not from the land title system imposed on Maori in the nineteenth century, but from the ‘evils of turangawaewae’. This concept ‘can prevent good land from being used or even looked after, and poorer land from being improved; it can cause Maori children to be brought up in areas where there is no employment for them or their parents; it can perpetuate inter-family and inter-tribal rivalries; and it can represent a formidable barrier to the advancement of the race. Perhaps it will sooner or later change its character, as other Maori customs have done, to fit in with the changing times.’ The Crown would help it to do so.⁹

The policies advocated in the Hunn report and enunciated by its implementers blatantly violated the continuing and deep-seated Maori nexus with the land, and so were greeted by increasingly intense opposition. Any attempt by the state to trample on this strongest of bonds in pursuit of economic rationalisation was to ignore, as the Presbyterian Maori Synod put it, ‘the cardinal principle of the need for tribal ownership, and the importance to us of turangawaewae’. Hunn had reinterpreted turangawaewae as ‘home ownership’. His assimilationist assumption that it could be understood in terms of a section owned by a Maori family in the city reflected a vast gulf in worldview between Maori people and official New Zealand. Despite the urban reorientation of much Maori life, Maori generally agreed that ‘well-being as a people’ involved collective ownership of land. This did not mean that they were not concerned about the difficulties inherent in fragmented title. They had long, in fact, been trying to get solutions which did not involve alienation. The Synod, for example, regarded ‘incorporation’ of farmland under state auspices – with land vested in a body corporate – as an acceptable compromise that enabled both production and a collective controlling voice over land use.¹⁰

The official committee system provided one of many forums in which widespread opposition to land alienation was discussed. When the NZMC was established, Carroll and his vice-president, Pei Te Hurinui Jones, were particularly interested in the issue of land. Both came from rural backgrounds, and as leaders who saw themselves as having a special responsibility for kaitiakitanga/guardianship of the land, they and their colleagues drew a line in the sand for the government. Despite their traditionalist conservatism, and indeed because of it, they felt compelled to join the Maori MPs and many other Maori leaders in taking a strong stance against the government’s landpage 157 policies. Crown proposals to alienate ‘uneconomic interests’ and to utilise the funds for the Maori good (as well as to free up lands for development in the national interest) were seen as both paternalistic and confiscatory. The plans included, for example, extending leaseholds in a way that would deny future generation full returns from lands they nominally owned. In 1964, the NZMC established a committee to investigate the land issue and formulate solutions for government consideration.

Faced by pressure from many quarters of Maoridom, the government appointed a commission of enquiry. The appointees, Judge Ivor Prichard and DMA official Hemi Waetford, were asked to find ways of improving Maori-owned title and better utilising the land. They consulted widely and recorded general Maori dissatisfaction with the system of fragmented ownership which had been imposed upon the tribes. They noted that this system remained a major problem despite the various strategies of incorporation, amalgamation and other options proffered to and imposed upon Maori since the late nineteenth century. Fragmentation continued to stymie development in rural areas, and it offered little benefit to Maori making the difficult adjustment to city life. Maori observers were grateful that such longstanding criticisms had been recognised.

But while the ‘great majority’ of Maori agreed on the need for substantial change, the Prichard–Waetford recommendations merely endorsed the general thrust of the Hunn report. The authors dismissed some of the concerns raised during consultations as insignificant, an indication to many Maori that a Maori presence on official bodies did not necessarily provide results acceptable to the majority of Maori. The report remarked on the ‘many unjustified complaints of a trivial nature’, and believed that ‘objectors were resisting the removal of differences between the law relating to Maoris and … that relating to non-Maoris for the reason that those very differences gave them something to raise at meetings and that without such talking point they would not have the same claim to prominence’. It seemed that the commission’s purpose had been to find ways to justify the targeting of communally held title, thereby striking at the heart of the tangata’s special relationship with the whenua, rather than to seek a Maori solution to a Maori problem.

In stating that ‘after 100 years change is inevitable’, Prichard and Waetford seemed to miss the point that it was the type of change that mattered to Maori. In one analysis, their general ‘aim was simply to allow individual Maori owners to do what they wanted with their land and to end … the whole Maori land title system’. Certainly they believed that if Maori-held land was to be used for the good of all, individual farmers of ability needed to be placed on it – many of them, by implication, pakeha. In pursuit of public-good efficiency, many of the Prichard–Waetford proposals were ‘coercive in nature’ and ‘advocated, inpage 158 essence, a major expansion of compulsory conversion’; that is, the compulsory acquisition and pooling by the Crown of uneconomic interests.

There was widespread Maori dismay in 1965 at the report’s recommendations – ‘something approaching panic’, in Hugh Kawharu’s words. Meetings were held throughout the country. Maori from many walks of life feared that the commission’s advice would embolden the government to step up its efforts to phase out multiple ownership of Maori land, rather than to find ways of making collective ownership and turangawaewae more viable in the modern world. The government made no secret that it was indeed determined to act coercively, now that it had before it a rationale for a drastic restructuring of titles in the interests of both ‘the national good’ and Maori – whether Maori agreed or not.

The New Zealand Maori Council, in association with the Extension Department of the University of Auckland, was at the fore of opposition to the new report. The two organisations hosted a conference in 1966 to discuss the Prichard–Waetford recommendations, and this well-attended gathering rejected most of them. In doing so, the attendees reflected an escalating feeling, widespread in both rural and urban Maoridom, that the report foreshadowed an imminent and comprehensive ‘last land-grab’ by the Crown. The conference produced ten pages of recommendations in response. These were moderate in tone, a reflection of the steadying influence of the NZMC. The alternatives proposed included Indigenous Land Utilisation Committees to work out title and other improvements, following a precedent among Whanau-a-Apanui; officials could work in partnership with these and the Maori associations ‘to increase production from Maori land’. Despite such practical suggestions for avoiding state coercion, and in the face of vocal and ongoing Maori opposition, Hanan and his fellow ministers rejected the various criticisms of the report. Calls for the Crown to investigate, with Maori leaders, solutions to what all parties acknowledged were very real problems were dismissed. Keith Holyoake’s National government believed it knew what was best and merely tinkered with the details of the Prichard–Waetford proposals, incorporating their essence into a Maori Affairs Amendment Bill.¹¹