page 191

Establishing Tu Tangata

One of the SSC report’s authors, Assistant State Services Commissioner Kara Puketapu, was appointed in 1977 to head Maori Affairs. He was only the second Maori to be selected to lead the department in its history, his appointment an indication of the significance of the Maori Renaissance. Puketapu was an advocate of ‘taha Maori’, and had called for the DMA to be a ‘people oriented, people managed agency’ which would ask Maori what they wanted and try to effect it wherever possible. He initiated a series of meetings with Maori in each district to help develop new policies, which were then considered by a conference of Maori leaders held at Parliament. This Hui Whakatauira, became an annual event.

Puketapu was given considerable leeway by the government for several reasons. It especially sought to assure ‘responsible Maori’ that working through ‘proper channels’ (as opposed to protest and disruption) would yield results. Moreover, Puketapu’s views had the potential to reduce the Maori ‘welfare burden’ on the state. They could also be seen to gell with National’s self-help philosophies. Under the new departmental ethos which Puketapu insisted upon, Maori were encouraged to ‘stand tall’ in conducting their own affairs. Tu Tangata/Standing Tall became, in 1978, the generic title for the ‘new philosophy’ of the DMA. Tu Tangata programmes centred on community-based Maori development, the overall aim being that of promoting ‘cultural and economic advancement’ through ‘encouraging self-reliance and self-determination’. ‘Maori cultural values were promoted … as a source of untapped energy’ which could ‘enhance the effectiveness of locally based projects’. Collective Maori energy, then, would once again be utilised by the state for the development of Maori human and natural resources for (as the DMA’s annual report would put it) ‘the common good of all New Zealanders’.⁵

Puketapu and likeminded staff intended Tu Tangata policy to begin to address the aspirations of traditionalists and radicals alike, and in many ways it represented a significant state move towards recognising and assisting rangatiratanga. At the same time, issues of self-determination and self-reliance were being canvassed within other sectors of the state, too. Processes being discussed and set in train were, in effect, reinterpreting the configurations of the national good. They were influenced by international as well as national developments. In 1978, New Zealand became party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, whose first article affirmed the right of peoples to self-determination. Even Maori cynical of the Crown’s motivations for its policy readjustments at this time appreciated the fact that Tu Tangata took the retention and enhancement of Maori cultural values to be intrinsic to the ‘advancement’ of their people. There was cautious approval,page 192 too, of Tu Tangata’s organisational bases. It aimed to generate activity at the most grounded of community levels, and particularly recognised the value of whanau ‘for reorganising the administrative basis of government-Maori interaction’. Whanau were to be encouraged to become involved in the planning and implementation of solutions to existing problems, and to suggest and promote new developmental initiatives.

While the ethos of the revamped DMA came from agreement at senior political and governmental level, its policies aimed to be bottom-up rather than top-down in both inspiration and operating mode. This ‘Wairua Maori’ approach was designed to seek out and ‘recognise the stance of the people’ by supporting (including through funding) any ‘action group involved in local improvement on a voluntary self help basis’ that was prepared to work in liaison with the Crown. The new philosophy thus supplemented the existing system of project-based assistance to official committees. Moreover, Tu Tangata was not an isolated policy within the public sector. Reflecting, as it did, ‘growing trends to channel welfare services from amelioration to development through local participation and responsibility’, it worked with and alongside other governmental agencies and programmes. However, its implementation came to be seen as a particularly good example of bottom-up initiatives for the state sector to consider, and the State Services Commission would challenge other departments to emulate the Tu Tangata approach in such matters as decentralising aspects of their management structures.

The officially endorsed (if cautious) empowering of Maori collectivities under the 1945 and 1961–62 official structures can be seen as an extension of Ngataism’s critical engagement with the Crown. In this sense, the Maori associations remained important to both state and Maori. But now the voluntary sector within Maoridom would be able to have a greater influence on official policy and operations, incarnating in different ways the policies for which Ngata had been the key initiator and spokesperson. In particular, to be self-reliant Maori would need to draw on the strengths of their own culture. These included collective responsibility and modes of working, and consensual decision-making processes, at all levels of Maoridom.

Tu Tangata represented a new way of linking the politico-cultural renaissance of Maoridom with the social, educational and economic advancement of the people that was, as many adverse statistics indicated, so clearly needed. The DMA’s initial role would be to encourage and facilitate the development of ideas and initiatives from within Maoridom, and those which seemed to be both appropriate and practical would be submitted for scrutiny at the annual Hui Whakatauira. The department undertook to explore policy and implementation possibilities and ramifications for those which were endorsed. The old boundaries between official and unofficial, already blurred in practice,page 193 were becoming more so in theory as well. The DMA’s journal was renamed Tu Tangata to symbolise the changes, and its content asserted notions of rangatiratanga.⁶

Other changes in terminology also indicated a new emphasis in policy and philosophy. In particular, the word ‘community’ came to replace ‘welfare’ in first the departmental lexicon and then in legislation. A departmental restructuring, in which social workers and other staff of the Welfare Division were transferred elsewhere or reclassified as community officers, accompanied such developments. The handling of community participation in the delivery of services to Maori would now come through ‘kokiri’ administration units (whose name reflected the concept of ‘advance’), and community officers would be placed in the field and remain permanently accessible. There was also to be an increasing indigenisation of staff as well as of style. All such concessions to Maori desires for greater recognition of rangatiratanga were widely seen, as the relatively radical Ranginui Walker put it, to be bringing to fruition the ‘devolution of power and resources [that] has long been dreamed of by the Maori people’.

Of course, Crown and Maori motivations did not always or necessarily coincide. The Tu Tangata philosophy’s stress on self-reliance rather than welfarism had helped lead to its backing by Muldoon and his ministers. But for them, the self-help aspects of the ideology outweighed Tu Tangata’s focus on collective Maori ways of doing things, such as the stress it placed on sharing and locality-based kotahitanga. In government eyes, self-help was preferably that of individuals and nuclear families, not the larger units which generally provided the operating bases of Maori communities. ‘My government has been receptive to many of your ideas’, Muldoon would tell Maori leaders in 1982, ‘but has always preferred’ those which were based on the self-reliance of individuals. The policy’s promise of potential savings for the state, too, loomed larger with ministers than with Maori, who noted that the Crown’s funding on Maori issues had always been niggardly. Still, the important thing for Maori was to ensure that Tu Tangata policy became tu tangata action. Puketapu’s successor from 1983 as head of the DMA, Tamati Reedy, declared that Tu Tangata meant ‘that the time had come for Maori people to be self-reliant and to manage their own affairs’. That social welfare for Maori could be relegated to something necessary only in emergencies suited Maori and Crown alike.

In the course of emphasising the self-reliance aspect of Tu Tangata for public consumption, the Muldoon government also stressed its own economic and anti-welfare policies and propensities. The National Party’s statement in a 1981 ‘Position Paper’ that ‘re-establishment of Maoritanga will bring about self-determination’ needs to be placed in this context. The party’s political leadership had increasingly considered social spending cuts to be imperative,page 194 given the lack of economic growth after 1973. With the welfare state imposing what were seen to be unacceptably high financial burdens, National strategists had been impelled ‘to concur with the objectives of Tu Tangata for pragmatic reasons’. Their endorsement was ‘predictable’, as one scholar put it, ‘given the potential of Tu Tangata to: (a) hold government spending on the Maori to within acceptable limits; (b) reduce Maori dependency on welfare services; and (c) pacify Maori demands for increased self-determination’. Transferring the responsibilities of government to sub-tribal and pan-tribal voluntary organisations and other community-based groupings made political and economic sense.

Tu Tangata, then, can be legitimately seen from one perspective as an attempt to appropriate the self-organisational impulses of the Maori Renaissance in order both to contain them and harness them for the exigencies of the (pakeha-dominated) national good – just another in a long line of official appropriations of Maori associational capacities. Many Maori leaders of all stripes were certainly suspicious of the state’s intentions. They feared, among other things, that Tu Tangata’s much vaunted consultation procedures were designed for rubber stamping of decisions already taken by bureaucrats and politicians behind the scenes. A number of observers, including officials, expressed concern that some of the DMA’s significant welfare functions were being pushed into the voluntary sector by the policy. And while Tu Tangata programmes often shifted the burden of responsibility for welfare matters onto community organisations, there was often no matching transfer of power or resources. In fact, it was widely reported that the DMA failed to adequately support local on-the-ground initiatives, even those predicated on government funding; Tu Tangata programmes had to rely largely on the ‘aroha of the community’.⁷

Whatever the degree of autonomy handed over and asserted under Tu Tangata, the Crown retained the upper hand. This was to be expected in terms of matters such as accountability for public money, but the doctrine of indivisible sovereignty had wider ramifications. Whatever the rhetoric about self-reliance, all officially backed expressions of rangatiratanga would continue to be constrained by the government’s ‘rules’, written or otherwise. Any resources or powers conceded to Maori communities could be taken back if the actions of the recipients, in their capacity as people running institutions accountable to the Crown, displeased ministers or officials. Autonomist impulses were certainly being recognised, with the ethos and operating parameters of Tu Tangata allowing both flexible and bold initiatives, and there would now be greater degrees of consultation in devising, planning and implementing DMA programmes. But Crown-franchised and Crown-assisted rangatiratanga could only proceed in authorised and revocable ways once bottom-up initiatives hadpage 195 been officially endorsed. Another ‘official system’ had been set in place that was, in the final analysis, subject to essentially the same constraints as previous ones. That being said, Maori observers at the time perceived that Tu Tangata constituted a forward march of not inconsiderable magnitude on the long road towards rangatiratanga.