‘Empowerment’ Programmes

As the new devolutionary policies were being debated and worked through, tribally-based initiatives, both official and unofficial, escalated. The Maori employment caucus, which arose out of the Hui Taumata, was prominent in promoting self-reliant ideas. Its March 1985 Employment Conference strengthened the demand for tribal authorities to control both resources and delivery of services. The Crown bureaucracy held numerous discussions and negotiations with Maori leaders from many areas and backgrounds. Between 1985 and 1987, the government endorsed a variety of initiatives and schemes. One of these, the MANA Enterprise Development Programme, was established to provide business-orientated loan financing through tribal authorities. Itspage 205 aim was to broaden Maoridom’s economic base by encouraging new Maori businesses and enhancing existing ones, thereby creating work at a time when (as had been expected) Maori were suffering disproportionately from job losses. The ‘Maori ACCESS’ (MACCESS) scheme was set up in 1987 after its promotion by the Maori employment caucus. It was to provide special employment and vocational training for the long-term unemployed and others disadvantaged by a drastically shrinking labour market.

Not all the new programmes operated at tribal level. New community-based schemes were established, often modelled on the most successful of the existing projects. One ‘flagship’ for the DMA’s policies of empowering Maori communities indicated clearly the way in which Labour’s policies built upon those of the previous government. Matua Whangai, a community-based Maori ‘foster parenting’ scheme, had first been mooted by the 1981 Hui Whakatauira and piloted from late 1983. Taken up by the new government, it was fully established in 1985 under the auspices of the DMA and several other departments. It would provide whanau-and hapu-based (rather than state-welfare) care for ‘youth at risk’. Its aim was both to deal with potential offenders and to ‘deinstitutionalise’ young Maori in Social Welfare homes and other carceral institutions by ‘using the strengths of the Maori whanau’ and tribal structures. Not only would the flow of Maori into disciplinary institutions be stemmed, but the very nature of a number of these institutions would also change: they would be gradually relocated within tribal, especially whanau, environments. Matua Whangai benefited from both state resources and those of tribal, sub-tribal and other Maori organisations. It marked a key development in the Crown’s recognition of whanau, hapu and iwi as offering ‘viable channels for renewal’.¹⁶

But future difficulties in Crown–Maori relations were foreshadowed early on in the life of Matua Whangai. Despite the efforts of many officials, DMA and other state involvement in ‘empowerment’ programmes sometimes proved far from compatible with community autonomy. In particular, officials tended to see whanau and other sub-tribal networks essentially as vehicles for government policy implementation rather than modes of returning power to the people through state–Maori partnerships, as they were touted to be. Matua Whangai schemes, for example, sometimes became little more than mechanisms for contracting out the delivery of state services. Such developments occurred in other operational areas too, adding to pre-existing suspicions in a number of Maori quarters as to the Crown’s motivations.

To deal with governmental agencies effectively, tribal and sub-tribal groupings had been compelled to bureaucratise or to establish bureaucratic wings or mechanisms. Tainui, for example, created a Development Unit to deal with MANA and MACCESS programmes. For some Maori communities,page 206 getting a balance between culture and tradition, on the one hand, and the business and management practices required by a rapidly managerialising public service, on the other, could be highly problematic. Additionally, some programmes such as MACCESS could not have funding apportioned to them unless the relevant Maori institutions had gained legal status. Thus, significant prerequisite demands were laid upon Maori institutions wanting to take part in Crown devolution policies and processes. These were often viewed in themselves as impeding rather than assisting rangatiratanga. When in June 1987 the Minister of Maori Affairs announced a policy of major devolution to iwi authorities of service delivery and resource distribution, many Maori leaders expressed open scepticism.

All the same, a significant number of the large range of governmental empowerment schemes had incorporated degrees of Maori community or tribal management or control. Many were interpreted by those involved in them as providing forms of limited autonomy or opportunities for the communal exercise of rangatiratanga – or, at very least, as prefigurative structures for a rangatiratanga-based future. Modes of expressing rangatiratanga were changing, and were seen to need changing, to meet new circumstances. ‘Common interest’ whanau-like groups were constructed around kohanga reo, kura kaupapa Maori schools, kokiri centres and other such institutions of devolved funding and partnered management. These sometimes coincided with or overlapped descent-based whanau, but often operated in a pan-tribal or non-tribal working environment. The new common interest groups were characterised, however, by the ‘core operational components’ of the whanau system, based on collectivist notions such as obligation, reciprocity and cooperation. Overarching them was a common ‘Maori identity’, something Reedy had been careful to stress when endorsing the empowerment of Maori structures.¹⁷