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Maori and the State: Crown-Māori relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa, 1950-2000

He Tirohanga Rangapu/Partnership Perspectives

He Tirohanga Rangapu/Partnership Perspectives

Whatever the opposition, momentum for devolution had built up to the point where the Crown could set about planning to rapidly devolve managementpage 234 of its services to Maori institutions. This process was headed by the Minister of Maori Affairs, assisted by a powerful, if informal, group of Maori leaders. A Maori-staffed unit within the DMA was tasked with working out detailed proposals, and in April 1988 the Crown encapsulated its ideas in a ‘Green Paper’ for public discussion, He Tirohanga Rangapu/Partnership Perspectives. This sought to do no less than ‘set out the basis, and justification, for wholesale reform of the longstanding government-Maori relationship’. Management of service delivery and a great number of social intervention programmes would be devolved to iwi, and to do so, a whole new structure for iwi–government relations needed to be created. The entire edifice and adherence to the ethos underpinning it would be overseen by the kind of small ministry recommended by the ‘Maori loans commission’. This would replace the DMA and superintend transfer of some of its programmes to mainstream departments, but it would not be an ‘operational’ division of government.

The Green Paper received huge publicity, and was considered a ‘watershed’ report for its restructuring proposals for Crown–Maori relations and its suggestion of a new policy framework for the relationship. Maori responses, however, were mixed. Many told a consultation team of officials headed by Rauru Kirikiri of their distrust of the Crown’s motives and their concerns about the proposed tight Crown control of processes and outcomes. There was opposition from hapu and urban groups to the Crown’s insistence on dealing with providers at iwi level. Some submissions expressed doubts aboutiwi capacity to deliver devolved services, given a suspiciously rapid timeframe allowing for little preparation or forward resourcing. Moreover, the Green Paper paid little attention to such crucial matters as how iwi were to provide for members outside their rohe (because of urbanisation, that often meant many or even most of them); the way in which iwi authorities would relate to Maori from other tribes who had migrated to their rohe; and the cross-iwi membership of so many Maori.

However, few Maori wanted the government to reverse the self-deterministic direction in which it was travelling, and the principles underpinning Partnership Perspectives were generally endorsed in more than 70 formal hui, many other forums and hundreds of written submissions. Respondents were almost universally critical, however, of the intention to ‘mainstream’ the various DMA programmes, including housing, to general government departments upon the abolition of Maori Affairs. Such plans were seen as evidence of the retention of assimilationist impulses within government, however devolutionary the new policy thrust. Many Maori felt that, despite the DMA’s inadequacies, a dedicated department for all Maori affairs was far more likely than ‘ordinary’ departments to pay attention to the needs of tangata whenua.

The DMA’s pending abolition, then, was seen as certain to compoundpage 235 the adverse effects of Rogernomics on the Maori people. Losing the some 350 community officers who had acted as mediators between Maori and government, for example, would be a hard blow to bear. The NZMC summed up the view of many respondents by depicting the need for an official institution acting as a buffer and facilitator between the Crown and Maori, one that could negotiate and mediate between the two parties to the Treaty in ways in which a small policy ministry could not (and was not designed to).

The DMA, or preferably a reformed version of it, seemed necessary for both continuing the fight against assimilative government impulses and helping ensure that devolution processes worked in Maori favour. Individualiwi authorities would be too under-resourced or preoccupied to be able to combat sidelining of Maori interests without the facilitational and operational help such a department could provide. Retention of the DMA or something like it would be all the more important if – as many Maori suspected – devolution represented mostly a transfer of a welfarist servicing burden ‘to the clients themselves’ rather than any real transfer of power. In this view, the key motivation for the Green Paper’s devolving of operational responsibility to iwi was to procure cheap but accountable ‘service delivery’ to an ethnic grouping which ‘consumed’ a disproportionate amount of welfare spending. Messages coming from within government seemed to provide support to such an interpretation. When asked if the government would really ‘relinquish ultimate control of the purse strings to iwi’, Prime Minister Lange riposted: ‘No more to the iwis than to the Rotary club’.

In presenting suggested mechanisms for incorporating rangatiratanga into the body politic, however, the Green Paper did effectively define Crown respect for rangatiratanga as enabling Maori to manage their own affairs. This, it could be argued, was already happening – all that would occur in addition was a transfer of extra resources and (especially) responsibilities to iwi-level organisations. Thus the present and proposed mechanisms of rangatiratanga arguably promised little more than a perpetuation of the uneven partnership of the past, with one party heavily dominant and the other largely subservient. Along with much approval in principle for devolution, then, came many criticisms of its suggested modes and motivations. One commentator even compared the Green Paper to the Hunn report for allegedly having similar assimilationist intent: it was ‘dishonest, deceitful and dismissive of Maori rights to rangatiratanga’. Once again, many felt, the Crown was about to appropriate tribal structures and energies mostly to suit itself, interfering more deeply than ever in internal tribal affairs in the process.16

Widespread scepticism and opposition built upon both the collective memory of a long history of Crown appropriations and observation of the ideological impulses behind the government’s new-right policies. Despite this,page 236 and bearing it in mind, many improvements to the proposals were worked on, and strategies were also developed to supplement or complement the Green Paper’s devolutionary model. The NZMC, for example, supported Whatarangi Winiata’s revival of the idea of a Maori parliament to handle Maori matters in Maori ways. As with demands for a separate legal system, such a stance was said by politicians and their advisers to be unworkable, in part because Maori did not live in spatial or marital isolation from pakeha. The Crown, in rejecting this as well as many other ideas, was determined to restructure along the lines of the thrust of Partnership Perspectives. It quickly became clear that critics of the Green Paper would be able to do little more than gain some relatively small alterations to its blueprint for partnership through ‘devolution to iwi’.

16 Department of Maori Affairs, He Tirohanga Rangapu/Partnership Perspectives, Wellington, 1988; Ritchie, Tribal Development, pp 30–31; Keenan, ‘The Treaty’, pp 214–6 (p 214 for ‘set out the basis’ and ‘watershed’ quotes); Williams, The Too-Hard Basket, pp 20, 22, 73; Jackson, S, ‘Te Karanga o te Iwi: Devolution – The Death of a People’, Metro, January 1988; Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, pp 285–6; Orange, An Illustrated History, p 188; Butterworth and Young, Maori Affairs, p 120; Henare, ‘The Ka Awatea Report’, pp 55–6; Kelsey, A Question Of Honour? pp 248–9 (p 248 for ‘relinquish ultimate control’ quotes); Patete, Devolution, pp 13–5, 34 (p 15 for ‘dishonest, deceitful’ quote); Fleras, ‘Tuku Rangatiratanga’, pp 186–7.