Ups and Downs of the Maori Year

Rawiri Taonui
The Press
03 February 2005

With Waitangi Day being celebrated on Sunday, RAWIRI TAONUI gives a Maori perspective on the highs and lows of the previous 12 months.

The year began with national polarization when Maori, as equal citizens under the Treaty of Waitangi and English common law, asked the courts to examine the continuing existence of their pre-colonial aboriginal, native or customary ownership of the seabed and foreshore.

A rattled Labour Government moved quickly to block this via mock consultation and by passing the Seabed and Foreshore Act. While older international law allowed governments to do this, current international law, in the form of the United Nations Permanent Committee on Indigenous Issues and Judicial Decisions, and the Wik decision (1996) in Australia and Delgamuukw (1997) in Canada, say that in modern times it is no longer appropriate to do so.

Wik and Delgamuukw found that pre-colonial indigenous rights could co-exist alongside those of the Crown and recommended negotiation between indigenous people and their governments where the two came into conflict. This would have been the most likely outcome of foreshore hearings in New Zealand.

The highly successful Sealord fisheries deal (1992) had unfolded in this way after the Waitangi Tribunal made similar findings about Maori fisheries rights in 1988.

Labour backtracked, simply because it lacked the courage to take on unfounded pakeha fears about access and was more concerned about the polls than it was about justice. Unfortunately, it is able to because no effective international forum exists to hold it accountable.

The requirement to prove uninterrupted connection since 1840 is one of the worst features of the act. Borrowed from the Australian Native Title Act (1997), it is unfair to the majority of Maori who lost this connection through colonisation.
Teasing old prejudices in new-age disguise with the sole purpose of boosting a flagging National Party, Don Brash's furious and spurious Orewa race-based attack polarised New Zealanders even further. Labour again reacted quickly, investigating any anomalies and reviewing policies and funding regimes. We saw a reversal of funding policies in education, and changes in health funding will follow this year.

Certainly, there was a need to tidy some Maori funding. Department of Corrections consultations payments in the Waikato were a clear example, and poor pakeha should be assisted. However, anti-Maori race-based arguments ignore several things.

First, while most pakeha accept that injustices were inflicted upon Maori, few acknowledge that this was racist. Fewer still will acknowledge that this history caused cumulative inter-generational political, social and cultural poverty among Maori that continues today, and, furthermore, that this is racist.

The same thinking also chooses to ignore the billions of dollars in benefits pakeha communities reaped from those injustices while arguing that the 1 per cent average compensation paid in treaty settlements and additional Government initiatives, designed to bring Maori on a par with pakeha, privileges Maori over pakeha.

Both things are entirely consistent with United Nations guidelines on the settlement of indigenous land claims (except the UN says we should pay more) and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1969), which allows such measures for the time it takes ethnic minorities to attain equality.

Other lows of 2004 included the unravelling of Donna Awatere-Huata for allegedly taking too many pipi and John Tamihere's corporate koha, a lesson that brown handshakes can get you in the tutae just as much as golden ones.
Tamihere will be back. His balance of talent and imperfection and his willingness to challenge Maori and pakeha and the greed in others is widely appreciated.

Awatere-Huata may not be back, but do not write her off. Someone with careers in psychology, protest, publication and Parliament can take a staple in the guts any day.

Then there was Destiny Church and "enough is enough". A weird mix of old-time Southern revivalism, uniforms, haka, conspicuous consumption and dreams of world – sorry, national – domination, it was difficult to distinguish them from the skinhead National Front except that Destiny do better impressions of a Nuremburg rally.

The vicissitudes aside, the year was good for Maori. The Maori Television Service has been a huge step forward. Despite the troubled start-up, rumoured egocentric Maori-wood clashes at executive level and the butchering of the English subtitles for otherwise landmark indigenous documentary series Hawaiki, the channel will have far-reaching outcomes for the advancement of Maori.

The face of the younger generation on air is particularly impressive - they represent a cultural renaissance that will not be stemmed. This vitality reverberates throughout our national culture: 23 iwi radio stations pump out the volume; Maori beats, in tandem with Pasifika ones, resonate in our popular music – Scribe is our top act; and who will forget the world-embracing adaptation of Witi Ihimaera's The Whale Rider, or Keisha Castle-Hughes, the Oscars' youngest-ever best actress nominee?

Maori Language Week was another success. Mainstream radio, TV, newspapers, schools and employers joined in encouraging all New Zealanders to korero Maori. While the future of the language is by no means assured, there is hope. The number of Maori-speaking adults has doubled and youth tripled in 20 years, and 30,000 pakeha students have learnt Te Reo at school since 1992.

Maori continue to prosper in education. Thirty-five thousand Maori children attend early-childhood education; kohanga reo and kura kaupapa are expanding; Maori enrolments at tertiary level have doubled since 1999; and Te Wananga-o-Aotearoa, with 38,000 enrolments, became the country's biggest tertiary institution. Culturally friendly and with wider and more flexible options, the wananga will continue to make inroads into the standing institutions. They are yet to provide top-end scholarship, but that may come because universities that fail to meet this challenge will lose quality Maori academic staff - some have already gone.

Maori have continued to perform commercially - business assets now total more than $9 billion. Final passing of the Maori Fisheries Act, ending more than a decade of acrimonious infighting, will mean better use of the nearly $1 billion in assets under Maori control.

Tainui reversed its fortunes, reporting a $15.8 million profit. Earlier difficulties should have been expected as the tribe dealt with the sudden transition from poverty to wealth and balancing tribal structures with economic ones. Other problems stemmed from a commission payment system that caused over-valuation of commercial acquisitions, and rapid early development that resulted in a cash shortfall appear rectified. This is not to say everything is rosy; the debacle over the Corrections Department double payments indicates the leadership requires further sorting.

Ngai Tahu is charging ahead. The new savings scheme is a first for New Zealand and beats all previous Government attempts at encouraging savings.

This continuing economic, political and cultural revolution has seen the maturing of a new generation of Maori leaders. Mark Solomon, Tahu Potiki and Hana O'Regan in Ngai Tahu and a host of others around the country set a new standard. They are bilingual, confident and well educated, and few pakeha match their skill set. These rangatira stand at the vanguard of a demographically recovered population, one that declined 75% from first contact to 35,000 in 1900.

Look for leaders of similar ilk to emerge at this year's Hui Taumata on Maori development. In particular, look for Shane Jones, chairman of the Maori Fisheries Commission, to rise in Labour Party ranks. Steeped in tradition, educated at Harvard and politically astute, he is a possible first Maori prime minister.

The future glitters with talent. Maori will number 750,000 in 2021, our average age will be 27 compared with 43 for non-Maori, and we will comprise 28% of all under-14s. Fifty per cent of all schoolchildren will be of Maori descent by 2050, when the question we ask might well be, will there ever be another pakeha prime minister?

Marking the third greatest point of Maori solidarity against injustice in recent times after the Hikoi-ki-Waitangi (1984) and the Fiscal Envelope protests (1994-1995), the 40,000-strong hikoi was the event of the year.

Born from the hikoi, the performance of the Maori Party will be a focus of election 2005. If elections were held today, they would clean sweep the Maori seats. However, 2005 is not a foregone conclusion. Labour will fight hard. Expect it to resource campaigns in the Maori electorates like never before, load the party list with Maori, and advance foreshore and seabed negotiations under different disguises with tribal groups to swing support its way. Labour will also dig for dirt on Maori Party candidates, although this might backfire as Helen Clark's attack on Tariana Turia over the foreshore and Trevor Mallard's more recent one over teenage pregnancy did. The Maori Party will at least win around half of the Maori seats. It is the best and the most balanced independent voice on Maori issues since the Kotahitanga Movement of the 1890s and the Maori Congress of the 1990s.

Turia is my Maori leader of the year. Long-time servant of grass-roots communities, mother of six, grandmother of 24 and fosterparent of 30 Maori and pakeha children, she combines the strength of Eva Rickard with the motherhood of Whina Cooper, the hands-on commitment of Princess Te Puea and the principled dignity of Mira Szasy. In an age when many Maori leaders have an eye for mana and money, Turia was prepared to risk all things, and did - Maori and pakeha know that.

Rawiri Taonui is head of the School of Maori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Canterbury.