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

The Maori Welfare Organisation

The Maori Welfare Organisation

Crown policies had once contained strong ‘divide and rule’ resonances for tribes. Policy developments from the mid-1930s had increasingly emphasised Crown responsibilities to ‘the Maori people’ as a whole, as opposed to tribes. These privileged ‘equality for all citizens’ above rangatiratanga. But there were gains as far as the pursuit of Maori autonomy was concerned. While Maori urbanisation encouraged the official mind to conceptualise ‘Maoridom’ as an alternative to ‘tribalism’, the emerging paradigm also provided more leverage for Maori as a national force. The increasing importance of Maori as a people with political power was epitomised by the removal of the word ‘Native’ from official discourse in 1947, and the appointment in the following year of the first Maori to head the department, Tipi Ropiha. Partly as a result of their contribution to the war effort, Maori were now seen as a people not only to be engaged with, but also to be shown respect as integral members of a country which had finally proclaimed its nominal independence from the imperial power. Policy-makers in Wellington could no longer see Maori as a series of tribes hidden in the countryside, to be patronised from time to time. The government also remained aware, however, of the ongoing importance to Maori of their tribal links, as the word ‘tribal’ in the institutions established by the MSEA Act indicated. It recognised, for example, that the Maori contribution in wartime was in many ways successful because it was based upon tribal structures. The best way of harnessing Maori energies in the post-war world, the Crown believed, was to utilise tribal structures in the short-term, in the interests of their long-term disappearance beneath the dominant culture.

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There were precedents for the concept underpinning the new structure. Both the new institutions and their powers were resonant of those of the Maori councils established in 1900 and whose last remnants were abolished under the 1945 Maori Social and Economic Advancement Act. The Maori Councils Act had granted ‘powers comparable to [those of] local government’. The councils had been permitted to pass approved by-laws, which the village committees that operated under them, and their own policemen, enforced. The committees had ensured the observance of sanitary regulations, controlled undesirable drinking and gambling practices, and fulfilled other functions under the watchful eye of the state (such as collecting taxes, on which Maori councils depended). The system had allowed, in principle, for the exercise of a certain degree of Maori autonomy, for the state had appreciated that unless the councils were ‘designed to draw their energies from the rhythms of everyday tribal life’, they would not get the support of their communities. But denied ‘meaningful rangatiratanga’, and insufficiently resourced, the system had languished. While it had remained useful in some circumstances and areas, only six councils were still operating when it was superseded in 1945.

At first Maori were cautious about using the institutions of the Maori Welfare Organisation (MWO). Scant advantage was taken, for example, of the potential of tribal executives (and, from 1947, of tribal committees) to pass and enforce by-laws. Nonetheless, increasing numbers of communities were prepared to accept that the new structures might be used for their own purposes as well as for the Crown’s – that the benefits could be mutual. Working through the only system proffered by the Crown, for example, could help to preserve some of the collective gains made during the war. It might also be used as a vehicle to re-establish and secure a certain degree of autonomy, although here there were many frustrations. The old departmental bureaucrats generally ran things much as before, and with niggardly resources available for Maori communities. While committees were able to get state funding for specific, approved projects in fields such as welfare, most projects needed to be resourced from local efforts. The type and extent of committee activities thus often reflected their fund-raising capacity.4

The post-war Prime Minister/Minister of Maori Affairs, Peter Fraser, had a higher degree of empathy with Maori autonomist aspirations than many others within the state apparatus. In 1948, he declared that the welfare organisation over which he presided should be ‘practically … autonomous’ and ‘to a very large extent independent and self-reliant’. The organisation was not merely to be just another branch of Maori Affairs but one that ‘should be looked upon by the Maori people as their organisation which they control locally as a form of local expression, direction, and control, and up to a point [it would provide] even a measure of local government in matters affecting the livingpage 17 conditions, housing, health, and the general welfare of the Maori people’.

There was, in fact, a considerable degree of official acceptance that, so far as the foreseeable future was concerned, some significant degree of Maori culture as well as organisation would, even should, survive. One of the stated aims of the new structure which proved to be enduring, for example, was to ensure the ‘preservation of Maori culture’, or at least (in the words of the department) to help ‘develop in the Maori an appreciation of the modern content of his own culture’. The idea was based on an acknowledgement that the ‘history of other races has shown that a culture will not really die out even without intense cultivation. There is in every individual an instinctive compulsion towards and an inherent attraction for his own indigenous culture’. This culture might be fragmented, but remnants were not unimportant – both per se and for touristic reasons.5

Sympathies for the survival of some degree of indigeneity were contained, however, within a broad welfarist perspective that was essentially rigorously assimilationist. It was no accident that the organisation under which tribal committees worked had ‘welfare’ in its title, and its legislation’s purpose was to promote ‘social and economic advancement’. In addition to maintaining Maori culture, and far more importantly in the eyes of the legislators, ‘committees were charged with producing responsible and fully participating citizens’ and ensuring their adaptation to modern conditions. In 1949, in one of its publications, the department summed up the main thrust of the Maori Social and Economic Advancement Act as being ‘to facilitate the full integration of the Maori race into the social and economic structure of the country’. It cast the 1945 legislation as the ‘most important single step ever taken in the progress of the Maori people towards complete integration with the pakeha way of life’.

In particular, it was the DMA’s welfare officers who were to play key roles in ensuring the ‘progress’ of the Maori people. Welfare officers, as the department would put it, were there to ‘assist the Maori, particularly of the younger generation, in adapting himself to the new culture’. From the beginning, they were tasked with promoting ‘race uplift’ of a social and economic nature within a policy environment that focused on ‘equality’ and European beliefs and standards of behaviour. Welfare officers formed part of a broader grouping of officials who ‘grappled with how to assist their clients to be successful members of the larger Pakeha (European) society that they were increasingly a part of’. This task included acting – in departmental words – as ‘friend, counsellor and guide’, especially to Maori migrating to the cities.6

Such functions were coordinated in seven administrative MWO districts. DMA officials ran the bureaucracies at this level, and at the sub-regional level of organisation. Only in the layers beneath these – in tribal executives and tribalpage 18 committees at marae or community level – were Maori people themselves given a representational voice. The original intention was to have some provision for Maori views to quickly reach the highest levels of the Crown. The executives and committees would, in conjunction with the welfare officers, ‘think out proposals and plans for the advancement of the Maori people in all directions’. The welfare officers could then represent their views directly to government through the Controller of Maori Welfare at head office, rather than through the district officers.