Urbanisation

During the Second World War, many Maori served overseas or migrated to the cities and big towns to contribute to the war effort, intensifying an ‘urban drift’ which had begun before the war and which partly reflected a thriving Maori population growth. This was the demographic backdrop to the fundamental socio-racial developments of the post-war years. In 1946, a traveller on the East Coast could still write of Maori children ‘watching the strange pakeha’ arrive. But the two separate peoples of Aotearoa/New Zealand were already coming closer together, mostly as a result of the movement of tangata whenua, the people of the land, to the urban spaces in search of better opportunities. With increasing numbers of young Maori workers joining those enjoying the perceived benefits of new lifestyles in urban centres, the withdrawal of the ‘other New Zealand’ into rural isolation – much observed in the first decades of the century – was being reversed. In 1926, 8.7% of Maori lived in urban areas. By 1951, the figure had risen to around 30%, and had reached 46% ten years later. By 1966, the proportion of urban dwelling Maori had escalated to 62%, and it was continuing to rise rapidly.

While urban migration was often prompted by ‘pull’ factors, such as work and excitement in the cities, it was also driven by an overarching ‘push’ factor. By the beginning of the war, the Maori birth rate was already double that of the pakeha, and colonisation and its aftermath had left little Maori-owned land to provide sustenance in the countryside. The land, then, was increasingly unable to sustain the rising Maori population. Rural-based land development projects could not provide sufficient jobs for the growing numbers of young Maori workers, and Maori needed to seek employment in the cities as the indigenous birth rate continued to burgeon. By 1961, the Maori population of some 200,000 was more than double that of a quarter-century earlier. In the first half of the 1960s, three quarters of Maori in their mid to late teenspage 12 migrated to urban areas. By the mid-1960s, over half of Maori children were being born in the big towns and cities, and a decade later only a quarter of Maori lived in rural areas. In one (typical) assessment, ‘the rate of urbanisation, in the decades after the war was … arguably the most accelerated shift for a national population anywhere’.

The state had encouraged the move of Maori to towns and cities in wartime to fill chronic labour shortages. This migration had been expected to be temporary, with officials and politicians generally thinking that after the war most Maori would return permanently to their home communities, frequently based at pa/villages centred upon marae/meeting place complexes. After some immediate post-war worry about negative implications of the ‘urban drift’, however, politicians and officials began to welcome Maori urban migration. Maori provided much-needed labour for post-war reconstruction and industrialisation. From 1948, the government began to encourage the migration.¹

Wartime urbanisation had already reinforced the Labour government’s pre-existing focus on Maori social and economic development. New city dwellers lived, as various reports noted, in unsatisfactory conditions, and this could potentially lead to stresses or tears in the fabric of society. Labour’s ‘full equality’ policies for eradicating, or at least minimising, class disparities became all the more urgent with respect to Maori. But these policies were essentially assimilationist in conception, socio-economic rather than ‘socio-racial’. The government and its officials downplayed the repeatedly expressed Maori desire not only for affirmative action to offset the marginalisation which had come about through colonisation, but also for politico-cultural autonomy. A 1943 election pamphlet on Maori policy listed five ‘Milestones of Progress Under the Labour Government’. While charting issues related to socio-economic equality, which Maori voters undoubtedly appreciated, the pamphlet avoided discussion of autonomy in outlining policy on ‘future security and future welfare’.

The Maori Social and Economic Advancement Act

Yet during the Second World War, autonomy had been much discussed in the context of the Maori contribution to the war effort. Some 300 tribal committees had been established nationwide as part of the Maori War Effort Organisation (MWEO). Coordinated by several dozen tribal executives, the committees operated independently of government, rallying support, recruiting Maori into wartime employment, fundraising, and engaging in activities which exceeded their official brief, such as community-based welfare work or cultural revival. Towards the end of the war, Maori leaders had attempted topage 13 get the government to recognise the ‘self administration and discipline’ their people had demonstrated in contributing to the war effort. In arguing that the committee system should supersede the official state agency for Maori, they envisaged vibrant tribally-based committees operating at community or marae level and reporting to superior, but equally autonomous, bodies. At very least, Maori leaders (including the Maori MPs, all four of whom were Labour after Sir Apirana Ngata lost his seat in 1943) argued, the department in charge of Maori affairs should be reorganised along similarly decentralised lines to those of the MWEO. Maori, in other words, could run their own affairs autonomously, albeit within the parameters of Crown sovereignty.

The Maori Social and Economic Advancement Act (MSEA Act) of 1945 has usually been portrayed as ‘a compromise’ between those who advocated a certain autonomy for Maori and those who wanted Crown–Maori relations to revert, essentially, to pre-war modes. In reality, the Act gave Maori only a small degree of what their leadership had sought. Government authorities had been frightened off by the very successes of the Maori War Effort Organisation: its demonstration that Maori could run their affairs autonomously – a concept most pakeha of the time found difficult to accept – and its fostering of kotahitanga or Maori unity. While community-building activity was better provided for in the MSEA Act than in previous legislation, then, the blueprints proposed by Maori leaders proved too problematic for the legislators. The government’s policy focus for Maori would remain socio-economic ‘uplift’. This would be superintended by what was generally seen by Maori as a paternalistic bureaucracy: the old Department of Native Affairs was retained and placed in charge of all operations under the Act. To great Maori disappointment, tribes were thus denied control and decision-making functions. If communities wanted official recognition for their tribal committees, they had to opt into the new system. Such committees would be incorporated into departmental structures as constituent parts of Native/Maori Affairs, their activities overseen by departmental officers.

The new committee structure became operative from 1 April 1946, part of the department’s new Maori Social and Economic Welfare Organisation (soon generally called the Maori Welfare Organisation, and from 1952, the Welfare Division). The key people in the hierarchy were to be the department’s district officers, in full charge of all issues and structures in their regions. The committees were to be bound by strict procedural rules and operating parameters. All bodies, from marae-based komiti/committees to hapu-or iwi-based executives, had to ‘follow European administration and meeting procedure’. Decisions were to be ‘taken by a majority vote, minute books to be kept, and audited annual balance sheets to be submitted. For many communities this was the first time such procedures had been introduced’.page 14 The Board of Native/Maori Affairs retained ultimate bureaucratic control, and the committee system was denied regional (‘district’) or national levels, which would have enabled Maori to place stronger pressure on the state. The committees did not get the comprehensive economic, social and political power that Maori had asked for; in fact, the system disempowered them relative to the position they had attained in the political economy during the war.

Rather than representing any sort of compromise, then, the system put in place by the MSEA Act was in many ways a victory for powerful forces in governing circles (and, more broadly, in ‘mainstream society’) which opposed the prospect of the MWEO being transformed into a peacetime embodiment of rangatiratanga. The 1945 legislation did, however, provide the basis for broadening the work of the department in such a way that it had little choice but to take some account of Maori views. A now ailing government was particularly conscious that it could not afford to alienate Maori. To assist its chance of surviving in office, it needed to retain the four Maori seats in Parliament, which it held in alliance with the Ratana movement. While the two principal peoples of New Zealand were eventually supposed to become one, the MSEA Act and its system of tribal committees would meanwhile permit a coexistence of cultures along lines long urged by Ngata and other Maori leaders. In the words of the Acting Prime Minister, Walter Nash, it was ‘not for you to be as we are, but for you to be as you could and would be’, enhanced by ‘all the advantages’ possessed by pakeha.²2

At the very beginning, Maori were slow to join the new system, and a number of the wartime tribal committees disappeared. Many Maori soon realised, however, that the official structure did provide some advantages, and allowed them, generally, to run their own affairs at the local level. It could, for example, be utilised to gain subsidies for community development initiatives. Before long, tribal committees constituted under the Act, ‘located in and representative of their respective communities’, were revived or created, and tribal executives followed later. By 1949, the Department of Maori Affairs (DMA) was describing the workings of the system thus: ‘The tribal executives and committees work in the closest possible contact with the communities they serve. The ancient Maori custom of full public discussion on the marae of all the problems of the tribe ensures close integration between the executives and committees and their people.’

That Maori continued to opt into the official committee system indicated that a certain degree of truth underlay this idealised depiction. By mid-century, Maori leaders all over the country had signed up their people to the Maori Welfare Organisation. There were 72 tribal executives and 430 tribal committees by 1950, and by then the new institutions technically covered all Maori in New Zealand. The system was already producing some discerniblepage 15 results in terms of improvements to meeting houses, marae complexes, sports facilities and the like, usually carried out by voluntary labour using subsidised materials. Committees entered into numerous and often involved interactions with the Department of Maori Affairs, and numbers of them began to go beyond their official briefs. Some would ‘take an interest in anything at all’ which helped advance the aspirations of their communities. The Crown generally tolerated this, given that the whole set of arrangements was perceived to be temporary – pending the advent of an assimilationist world of supposedly race– free communities, something that would be hurried along by urbanisation. ‘The departmental goal’, therefore, ‘may have been to harness Maori wartime energy and apply it to post-war concerns, but that did not … preclude Maori from applying that same energy to their own concerns’. In official eyes, this could be accommodated if those concerns assisted state goals, such as preventing social discontent through instilling (as the permanent head of Maori Affairs noted) pride in ‘Maoritanga’.³

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.

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.

Committees

But the reality was that the official committees, as an integral part of the Department of Maori Affairs, struggled to make their voices heard. One assessment that the committees were ‘only a shell of the effective organisations’ that had operated under the Maori War Effort Organisation indicates the magnitude of the task faced by those determined to make the best of the opportunities the new system afforded. The Prime Minister’s strictures that bureaucrats should not ‘nullify the purpose of the legislation’ by turning the MWO and its committees into ‘merely another branch’ of the department had brought little as mid-century approached. The independence of committees was, in effect, negated by structural provisions in the Maori Social and Economic Advancement legislation itself. Senior Maori in the Labour Party, along with other Maori leaders, frequently expressed their disappointment at the departmental straitjacketing of Maori efforts to control their own affairs. Despite Labour having promised a degree of autonomy to the Maori constituency at the 1946 elections, a levelling and Europeanising policy of ‘equality’ dominated the rest of its term in office. In the final analysis, the MWO existed to do the Crown’s bidding within a dominant assimilationist paradigm that was being reinforced by the trend towards Maori urban migration.⁷

On the other hand, the official committee system could be used to a certain extent to challenge that paradigm. Before long, for example, some Maori were using it to help recreate rangatiratanga in the detribalised environment of the large towns and cities. Although their work was officially sanctioned by the DMA, both here and in rural environments the committees did not necessarily become ‘obedient servants of the state. [They] worked out for themselves what activities they would undertake, responding largely to the concerns and circumstances of their respective communities and not just departmental policy’. Those in official committees made deliberate choices as to the best strategy for their people at a given time and place.

In the rural areas, for example, these committees could be of considerable benefit to Maori by providing farming advice and assistance. Some worked towards developing lands hitherto ‘locked up’ due to problems relating to multiple ownership and a lack of access to capital. In 1949, the Crown and Maori leaders working within the official committee structure finalised new ways of helping tangata whenua farm their own lands rather than lease them to pakeha. In urban areas, official committees were often place-based rather than marae-based, welcoming individual Maori from many different tribes. Sometimes they alone gave Maori urban migrants voice, a point of contact and advice to assist them in making the often painful adjustment to new ways of life. They also offered channels for migrants to seek government financial and welfare assistance: ‘everybody went to the Maori Affairs’, as the DMA was colloquially known.

Unofficial komiti/committees also flourished throughout the period covered in this book. Operating largely beyond the scrutiny and control of the DMA, such structures were freer than official committees to respond to local need rather than to the demands of bureaucrats, although they went without the support and resourcing that the DMA could provide. Sometimes, however, such komiti were able to use the official system for their own ends. Some would even come to seek the official franchise, proving their worthiness by adopting the formal minute-taking practices and other requirements of the MWO system. When official status was granted, they might well continue to operate much as before, but now with access to, for example, subsidies to carry out projects of which the Crown approved.

Some of the wartime Maori structures which continued independently after 1945 (as well as some new ones) operated as rivals to the official committees. Non-official bodies included the Maori Women’s Health Leagues, which sometimes considered it necessary to interact with the authorities for the benefit of their members. But because of this, they were deemed by some Maori to be state-contaminated. In fact, because of the stigma attached to getting too close to the government, even some of the official MWO committees resisted direction from head office from time to time, reporting this back to their communities and gaining kudos accordingly. However, numbers of non-official committees continued to seek integration into the MWO, including some of the War Effort committees which had previously opted for independence from the Crown after 1945. Many people cooperated with, or worked within, both official and unofficial systems, and new leadership strata began to develop. When around mid-century a number of key leaders died, including Ngata, Princess Te Puea, Bishop Frederick Bennett and Peter Buck/Te Rangihiroa, the way was clear for new leaders to flourish – including, increasingly, those in the urban spaces.⁸

Policing and Social Control

Under the MSEA Act, volunteer Maori Wardens were authorised to provide the valuable (and cheap) service of enforcing ‘order and regularity’ within the MWO/Welfare Division’s official committee system. Some Maori committees were quick to see the advantages of this, and began operating a warden system even before the first wardens were formally designated under the Act in 1949 – a delay partly caused by the need for New Zealand Police Force vetting of appointees. As well as their formal role in community policing, Maori wardens began assuming various leadership duties at flaxroots level early in the scheme’s operation. Numbers quickly escalated. In 1950, there were 32 official wardens, a figure which increased to 134 in 1951. By 1954, there were 205 and, as their uses in controlling Maori who had migrated to the towns and cities became manifest, their numbers continued to grow. There were over 500 in 1962, and by 1975 the number of wardens had reached a thousand.

The Department of Maori Affairs saw wardens as the ‘police force’ of the tribal executives and their committees, although their only identification at first was a metallic badge, and they were not remunerated for their work. In a dispatch to welfare officers, the department described a warden’s principal job as being to ‘stamp out mischief before it becomes a crime’ – in other words, to act mainly as preventive police. Wardens were said to be the ‘eyes and ears of the Executives … They are virtually policemen without the powers of policemen’. There were substantial penalties, applicable to pakeha as well as Maori, for obstructing their work. Because wardens were responsible to elected institutions, they could be – and were – seen as a community resource. But they were also part of the coercive wing of the MWO, a state-franchised institution.

Despite such an uneasy mix, there were few demands for their disbandment. In particular, both Crown and Maori communities wanted wardens to help regulate alcohol consumption, with excessive Maori drinking increasingly seen as detrimental to both the Maori community and the ‘public good’. Wardens could order Maori off licensed premises, or prevent publicans serving them liquor. In 1951, wardens gained increased liquor-related powers, such as the ability to enter Maori gatherings on c without a warrant in order to seize liquor. On such matters involving order within Maori communities, both they and tribal committees could act even if no relevant by-laws had been passed.

In addition to wardens’ formal duties, committees frequently used them for their own, informal social control purposes. The mana of being Crown-franchised officers sometimes gave wardens a better capacity to deal with ‘recalcitrance’ than had they been non-official tribal or other authorities. Moreover, given that they were voluntary and unpaid members of thepage 21 community operating under a principle that has been described as ‘aroha ki te tangata’ (love for the people), the wardens often assumed the status of community social workers. Although integrated into the state system, they came to epitomise the determination of Maori to run their own affairs and resolve their own problems. The official committee system’s responsibility for wardens assisted its capacity to survive and, in many areas and arenas, to thrive.⁹

Responding to Challenge

As mid-century approached, tribal organisation was coming under strain, with ‘drift’ to the large towns and cities starting to become a huge and rapid migration. From 1948, the Crown assisted rural Maori to gains skills necessary for urban life, and the government began to implement (in the words of the Secretary of Labour) ‘practical measures for ensuring the ultimate absorption of the Maori Race into full employment’, providing, for example, temporary accommodation in the cities. The disciplined and ethnically-situated modes of behaviour required in collectively-orientated rural communities began to yield to the atomised lifestyles of the urban spaces. The new challenges to tribally-based organisation and discipline would soon escalate as the Maori population increased: up from 134,097 in 1951 to nearly four times that number half a century later. The Crown considered the problems engendered by urbanisation were best addressed by securing jobs and better living conditions: Maori would benefit primarily from socio-economic improvement strategies posited on full assimilation to the ways and mores of the dominant culture. The Crown’s refusal at the time of the MSEA Act to countenance official regional and national Maori representation, because this had the potential to promote Maori autonomy, meant that (apart from unofficial movements such as Kingitanga and Ratana) there was no cross-tribal organisation to fight urban threats to ‘Maoritanga’. The DMA and its Maori Welfare Organisation handled matters at a central official level, and tribal committees and executives sometimes became involved in pursuing transitional measures through departmental channels, seeing these contributions to adjustment procedures as a case of Maori helping control Maori issues.¹⁰

However, such collectivity-based collaboration, while welcomed, did not form a major part of the strategy of the post-war government. In Labour’s social-democratic philosophy, Maori were individuals who tended to be disadvantaged by their class location and needed welfare or other state assistance to participate in socio-economic uplift. Past welfare efforts would be consolidated and extended as Maori moved to the towns, a migration that would encourage industrial expansion and diversification in the interests of allpage 22 New Zealanders. As Minister of Maori Affairs, Fraser emphasised in his 1949 annual report to Parliament that he believed socio-economic development to be the key to the Maori future. This would not only benefit the tangata whenua but also contribute to ‘national wealth’. A raised income and standard of living for Maori was thus of ‘great importance not only to the Maori people themselves, but also to the economy of the country’.

Such sentiments, which were expressed twice in the report, were typical of state pronouncements of the time, and they were always underpinned by an assumption that Maori should be helped to become as close as possible in all respects to Europeans. However, these goals of social and economic assimilation could meanwhile accommodate (again, in Fraser’s words) some form of ‘independent, self-reliant, and satisfied Maori race working side by side with the pakeha’. Such rhetoric may have damaged Labour in the eyes of the European electorate at the 1949 election, given a vigorous National attack upon Labour’s alleged pandering to Maori and the Prime Minister’s apparent concessions to Maori self-determination. But in reality, the Labour government had remained reluctant to offer Maori anything but a cautious and constrained degree of control over their own affairs.

In the election campaign, Labour essentially stood on its previous assimilationist and equality-focused policies, while the National Party ostentatiously offered Maori less than Labour. National won, reflecting a mood swing within sectors of pakeha New Zealand which, when combined with urbanisation and other trends, did not seem to bode well for the future of rangatiratanga and of Maoridom in general. Already there was a racial backlash against the growing and visible Maori presence in urban spaces. Race relations could be deemed to be ‘the best in the world’ when most pakeha knew Maori only at a distance, but such official discourse could come under challenge when individuals and, later, families moved into urban areas and brought with them customs unfamiliar to surrounding pakeha.

While pakeha attitudes reflected a general European ethnocentrism, racist incidents were on the rise, especially as a reaction to increased Maori involvement in urban-based disorder or crime. The National politicians had taken heed of popular pakeha sentiment in their campaign, and afterwards. Once in office, however, they did not attempt to turn the clock back on urban migration. And, despite some urban pakeha resistance to mingling with newly-arrived Maori, the National government continued the assimilationist policies of its predecessor – policies so deep-seated in both officialdom and civil society that they formed part of accepted wisdom, whatever the difficulties posed by Maori adjustment. Significant voices within Maoridom, too, saw assimilation as the most desirable goal. In 1949, the Maori Purposes Fund Board published Peter Buck’s The Coming of the Maori, which treated official policies as though rootedpage 23 in fact. The book argued that a blending of the two races was occurring, and that ‘in nationality’, the Maori were ‘as British as anything which ever came out of Britain’.¹¹

Almost all Maori leaders, however, including the most conservative, aspired to some degree of autonomy for their people. Although the outlook may have seemed bleak in 1950, prospects for self-determination were not unpromising if long-term developments were taken into account. The first half of the century had seen considerable social, economic, demographic, cultural and political advances for Maoridom. Many marae-centred communities continued to thrive, or were reconstructing themselves within a vigorous tribal environment. Since the 1930s, Labour policies had led to significant increases in Maori health and material well-being. From this considerably improved socio-economic base, which would eventually find further enhancement as people found jobs in the cities, Maori leaders could work to pursue politico-cultural autonomy. To be sure, urban migration, essentially the province of the young, implied intermarriage, and the state welcomed this as an agent of assimilation. But increasing intermarriage, and general Maori adoption of city ways, did not necessarily (or even usually) mean complete abandonment of tribal affiliation.

Urban life, moreover, could actually help to promote identification with ‘Maoridom’, as newly arrived individuals naturally sought out ‘their own kind’, including through the official committees and their activities. The various types of Maori development in both urban and rural environments did not, of course, come to a halt under National. Just as pre-1950 gains were made in the absence of any great understanding by Labour of Maori desires for autonomy, or indeed of tikanga Maori (Maori custom), further accomplishments – socio-economic, cultural, political, even autonomist – were possible under the new government, however unsympathetic or uncomprehending it might be on Maori issues. Obviously, many achievements would need to come from the people themselves, but Crown intervention could assist Maori aspirations – especially if government officials and politicians could be persuaded that intervention was in ‘the national interest’. The process benefited from the emergence of new leaders within Maoridom, often people able to work within both pakeha and Maori worlds, and from the inputs of the small number of Maori associated with the National party – some of them of very high rank in tribal Maoridom.

Observers, even within some National circles, were soon noting a general feeling within society that a new era of Maori development was about to begin, one that would build upon the gains of the previous half century, the potentialities of urbanisation, and the post-war economic boom. Development, as Maori saw it, would draw much on Maori culture, and its maximisation would depend upon Maori being able run their own affairs unimpededly whilepage 24 engaging with urbanisation and modernity. Maori aspirations for recognition of rangatiratanga, then, did not sink beneath the weight of urbanisation, assimilation policies and growing wealth for individuals who had adjusted to work and life in the cities. In some ways, hopes were reinforced in the decades which followed. This was partly a result of pakeha and Maori New Zealanders becoming increasingly aware of national issues of ‘race relations’ and Maori aspirations. International developments – decolonisation, self-determinationist discourse and anti-racist movements – were also widely discussed. Debates and politico-cultural trends which would eventually lead to momentous changes throughout the world were already present, sometimes in more than incipient form, in mid-century New Zealand.¹²