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

Organising and Scrutinising the Warden System

Organising and Scrutinising the Warden System

Maori wardens responded to the difficulties inherent in their tasks, and the desire to improve and professionalise their work, by forming local and district-level associations. In 1966, a number of these began to moot a national organisation. The NZMC supported the concept in principle, while seeking to ensure that any such organisation would fully respect the needs and wishes of the official system of which it would form part. That May, the Maori Council established a Subcommittee on Maori Wardens, and after a great deal of groundwork a draft constitution for a national association was prepared. Its functions would include overseeing selection, supervision and training of the wardens, and liaising and coordinating activities with the Maori committees. After much further deliberation, the New Zealand Maori Wardens’ Association was founded in 1968.

By then, however, wardens had become so responsive to local committees in some areas that both the Crown and the upper echelons of the NZMC were attempting to regain fuller control over them. Moreover, the increasing propensity for wardens to coordinate their activities had led in some places to a collective assertion of a level of independence from the NZMC machinery that was unacceptable to both state and council. At a meeting in Wanganui, for example, wardens agreed that surveillance-patrolling should be downgraded in favour of activities communities had asked for, which were more in the line of social work – helping families in distress at a time of economic downturn, for example, or rescuing young people in danger.

The state and the NZMC had been supportive of the concept of a national wardens’ association partly in the hope that it could help combat local or regional ‘separatist’ tendencies among the wardens. But now, perceptions among both of a unified separatist tendency among wardens caused just as much, if not more, alarm. The national association should be able to help contain any propensities of separatism rather than reflect or coordinate them. After many pressures, discussions and negotiations, in 1969 a compromise between the interested major parties was hammered out, holding the promise of more cooperative relationships at all levels. A legislative relocation of supervision and control of wardens followed. Responsibility for their management reverted to the districtpage 127 Maori councils (which of course reported directly to the NZMC). Where the district councils were satisfied that Maori committees were acting appropriately in supervising their people, control of wardens could be devolved back to the flaxroots committees.14

Over and above issues of ‘control of the controllers’, however, from the beginning there had been controversy as to whether the institution of wardens should continue to exist in a supposedly integrating society. With the increasing numbers and visibility of wardens, officials and ministers were among those who had become uneasy at the implications of a ‘separate police’ based along racial lines. The increasing presence of uniformed wardens on city streets highlighted matters that the Crown preferred not to expose to public scrutiny and debate – the expedient existence of race-based institutions which clearly sat uneasily, at least on the surface, with its assimilationist goals for Maoridom. As the years went by, moreover, the expansion of the Maori warden system drew attention not only to the existence of race-based official organisations, but also to the fact that ‘Maori had not achieved the full measure of equality’ officials had aimed for in implementing the Hunn report. Maori continued to require a ‘special attention’ – in the urban case, one focused on crime and disorder – that ran counter to the paradigmatic aspirations and the primary discourses of government and officialdom.

High-profile separate official organisations within Maoridom, in short, symbolised the difficulties inherent in the Crown’s ability to persuade the public that it was properly and fully pursuing its own policy of ‘integration’. The truth was that the wardens and other such institutions embodied attempts to appropriate Maori communal energies to assist the Crown impose certain standardised ways of behaving, ways which assisted the assimilationist strategies of state at the same time as helping Maori communities in many positive ways. But the apparent discrepancies involved in this scenario became the more obvious when assimilationist policies aimed at formal equality before the law, and sameness of treatment for all citizens, were legislated into effect from time to time to remove special treatment for Maori. In 1962, for example, provisions for Maori juries in circumstances where the parties were Maori had been abolished, and concomitantly tangata whenua were made eligible for general jury service.

As Minister of Justice as well as Maori Affairs, Hanan was increasingly concerned that the legislation governing Maori wardens was manifestly ‘discriminatory, in that it was a policing mechanism that applied to only one race’. The warden system was coming under greater scrutiny from both other ministers and officials, too, for its implications of separatism in a country boasting of its ‘one New Zealand’ and ‘equality’ policies. By the late 1960s, the propensity of the wardens to think of themselves as a fully-fledged ‘auxiliarypage 128 police force with attendant powers of arrest and physical force, uniforms, patrol cars, interrogation headquarters, private filing systems, rubber truncheons and badges of rank’, as an official memo put it, added to the disquiet in a number of quarters.

Their cause was not helped by an excessive zeal among some wardens, a few of whom were prone to use force, or to equip themselves with items such as two-way radios which were widely perceived to reflect a vigilantist approach to their duties. Such over-enthusiasm led such unlikely bedfellows as civil libertarians and regular police to similar misgivings. Moreover, in 1970 another Young Maori Leaders’ Conference, reflecting among others the views of radicalising urban Maori, demanded abolition of the wardens. By the start of the new decade, governmental and official agencies were responding to many such pressures and beginning to rethink not just the nature and role, but also the desirability, of the Maori warden scheme.15

14 Fleras, ‘Descriptive Analysis’, pp 62, 64–5, 275–6, 278; Butterworth, ‘Men of Authority’, pp 26–7; Stenning, ‘Maori, Crime’.

15 Fleras, ‘Descriptive Analysis’, pp 212, 214, p 278 (for ‘Maori had not achieved’ quote), pp 279–80 (p 279 for ‘auxiliary police force’ quote); Royal Commission on the Courts, Report of Royal Commission on the Courts, Wellington, 1978, p 16; Butterworth and Butterworth, Policing and the Tangata Whenua, pp 32–4 (p 33 for ‘discriminatory, in that’ quote); Walker, ‘The Politics’, p 171.