The Changing Role of the New Zealand Maori Council

Initially, the Maori Council had been slow to adjust to the perspectives of urban Maori leaders. The divisions between rural and urban leaders within the NZMC (and, relatedly, between the system’s conservative and liberal factions) reflected real differences in their respective tasks. Urban leaders had to deal with poverty, discrimination, crime, disorder, growing unrest and (eventually) protest groups and gangs. Solutions to urban problems faced by Maori were often discussed and addressed in pan-or non-tribal ways that rural-based districtpage 161 Maori councils and some other sectors of the official system found difficult to comprehend. After becoming secretary of the Auckland District Maori Council in 1969, Ranginui Walker had been radicalised into a commitment to struggle on behalf of all of his people, wherever they were. Along with other activists who opted to work within the NZMC system, such as fellow academics like Hohepa, he was in the ‘vanguard of a new elite’ of educated leaders whose radical roots lay in the huge social and cultural changes stirring in the later 1960s. Such leaders became increasingly visible, a number of them aiming to fight ‘the establishment’ from within the official system, while at the same time trying to push it in more radical directions.

By the early 1970s, Pei Jones (who had succeeded to the NZMC presidency) and others had come to the conclusion that a younger leader who could relate to urban as well as rural Maori was needed to head the whole Maori associations edifice – one who could modernise the NZMC, strengthen its hand and contain its more radical urban elements. Their deliberations led to Graham Latimer, a man with first-hand experience of life in both city and countryside, taking up the presidency from 1973. Although he was a National Party member, Latimer’s succession nevertheless led to greater NZMC independence from the party and to new elements entering into the higher reaches of the system. He was a strategic operator who could accommodate more radical concerns when the cause of Maori agency required. By the beginning of the 1980s (founding NZMC member Henare Ngata later recalled), the NZMC had ‘a far different type of leadership’ than in the ‘earlier days’: an educated grouping reflecting ‘the change in the Maori community itself’. Of the two dozen founding delegates, only two still sat on the Maori Council in 1981.¹⁴

As the 1970s and the Maori Renaissance progressed, the NZMC’s agenda increasingly came to reflect several of the key concerns of Maori activists, despite official and internal attempts at containment. Taking cognisance of the growing prominence of urban radicals, the council continued, albeit cautiously, to establish its independence from the government despite its role as the legal embodiment of the Maori voice. It would come to use a number of routes, including the courts, to challenge the government on matters that disadvantaged Maori, eventually with notable successes. It preferred dialogue to confrontation, however, arguing that the spirit of the Treaty of Waitangi underpinned its methods. It raised many issues with ministers, officials and public alike, especially the need to repair historical injustices as well as to prevent further land alienation. It also promoted the urgent task of protecting language and culture. Except on keynote issues such as the struggle against the 1967 legislation, however, it was tardy in translating its various concerns into detailed and proactive policy demands, and so remained heavily criticised by younger activists.

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But the NZMC had influence with the Crown in a way the radicals did not, and so the unofficial and official pressures were in a sense complementary. After the annual Waitangi Day protests began, for example, the government sought NZMC advice on which Acts, in its view, contravened the Treaty. It was surprised to be presented with a long list of key statutes, including those which it had not expected, such as town and county planning legislation. More broadly, the Maori Council and its subordinate bodies contributed to a discourse in which the state was increasingly forced to assess the progress and, ultimately, viability of its polices of integration/assimilation. The NZMC system has been characterised as providing, over its first two decades, ‘a forum within which a variety of conflicting impulses in the Maori world could be articulated and tested’. It ‘contributed to the growth of a pan-Maori consciousness and habits of consultation and cooperation that laid solid foundations for future autonomy’. The fact that it was a statutory and apparently conservative body that was being pushed inexorably by circumstances in such directions made governmental and official circles more ready to listen to the causes it espoused – even if they were not yet conceding them.¹⁵