‘Good Government’

On 1 June 1951, top DMA bureaucrats decided that it was opportune to ‘strangle the autonomy and freedom’ which some of the Maori welfare officers had established for themselves and, by extension, for the committees they liaised with. The officers were told, as a body, that they had been over-emphasising matters such as marae and cultural development. All were now placed fully under the control of the (pakeha) district officers. In the words of a Maori historian, the changes instituted by the DMA signalled ‘the end for another potentially exciting and positive policy aimed at providing Maoridom with a measure of self-determination’. Subsequent attempts by Maori welfare officers (such as at a meeting late in 1952 with departmental officials) to seize back at least some degree of their operational independence made little headway – even when assisted by forceful leadership within their ranks, including former 28th (Maori) Battalion veterans such as Lieutenant-Colonel Arapeta Awatere and Norman Perry.³

By the time the new arrangements were imposed, many tribal committees were already carrying out state functions which, on the surface, had little to do with ‘Maori welfare’: acting, for example, as enforcement agencies or official revenue gatherers, including collecting rates levied on Maori land by local bodies. The Huria Tribal Committee was frequently ‘used by the Tauranga County Council as an agency for the encouragement of rates payment, or by the police in periodic endeavours to discipline the adolescents from the village’. Such cooperation with various authorities was perceived to have downstream benefits. Committees also often focussed on doing things which were, strictlypage 28 speaking, state responsibilities, but which had not been officially prioritised: improving the lot of their people by installing running water for houses in the pa, for example, or securing better sanitation. Tribal executives might build recreation grounds for the whole community, or promote education and employment opportunities for their own people. Urban Maori committees, in particular, were also involved in addressing complaints and requests from schools, government departments and ‘pakeha’ institutions and individuals. While such activities served a useful purpose in assisting good relations with state and pakeha, they also ate into the capacity of the committees to support the political and cultural aspirations of their people.

A number of Maori and pakeha sought to counteract the possibility of the committee members becoming little more than functionaries of the Crown. Sectors and individuals within the Maori welfare system urged that committees focus on matters important to their communities. In particular, they encouraged the committees to operate as autonomously as possible, beginning with rejecting all efforts at Crown co-option. They believed that the government would attempt to minimise confrontation over a wide series of fronts (as opposed to making symbolic statements through such acts as dismantling the pa at Okahu Bay) so as to preserve the community-based strength of the MWO organisation. The trade-offs that committees needed to make in order to further their own agendas might be some degree of work on behalf of the Crown. This could be a problem, but not an insuperable one. In such circumstances, boundaries were always blurred, ‘making it difficult to assign labels of collaboration or resistance, conservatism or activism’. The evidence indicates that ‘[e]ven the most co-operative relationships were tempered with resistance when required.’ Thus many flaxroots committees, performing functions that were crucial to local Maori well-being, pressed ahead in giving priority to pursuit of their own aims, while at the same time assisting the DMA and other local, regional and central state agencies. Such assistance might, in turn, lead to financial and other support for ‘their own’ projects.⁴

Even the most autonomous committees, however, gained little in the way of meaningful political independence. This was a reflection at micro level of the systemic official constraints preventing the development of Maori autonomy at a macro level within the state, with Holland’s Cabinet asserting assimilationist policies even more vigorously than its predecessor. The tribal executives and committees were not mentioned in the National government’s first annual report on Maori matters to Parliament. While the government appreciated the need to come to a temporary accommodation with Maori institutions, there was a prevalent feeling within state circles that the time when Maoridom would begin to dissipate was nigh.

National’s interest in the official committees was principally in theirpage 29 contribution to ‘good government’: the MWO should assist with rapid Maori assimilation, avoiding significant spending along the way, rather than help Maori determine their own destiny. This might seem ironic given National’s ideological emphasis on self-reliance, but its focus was always on individual self-reliance rather than collective self-determination. National’s Minister of Maori Affairs, Ernest Corbett, who farmed confiscated Taranaki land, was principally interested in inducing Maori, as individuals, ‘to accept the responsibility of citizenship’. In the terminology of later times, he stressed Article Three of the Treaty, which spoke to the equality of rights and obligations for all citizens, as opposed to Article Two’s emphasis on rangatiratanga. When Dick Scott’s The Parihaka Story was published in 1954, Corbett set DMA head office staff ‘combing through the book … to find errors of fact’ that would discredit what was essentially a pioneering, rangatiratanga-based perspective on a grim chapter in New Zealand’s race-relations history. Corbett and others assumed that sympathy from pakeha for the struggles of Maori might help prolong Maori organisation rather than work towards its disappearance. The National government sought, even more than its predecessor, to control and appropriate Maori energies in the cause of marginalising Maori as political players. By the late 1950s, anthropological fieldwork was revealing an accumulated build-up of flaxroots distrust of the Crown and its attempted impositions upon, and plans for, Maoridom.⁵