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

Trust Boards

page 47

Trust Boards

The Maori struggle for control of their own affairs continued through the 1950s within a variety of state sanctioned forums, as well as in other ways. While official committees often attempted to provide a delicate balance between Crown control and Maori autonomy, so too did trust boards. The trust board model had been pioneered by the Crown in the 1920s to allow tribes to manage compensation payments which had been negotiated. The model was later developed to provide tribal representation for more general purposes. But trust boards also provided the Crown with a considerable degree of control.

The boards were constrained by official accountability procedures under both general trust and dedicated legislation. Officials scrutinised board activities and spending, and the Crown held ultimate power over the boards and their personnel. Though tribally elected, board members were appointed by the Governor-General, and the endorsement of the Minister of Maori Affairs was required for the chairs and secretaries boards selected. The minister was not only in final control of both budgets and the purchase and disposal of land and resources, but could also ‘direct that board administration be investigated’. Such interventions could lead to ‘adjustments’ in operations, as bureaucrats put it. In short, trust boards were scarcely regarded by the Crown as agents of Maori autonomy except in a very attenuated sense. Even conservative pakeha, seeing the usefulness of boards as tools for accommodating and containing Maori counter-discourse, could approve of them.

For tribes, however, boards were foci for communal reinvigoration and sites for working towards controlling their own affairs. They offered opportunities for retaining or regaining a degree of autonomy in a generally unsympathetic socio-political environment. In the view of many board and tribal members, too, trust boards embodied a certain degree of state recognition of tribal authority. When controversy arose around systematising and consolidatingpage 48 boards under the Maori Trust Boards Act in 1955, the desirability of the boards went unquestioned by tribal leaders.

Both parties, Crown and Maori, thus saw benefits in trust boards, although neither considered the arrangement perfect. So entrenched did the trust board model become that the acting head of the Department of Maori Affairs noted with great confidence in 1960 that any future resolutions of historical claims would ‘result in the setting up of additional trust boards’. The mere fact that he was in effect predicting future reparations regimes placed him firmly among the ‘progressive’ pakeha of that time. But his view that trust boards were appropriate vehicles for compensation was held partly because they offered a means for the Crown to further its welfarist and assimilationist agendas.

Government and officials had hoped that settlements between 1944 and 1946 with the three groupings which had traditionally and persistently presented the largest claims (Ngai Tahu, Taranaki and Waikato–Maniapoto) would, by providing annual payments, help remove impediments to ‘progress’ among Maori. The settlements, coupled with drift to the cities and towns, were supposed primarily to smooth the way for assimilating Maori into the welfare state.

Although the payments were later seen as less than generous, at the time they underpinned the administration of trust boards established by compensation legislation. They also allowed some small beginnings to be made on closing the large gaps in living standards between Maori and pakeha. But not only did the Crown soon realise that there were significant difficulties in implementing such plans, it was also quickly reminded that there were many other tribes seeking compensation for their historical losses.

Negotiations between officials and various non-compensated tribes had begun after the 1946 Waikato–Maniapoto settlement, and the late 1940s and the 1950s saw further compensation agreements reached and new boards established accordingly. One was provided with £22,500 compensation for matters relating to the purchase of the Aorangi Block; a Wairoa board received £20,000 on account of forced cession of the Kauhouroa Block to the Crown; and its Taitokerau equivalent was founded on a £47,000 payment in compensation for the Crown’s taking of ‘surplus land’ (land deemed early in the life of the colony not to have been validly purchased from Maori before annexation). In 1957, a Tuhoe delegation saw Minister of Maori Affairs Corbett about broken promises over roading in the Urewera. The minister, suggesting that any compensation would need to be monetary, typically advised that this should be channelled through a trust board. When the negotiations were completed, the Tuhoe Maori Trust Board was established with a lump sum of £100,000 to use for the ‘betterment of the people’.1

The settlement sums, especially when income could be guaranteed by annual payments, not only provided funding to run basic tribal affairs, but also enabledpage 49 boards to expand their scope of activity for the benefit of their members. Funds could be used to assist with education or farming, for example. In this sense, the (still small number of) tribal trust boards were in a better position than the official committees, which were required to earn their own funds and to supplement these by applications for subsidies. The Maori Trust Boards Act of 1955 endorsed aspects of the social and economic role which had gradually been developed by the boards.

Over time, in fact, the concept of the trust board came to have considerable flexibility for the Crown as well as the tribes. The Aupouri Trust Board was established to ‘control income from certain land and capital funds from a communal enterprise at Te Kao’, but received no payment from the Crown. The Tuhoe-Waikaremoana Maori Trust Board, in which the Waikaremoana reserves and lake bed had been vested, had ‘taken on a broader role than just the administration of “compensation” funds’ under provisions in the new legislation. Widely seen to act ‘as a tribal voice’, it established ‘young people’s committees’ to encourage continuity in tribal management, and it controlled significant areas of land vested in it by the Maori Land Court. In time, trust boards would come to boost their income by investing portions of their annuities or lump-sum compensation payments in, for example, local-body stock or rental housing. Each board developed its own priorities, many of them aiming to balance the needs of the present with those of the future. Ngai Tahu’s board provided assistance to needy tribal members, giving out around 500 grants per annum by the late 1960s, and making educational grants which approached similar numbers. It also involved itself in hospital, harbour and power boards in the 1960s, and purchased blocks of flats in Wellington. While it had been spending a third of its income on administration in 1953, this had been reduced to less than an eighth within two decades.2

The concept of trust boards became very significant for the post-war aspirations of many Maori, especially after the Crown saw the benefits in expanding the system to include different types of trusts. Trust boards were viewed by various Maori groupings as providing a means for pursuing economic development, as forums that could reflect Maori cultural and other values, and as leaders in the fight for recognition of rangatiratanga. A number of the politico-cultural roles that they took on reflected a propensity by their members and beneficiaries to subvert their official raison d’etre. Some boards developed a momentum that took them well beyond the Crown’s comfort zone. On the other hand, the state, too, could capitalise on the multiple uses to which boards could be put. It could encourage them, for example, to become adjuncts of the Crown in providing a variety of services for their people which the state would otherwise have to organise (at least in theory).

page 50

Moreover, the Trust Boards Act, in addition to expanding board responsibilities, ‘clarified’ their role after a series of tribal actions and assertions through the boards had troubled the Crown. After pondering the appropriate degree of latitude that should be allowed on issues relating to land, for example, the politicians secured restrictions on boards’ abilities to regain a landed base for their tribes. Funding extensive, collectively-orientated land development within tribal rohe was seen as turning the clock back at a time when Maori urbanisation and assimilation, rather than rurality and tribalism, were to be encouraged above all else. This aspect of the legislation, Maori argued, breached the original agreements with some of the boards, quite apart from more generally hindering tribal aspirations relating to turangawaewae. But Parliament’s decision on the issue was a clear reminder that the boards were established by the Crown and accountable to it, their powers conferred by its grace. As with the 1900 Maori councils, boards remained heavily constrained in the degree of autonomy they were allowed to exercise.

In fact, despite (and because of) their efforts to expand their activities, the trust boards were increasingly pressured to concentrate on functions reflecting the Crown’s original intentions under the trust board model. The 1955 Act thus specified that Maori trust boards needed to focus on matters which were essentially within the Crown’s area of responsibility: health, social and economic welfare, education, vocational training and the like. Board attempts to redirect predetermined uses of Crown funding were not well received by the monitoring bureaucrats. ‘The Maori Affairs’ provided continual ‘guidance’ as to how state-provided monies might best be spent, within a restricted range of permissible activities. Crown spokesmen openly remonstrated that ‘education is not assisted more liberally’ by the boards, which were ideally expected to devote at least half of their income to educational matters.

The trust boards, however, continued to attempt not only to determine their own priorities within official parameters, but also to operate outside them. When defending such activities to the Maori Affairs bureaucracy, they drew upon their terms of reference, which included the words: ‘Such other purposes as the boards determine’. When heading Maori Affairs in 1960, Jack Hunn noted the discrepancies between the formal (and, he might have added, often bureaucratically imposed) limitations on the trust boards and the ‘seemingly wide power’ in their briefs. He declared that, in actual fact, their powers had been ‘probably exercised without limitation’. While this was an exaggeration, a later analysis concluded that until new legislation was passed in 1988, it was ‘notorious that Trust Boards were engaged in activity beyond and with only a casual regard for the limitations of their statutory authorization’. While the Crown never stopped intervening in board activities which it considered a challenge to its authority (or to financial propriety), it clearly turned a blindpage 51 eye for a very long time to many small (and a few not-so-small) usurpations. In the final analysis, trust boards remained, in the eyes of both state and judicial bodies, convenient repositories of funding for state-required tasks. For many Maori, too, the advantages presented by boards overrode their disadvantages.3

1 Hill, State Authority, pp 130–39; Hunn, Jack K, Report on Department of Maori Affairs: with Statistical Supplement, Wellington, 1961, p 62 (for ‘the setting up’ quote), p 63 (for ‘direct that board’ and ‘adjustments’ quotes); Marr, Cathy, Crown Policy Towards Major Crown/Iwi Claim Agreements in the 1940s and 1950s, Wellington, Treaty of Waitangi Policy Unit, 1990, pp 99–100; Hill, Richard S, Settlements of Major Maori Claims in the 1940s: A Preliminary Historical Investigation, Wellington, Department of Justice, 1989; Stokes, Evelyn, Milroy, J Wharehuia and Melbourne, Hirini, Te Urewera: Nga Iwi te Whenua te Ngahere: People, Land and Forests of Te Urewera, Hamilton, 1986, pp 106–10 (p 107 for ‘betterment of the people’ quote).

2 Mahuta, Robert, ‘Tainui, Kingitanga and Raupatu’, in Wilson, Margaret A and Yeatman, Anna (eds), Justice and Identity: Antipodean Practices, Wellington, 1995, p 26; Walsh, More and More Maoris, p 40 (includes ‘control income from certain’ quote); Stokes et al, Te Urewera, pp 87, 109–110 and p 300 (for Tuhoe-Waikaremoana Trust Board quotes).

3 Marr, Crown Policy; Hill, State Authority, pp 50–64; Hunn, Report on Department of Maori Affairs, p 62 (for ‘seemingly wide power’ quote), p 63 (for ‘education is not assisted’ quote); McHugh, Paul, The Maori Magna Carta: New Zealand Law and the Treaty of Waitangi, Auckland, 1991, p 202 (for ‘notorious that’ quote).