Labour and the Committee System

The reasons for the government’s disinclination to recognise and more fully work with Maori representation above tribal executive level was summed up in a Department of Maori Affairs response to continued submissions in favour of a national organisation: ‘It is not considered desirable or necessary that Government should assist in promoting a national body that would tend to formulate policies of its own and press these upon Government’. The district councils, unable to exercise the power they sought through a central body, waned, and a number of committees and executives lost heart.

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Labour’s election to the treasury benches again in 1957, however, offered renewed hope. The party’s election manifesto incorporated a ‘new outlook’ that involved giving Maori ‘a greater say on events of importance to them’. Two principal modes of ensuring this were mooted. The first involved injecting new energy into the tribal committee/executive system, which was especially languishing in the rural areas where, partly because of the land issue, many Maori people were opting to engage in collective endeavours untainted by the Crown. The second mode focused on the urban spaces: a better adaptation of the functions of the committees and provisions of the MSEA Act to the increasingly urbanised realities of Maori life was proposed. While there would be no bold structural initiatives, Labour’s commitment to boosting the existing system was widely seen to constitute a policy of improving the Crown’s responsiveness to Maori.

But when Labour entered office, such improvement failed to manifest itself, and Maori frustration led to a further fall-off in the activities of both tribal and executive committees. This downturn in committee activity was accompanied by a great deal of active withdrawal of support for the government, and some leaders were even recommending that their people abandon the longstanding electoral support for the Ratana/Labour MPs – however hard these had worked to secure better policies and representation within the Labour movement. But a significant number of elders, together with younger leaders, believed that it might be possible to persuade Labour, through both a revived committee/executive system and higher-level pressure, to fulfil its explicit and implicit commitments to Maoridom. If kotahitanga/unity could be achieved within the Welfare Division system at regional and especially national levels, this could reinforce that degree of influence still exercised by the Maori MPs.

The government, alarmed at both the decline in committee activity and with much very vocal evidence of the disappointment of its Maori electorate, sought to retrieve the situation. On the issue of regional representation, it held out the possibility of significant concessions. In view of this and other encouraging official noises, the informal district councils began to revitalise or re-form. In 1959, by mutual agreement between Crown (under strong pressure from advisers such as Erik Schwimmer) and Maori, seven district councils were formally established (although they were not designated part of the Welfare Division, there being no legislative provision for this). In October that year, moreover, a non-official national body, the Dominion Council of Tribal Executives, was established at Rotorua, the Waiariki committees having again taken the initiative. The renewed and new regional and supra-district groupings gave a fillip to Maori politico-cultural activity, prompting in turn some revival in flaxroots activity. But official endorsement of the national organisation was still wanting. In early 1960, the Secretary for Maori Affairspage 58 told his minister, Walter Nash, that continued refusal to recognise the new national body as an integral part of the new system ‘could quite conceivably result in the people becoming antagonistic to the Department, and we could well find a militant private association that could retard our already difficult task in Maori Affairs’.

Through such logic, Nash came to see the need for a national organisation that could cooperate with government. But he was concerned – among other things – at both the potential power of an officialised representative national body and its potential capacity to undermine the authority of the Maori MPs. One scholar has suggested that in ‘spontaneously resolving to form a national council’, the committee system’s leadership had acted prematurely: such a body would be accepted only if it were the government which decided to initiate, ‘convene and sponsor’ it. Nash’s reaction probably reflected such a view. But soon, however, under renewed pressure from various quarters, politicians and officials were exploring ways of making the national organisation a statutory body (albeit along lines that would suit the Crown’s needs). Hunn noted in August 1960 that a ‘Council is about to be set up by statute to speak for the tribal organisation on a national plane [and to] provide a two-way channel of communication’. But some elements of the Crown dragged their heels, concerned that a national council might become a ‘policy forming body’ that would present ‘its own views and recommendations to government’. By the time Labour lost the election later that year, no legislation had been presented to establish a statutory official national organisation.⁸

The second Labour government’s relationship with Maori, then, had proved to be far less harmonious than its election promises had suggested. Maori could see that whichever of the two main parties attained office, the Crown remained firmly committed to its long-term assimilationist policies. Yet many Maori leaders also saw clearly that the Crown and political parties could not avoid addressing, at some level, both Maori organisational energies and the culture and causes dear to the tangata whenua. National’s post-war electioneering had trumpeted ‘One Race – One People’. But as early as the beginning of the 1930s, even the Governor-General had presaged the notion of ‘two peoples, one nation’. This was now slowly appearing as a modifying theme within the official assimilationist discourse, although even the most ‘progressive’ corners of the state machinery envisaged that the pakeha culture would remain overwhelmingly dominant. Inside officialdom, this incipient idea of ‘two peoples’ dovetailed with a stronger line of thought: that special measures were needed to bring Maori up to the pakeha level of socio-economic development. ‘Equality’, at least of opportunity, between pakeha and Maori would supposedly eventuate. Neither the ‘two peoples’ nor the ‘special measures’ position generally embodied an enthusiastic acceptance ofpage 59 difference. Rather, they represented a preparedness to tolerate those aspects of Maoridom which were not able to be suppressed. And even such tolerance was qualified by the assimilationist assumption that ultimately most, if not all, Maori culture would disappear under the weight of the ‘superior civilisation’.

While the official willingness to appropriate organisational expressions of rangatiratanga and accommodate aspects of Maori culture needs to be viewed in this context, the very existence of such policies often enabled Maori to further their own causes. The issues surrounding ideas of ‘two peoples, one nation’ were discussed, argued and debated extensively in public and private, including among pakeha. Debates within the labour movement in the lead-up to the 1957 election helped focus the Labour Party on Maori questions. Labour’s Maori Advisory Council changed its name to the Maori Policy Committee (MPC), embodying a hope that it would soon gain a more significant role inside the party. In the year of the election, Labour’s annual conference unanimously adopted the MPC’s report, and key policies of its ‘new outlook’ were incorporated into the election platform.⁹

The National government’s toleration of difference had mostly focused on what could be appropriated through the existing official committee system, its Labour predecessor’s alleged ‘generosity’ to Maori having been characterised as a ‘folly’ with consequences that needed containing or minimising. The Holland ministry’s brief flirtation with adding higher levels to the official committee system had led to little result for a number of reasons besides the propensity for such bodies to turn upon it. These included the broad ideological context. After several settlements with Maori over historical grievances had been reached and trust boards established, for example, influential commentators of the right had opposed enhancing the official committee system. They argued that trust boards were more acceptable, being both accountable to the state and able to attend to the needs of Maori pending their (rapid) assimilation in all respects except skin colour and residual ‘culture’. Such views were strongly held within the National government, and this increased the resolve of many Maori to place increased pressure within the labour movement as the 1957 election approached. The Labour Party’s reinvigorated Maori policy platform reflected the strength of such mobilisation.