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

Urban Adjustment and ‘Race’

page 85

Urban Adjustment and ‘Race’

The Maori population more than doubled in the twenty years after World War II, at the same time as urban migration gathered great pace; the ten years or so after 1956 saw the most intensive population movement. Almost half of all Maori were living in built-up environments at the beginning of the 1960s, many of them mixing with pakeha on a regular basis. By the mid-1970s, some three-quarters of Maori were urban dwellers. Adjustment problems of some magnitude within the migrant population were inevitable with such a speedy relocation, and with these came an upsurge of ethnocentric incidents and racist attitudes towards Maori. Official pronouncements, however, still tended to promote the idea that New Zealand had as near to perfect an understanding and tolerance between the races as was possible, and this seemed to be generally believed throughout pakeha society. K C McDonald’s 1963 textbook Our Country’s Story stated that ‘there is no country in the world where two races of different colour live together with more goodwill towards each other’, echoing the generally rosy perspective of the two general histories of New Zealand written in the late 1950s.

Such views partly reflected a long-held idea which had been nourished when Maori were out of sight of most pakeha, something amounting to a national (or pakeha) myth. This took the Treaty of Waitangi as its ‘enlightened’ founding statement. In 1960, Parliament declared that the date of the initial signing of the Treaty in 1840, February 6th, would be known each year as ‘Waitangi Day’. This would provide an opportunity for thanksgiving that New Zealand’s racial and other fortunes had been enabled to flourish under the protection of such a supposedly progressive iconic document.

There was some element of truth in the perception that race relations were healthier than in other western jurisdictions. This would often surface in the empirical and anecdotal evidence mustered in public comment (includingpage 86 from Maori) favourably comparing New Zealand’s race relations with those of Australia and other former settler colonies. There was little overt opposition to the notion of interracial dating among young people, and rates of intermarriage were increasing as urbanisation proceeded. By 1960, a full half of Maori marriages were reported to be to non-Maori. Authorities noted this approvingly, stressing that it indicated assimilation in action as well as racial harmony – intermarriage, as a key figure of the time put it, ‘is a powerful solvent’. On the left and liberal end of the political spectrum, pakeha marched together with Maori in protest against the All Black rugby tour of apartheid South Africa in 1960, demanding ‘No Maoris, No Tour’. On the moderate political right, there was an increasing realisation that race incomprehension and hate could lead to widespread civic strife.1

‘No impartial observer could deny’, however, ‘that racial discrimination exists in New Zealand’. Government officials ‘generally agreed that a widespread problem of discrimination did exist’, and that ‘the problem was probably growing more acute’ (although they remained reluctant to draw public attention to these issues). The marginalisation of Maori in most facets of New Zealand life, too, remained obvious, despite better prospects in the urban-based workplaces and spaces. Even McDonald tempered his populist vision with the caveat of ‘disturbing evidence that in some districts at least complete social equality has still to be achieved’. Although many pakeha refused to concede that there were any, let alone fundamental, flaws in New Zealand’s much vaunted race-relations environment, the evidence to the contrary was becoming hard to ignore.

In 1960, American scholar David Ausubel published The Fern and the Tiki. The book described in detail the pervasive race prejudice and discrimination against Maori which Ausubel had encountered in New Zealand. He had been sponsored as a Fulbright research scholar by anthropologist and psychologist Ernest Beaglehole, who had hoped that a liberal outsider’s perspective would stimulate a rational race-relations debate. Instead the book provoked much fury, even among pakeha liberals, for the way it challenged the paradigm of excellent race relations. However, meaningful debate did emerge before long, even if initially defensive in tone. For the year 1963 alone, one scholar identified 151 books and articles produced on race in New Zealand, a reflection of the large amount of time and space devoted to the subject in newspapers, on the radio and in public and private forums.2

Even the Department of Maori Affairs was soon to have public doubts about the state of race relations in New Zealand. The department conceded that Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson’s foundational statement upon the signing of the Treaty in 1840 that there was ‘now one people’ in New Zealand had proved to be ‘not strictly so’. But despite this and other waverings, itpage 87 continued to laud the ‘happy circumstance’ of an alleged ‘fusion of the two races’. Maori and pakeha were said to be ‘remarkably uniform, economically, socially, and culturally’. And it still saw the ‘one people’ route as the appropriate way forward: ‘the future of the Maori is bound up with the pakeha social and economic structure’.

That did ‘not mean the death of Maori culture’, however, at least not fully and not yet. As the Secretary for Maori Affairs had said in 1957, the journey to ‘full integration’ needed to incorporate some Maori ways of thinking and seeing if it were to succeed. ‘A large number of Maori people still find the old community structure intensely meaningful and beneficial and while working for those people’s individual material advancement, we must respond to their frequently expressed aspirations for a good and progressive community life with balanced material, social and cultural features.’ Another commentator put it a different way: on a daily basis, ‘consciously or unconsciously every Maori is engaged in a personal debate whether to assert or abandon some particular attitude or habit or whether to adopt or reject some new one’. If racism or discrimination intensified, members of the Crown believed, non-assimilationist choices might be made more often, and the appropriate ‘balance’ between the past and the present would not be attained.3

There was increasing appreciation that the pre-war rhetoric about ‘perfect race relations’ had more accurately pertained to a situation of ‘non-relations’, with Maori living a largely separate existence from pakeha at that time. Many observers, officials and politicians took from this realisation a belief that progress on removing discrimination and racism depended on encouraging mutual understanding between pakeha and Maori through fully integrated living and working environments. The senior DMA official who would lead the call for racial enlightenment opined that cross-ethnic living and mixing would ‘prevent a “colour” problem from arising in New Zealand’. People ‘understand and appreciate one another better and mutually adjust themselves easier if living together as neighbours than if living apart in separate communities’. Once neighbours got to know each other, Maori could ‘feel that [they had] a rightful place in [the] community.’ The very fact of urban migration, despite initial race tension, would – it was believed or hoped – assist not only the development of race harmony but also its supposed corollary, assimilation.4

But by 1960, there was an increasing official conviction that to get such results in the context of rapid and comprehensive urban migration, two key things were needed: greater state regulation and new measures to ‘smooth the process of integration’. A ‘calculated’ paternalism in areas such as education, health and housing would assist both urban adjustment and long-term assimilation. It was still believed, for example, that even greater dispersal of Maori homes throughout suburban streets would ultimately prove to be one of the mostpage 88 effective ways of both countering racism and integrating Maori into the pakeha world. ‘[T] he home’, Peter Fraser had said, ‘is the place where character is moulded and lasting impressions made’, and the home was influenced heavily by its immediate social and spatial environment. Many thought that as new generations of Maori were brought up within the physical and hegemonic landscapes of the pakeha, actual and perceived separateness would gradually disappear: Maori ‘will grow up with a set of values very different from their own’, as top DMA officials put it. And so, the argument went, any need for special measures and separate organisations for Maori would eventually, to a large degree, disappear.5

1 Sissons, ‘The post-assimilationist thought’, p 58; McDonald, K C, Our Country’s Story: An Illustrated History of New Zealand, Christchurch, 1963, p 148 (for ‘there is no country’ quote); Walker, Ranginui J, ‘State of the Nation’, New Zealand Listener, 21 Feb 2004, p 32; Hunn, Affairs of State, p 147 (for ‘powerful solvent’ quote); Harré, John, ‘Maori–Pakeha Intermarriage’, in Schwimmer, Erik (ed) The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties: A Symposium, pp 121, 129; Ausubel, The Fern and the Tiki, pp 182–4; Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, p 242; Booth and Hunn, Integration, p 4; Nightingale, ‘Maori at Work’, pp 205, 248; Walker, Ranginui, ‘The Treaty of Waitangi in the Postcolonial Era’, in Belgrave, Michael, Kawharu, Merata and Williams, David (eds), Waitangi Revisited: Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi, Auckland, 2005, p 56.

2 Hunn, Affairs of State, p 145 (for ‘No impartial observer’ quote); McDonald, Our Country’s Story, p 148 (for ‘disturbing evidence’ quote); Secretary of External Affairs to the Prime Minister, 24 Dec 1959, attached draft, ‘Discrimination against Maoris’ (for ‘generally agreed’ quote); Ausubel, The Fern and the Tiki; Kersey, Harry, ‘Opening a Discourse on Race Relations in New Zealand: “The Fern and the Tiki” Revisited’, Journal of New Zealand Studies, Oct 2002; Archer and Archer, ‘Race, Identity’; Thompson, Race Relations in New Zealand, pp 31–5, 57–69.

3 Department of Maori Affairs, The Maori Today, 1964, ‘The Future’ section (for ‘happy circumstance’ and following quotes); Harris, Aroha, ‘Current Narratives of Maori and Integration in the 1950s and 60s’, Journal of New Zealand Studies, NS 6–7, 2007–2008, p 143 (for ‘A large number of Maori’ quote), Hill ‘Social Revolution’, p 4 (for ‘consciously or unconsciously’ quote).

4 Bedggood, David, Rich and Poor in New Zealand: A Critique of Class, Politics and Ideology, Auckland, 1980, p 81 (re ‘non-relations’); Sinclair, Keith, ‘Why are Race Relations in New Zealand Better than in South Africa, South Australia or South Dakota?’, in Webb, Stephen and Collette, John (eds), New Zealand Society: Contemporary Perspectives, Sydney, 1973, p 19; Ausubel, Maori Youth, p 115; Hunn, Report on Department of Maori Affairs, p 14 (for ‘prevent a “colour” problem’ and ‘understand and appreciate’ quotes); Thompson, Race Relations in New Zealand, p 42; Harris, ‘Dancing with the State’, pp 137–8; Booth and Hunn, Integration, p 10 (for ‘rightful place’ quote).

5 Hunn, Affairs of State, p 147 (for ‘smooth the process’ quote); Harris, ‘Maori and “the Maori Affairs”’, p 203; Fraser, Peter, ‘Foreword’, p 2 (for ‘the home is the place’ quote); Booth and Hunn, Integration, p 9 (for ‘set of values’ quote).