Preparing for Devolutionary Partnership

Even before the systematising of ‘the principles of the Treaty’ in 1987, the government had reached a crucial intersection. The tension between its free-market policies and the Maori ‘demand for recognition of tino rangatiratanga’ had caused it to make clear that its ‘economic rationalisation’ and de-statising imperatives would predominate where they clashed with Maori aspirations. In some interpretations, by late 1988 governmental support for Maori initiatives had essentially dissipated except insofar as the ministers were forced to move by judicial decree or Tribunal-led opinion. This is, however, to downplay the way deregulatory and laissez-faire policies dovetailed with devolution, and also to ignore ways in which pressure from Labour’s members and supporters for it to respect the Treaty contributed to some significant Crown decisions at the time. In late 1988, for example, the government decided to set up an agency in the Department of Justice to coordinate and provide strategic advice on Treaty policy across departments, the Treaty of Waitangi Policy Unit (TOWPU; later, the Office of Treaty Settlements). Before long, the unit (which came fully into operation in early 1989) gained a highly significant new function – that of pioneering negotiations to settle historical grievances.

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In general terms, however, the ‘juggernaut of Rogernomics’ would always attempt to mow down manifestations of rangatiratanga when they got in its way. Maori launched a strong fightback against the devastating impact on their people of neoliberal economics, aided by the courts, commissions of enquiry and pakeha sympathisers (including some working within the Crown). Many tribal and other collective groupings utilised, in such campaigns, that degree of devolved power that the Crown had conceded to date. They were encouraged by a number of developments, including the proceedings of the Royal Commission on Social Policy. Appointed in 1986, this was an attempt by the Labour government to reconcile its party’s traditional emphasis on equality, income-redistribution and other ‘cradle to grave’ welfarist policies with its devastation of the working and social lives of great numbers of the least privileged in society.

The commission’s brief, to examine New Zealand society ‘from a social justice rather than an economic perspective’, did help prevent Labour’s support base from rebelling openly against the right-wing reforms. But its deliberations also provided a rallying point for all those concerned with issues of social justice and self-determination. When the government signalled its displeasure at the commissioners’ apparent empathy with such perspectives, in 1987 the endangered commission rushed out an interim ‘April Report’ which provided landmark findings relevant, among other things, to indigenous aspirations. It took account of Maori perceptions about their past, present and desired relationship with the Crown, generally endorsing the huge numbers of submissions which stressed the importance to Maori of controlling their own affairs in partnership with the Crown. The heavily biculturalist report concluded that state policies and actions had so far created only an ‘illusion of partnership’, and this was not healthy for both Maori and society as a whole. It urged meaningful consultation on how best to embed Maori rights under what it depicted as the cornerstone of the government’s relationship with Maori: the Treaty of Waitangi.¹¹

The 1980s saw many and varied Maori initiatives to establish bodies with which the Crown could potentially effect partnership arrangements. Primary among them was the strengthened or renewed institution of runanga and such bodies as federative tribal groupings founded to prepare (among other things) claims before the Tribunal. It was the targeted unity of purpose among the Muriwhenua cluster of iwi which had led to the breakthrough Muriwhenua Fishing Report and later preparation of land claims in the far north. As well as an upsurge in runanga-and federation-based organisation, there were also a number of broad pan-tribal or non-tribal initiatives, especially in the cities. Te Whanau o Waipareira Trust, established in West Auckland in 1984 to support those who had moved from their tribal areas, looked topage 231 take responsibility for delivering health and other services to Maori. It and similar urban bodies, such as the Manukau Urban Maori Authority, accepted the reality of mass urban migration and partial detribalisation as a given, and sought to effect rangatiratanga through (especially) socio-economic progress for those permanently living in the cities. Such developments marked the beginning of a trend towards Maori groupings pursuing autonomist outcomes alternative to those located within the redress-based ‘Treaty rights’ discourses which had predominated within Maoridom.¹²

It was under great pressure from those engaging in such discourses, however, that the Crown was increasingly compelled to move faster on the issue of devolution. Its natural inclination, particularly as the clash between Maori well-being and the demands of Rogernomics became ever more clear, was a familiar one: to appropriate Maori institutions and energies as the best way of both deflecting pressure and pursuing state goals – especially (in this case) by devolving welfarist and other responsibilities it wished to cast off. Maori leaders were aware that the government’s decision to explore autonomist ‘concessions’ was not rooted in any altruistic desire to effect rangatiratanga. But, as in the past, many believed that if concrete progress was to be made, they needed to work with (and attempt to push the limits of) whatever the state was placing on the table. In particular, the government’s desire to reduce the role of the executive within the nation state seemed to hold out the possibility of ‘new configurations of political power’ which could both enhance rangatiratanga and ensure economic security for the tangata whenua, the latter being so much more necessary as a result of the impact of Rogernomics.

While politicians and officials perceived ‘Article Two’ arrangements as little more than self-management, then, this did not dissuade Maori from varied institutions and perspectives from reading greater potential into at least some of the many proposals under scrutiny. Entrepreneurs in tribal and urban authorities, many of whom identified rangatiratanga with economic security, argued for devolutionary arrangements which both provided resources and freed Maori authorities from state managerial control. Maori of more radical ilk continued to seek at least quasi-constitutional arrangements that could be seen implicitly to challenge the supremacy of the Crown. Engaging with the Crown in devolutionary talks was a quite separate matter from endorsing the social effects of the economic reforms, and many Maori leaders vocally opposed the suffering inflicted by government policies on working people of all ethnicities.¹³

In most quarters of Maoridom in the later 1980s, there was even greater discussion than usual of breaking free from what was seen as a largely paternalistic and anachronistic Department of Maori Affairs. Sectors of the state had not been averse to listening to such messages. As early as the mid-1960s,page 232 a senior DMA official had put his name to a statement that his department had ‘a long tradition of paternal attitudes’, and felt it ‘probable that many Maoris would prefer to be free, even if it be to make their own mistakes’. Two decades later, such views had begun to enter the bureaucratic and political mainstream. The questions were: should the department be changed (and, if so, how) or abolished (and if so, replaced by what, if anything)?

By the end of the 1980s, Secretary for Maori Affairs Tamati Reedy was conceding that within the DMA, just as with other departments, there had traditionally been ‘little recognition of Maori social structure and desire for self-determination’. While the ‘wairua, mana and rangatiratanga of the Maori people [had been] able to find some expression’ within the department, this had been constrained – certainly until the ‘revolutionary change in direction’ of Tu Tangata. From that time onwards, there had been much examination of how ‘the Maori people [could] take over the management of Departmental programmes’: the DMA was ‘heading towards its own demise’. The ultimate dissolution of the department had, indeed, generally always been official policy, at least implicitly. Hunn had advocated phasing it out so that Maori could deal directly with ‘ordinary departments’. As a scholar writing in 1971 noted, the ‘long-term objective to close the department’ had been premised not upon devolution but upon the achievement of ‘integration (or assimilation?)’. It had remained in being in the absence of that eventuality, and as a continuingly useful expedient – one into which, for example, responsibility for New Zealand’s Pacific Island territories had been placed in 1968.

By the 1980s, however, the usefulness of the institution was under considerable question. Aspects of Tu Tangata, especially those relating to tribal involvement in decision-making, had raised Maori community expectations in ways with which the DMA could not fully cope. Answers to the perceived problems of a centralised, inefficient and often unresponsive department were increasingly seen (as Reedy noted in his 1986 annual report) to lie in a system of strengthened tribal structures. The mid–1987 findings of a commission of inquiry into (the very public) humiliation of the DMA over a ‘Maori Loans Affair’ assisted the Crown in planning its removal. The commission’s recommendation of progressive transfer of community and economic development programmes to tribal authorities wielding certain devolved state powers gelled with ideas being explored within state and Maori circles. So, too, did the suggestion that a streamlined Maori development ministry replace the multi-tasked DMA: with devolved institutions conducting operations, the new entity’s functions would involve little more than overarching policy advice and Crown statutory obligations. The demise of ‘the Maori Affairs’ was virtually inevitable when, on 24 June 1987, Cabinet agreed that ‘to achieve a true partnership between the Government and the Maori people, therepage 233 had to be devolution of responsibility to the Maori people themselves for the management of Government programmes’.¹⁴

Utilising the evolving Treaty principles, based as they were on an ultimate ideal of ‘partnership’, the government now set out to develop officially-sanctioned authorities which could assume roles as (junior) partners with the Crown. It was in the many discussions which ensued that Maori leaders, ministers and officials increasingly came to believe that runanga operating at iwi level would provide the best vehicles for such purposes. Some Maori voiced misgivings that runanga institutions were about to be appropriated, while others felt that the suggested modes of incorporation outweighed potential benefits for Maori. Some who were concerned that any form of devolution under Rogernomics would foster managerialist elites which would subvert the Maori collective way of life initiated the debates which would later culminate in accusations of capitalistic neotribalism. Many argued that the government’s prime motive was to divest itself of responsibility to promote equality for Maori within New Zealand society, and so could not be trusted. Others were convinced that the Crown would select as its ‘partners’ only those tribes and/or runanga which suited its convenience.

At the fringes of Maoridom, some argued that devolution fell so short of the full ‘Maori sovereignty’ which, they contended, had been promised in 1840, that it could not be contemplated in any way. Many more were concerned with more practical ramifications, believing (for example) that devolution could lead to ‘a dangerous version of Pakeha-style competition’ among tribal and other Maori groupings at a time when Maoridom needed to be united in its struggle against the policies which so damaged its people. Certainly, many of the urban-based Maori entities rejected the way iwi were ‘privileged’ by the emerging policies. All such contentions were countered by many others. The urban authority perspective, for example, was met with various arguments: the migration-based decline in tribal identification was what had widened some disparities between Maori and pakeha in the first place, and restoration and revival of tribal vitality through runanga was a way of reversing these trends; the Ratana-inspired, non-tribal unity of recent decades had done little for Maoridom; urban Maori remained members of their iwi and, as such, could participate in, and would benefit from, tribal-based programmes; and primacy of ‘runanga iwi’ as devolved vehicles of transference of resources and power did not preclude either sub-devolving or other modes of devolution.¹⁵