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The Runanga Iwi Act

In December 1989, the Runanga Iwi Bill was introduced, presenting a framework for devolution which ‘acknowledged the enduring, traditional significance and importance of iwi’, with legally incorporated runanga to become the administrative wings of the tribes. Responsible for devolved government services to their members, in order to gain official recognition these runanga iwi would be required to meet various criteria, such as possessing authenticated boundaries and appropriate financial structures. Of the 138 public submissions on the initial draft of the Bill, many argued that the proposals were inadequate as they sat fully within a framework of indivisible Crown sovereignty: at most, as in the Principles for Crown Action, the degree of autonomy to be accorded runanga seemed to be little more than that possessed by local government. Even the Iwi Transition Agency declared that iwi were ‘not perceived as governmental or jurisdictional authorities in their own right – as required by the Treaty’.

More specifically, critics opposed the Bill’s prescriptive definitions of how iwi were to operate, and claimed that its system ‘impinged on the rights of iwi to make decisions outside the runanga structure as defined in the Bill’. Some argued that ‘divide and rule’ strategies underpinned the legislation, with iwi about to find themselves in competition with other tribes for scarce Crown resources – not to mention the fact that the urban Maori authorities and pan-tribal organisations were far from happy with the emphasis on iwi-based runanga. Within the non-tribal Ratana movement, reportedly, there was consternation that – yet again – Labour had taken little interest in the perspectives of its political partner. Although there was little historical analysis, some commentators implicitly suggested that the Crown was doing what it had done throughout the twentieth century, appropriating Maori organisational forms for its own purposes without any really meaningful concessions. Nine decades on from the Maori councils, and despite the now limited utility of the official committee concept introduced in 1945, for some critics little seemed to have changed. The only real difference they could see was that the Crown was now resourcing institutions deemed to offer governance at iwi level (although a very few would note that this had been the case with the official runanga of the 1860s). Whatever the details of the proposals, the central government could, in the final analysis, cancel any or all devolved powers; full rangatiratanga still seemed far away.²¹

There was, however, considerable, if guarded, optimism in many Maori quarters. This was boosted when it became clear that the Crown was at last prepared to acknowledge its past breaches of the Treaty. Even thepage 242 Queen, speaking on Waitangi Day at the Treaty Grounds during the 1990 commemoration, declared (of course, on official advice) that the Treaty had been ‘imperfectly observed’. The cautious optimism of Maoridom was encapsulated in a 1990 book which, while not downplaying the problems, predicted that the two ‘Treaty partners’ could soon be governing New Zealand ‘in ways that respect the different bases from which they draw their authority’. Meaningful changes were predicted with regard to governance and resourcing, even if they might go nowhere near far enough to meeting the requirements of full rangatiratanga.²²

Pragmatic in their response to the likelihood of little fundamental change in the accountability provisions of the Runanga Iwi Bill, ‘iwi up and down the country established runanga’ or reconstructed existing ones to fit the official criteria. When the Runanga Iwi Act (RIA) was passed in 1990 (becoming operative from 28 August), it reflected some attempt to be more generous and less prescriptive, and references to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi were now included. But many Maori commented on how restrictive it remained, noting, for example, that it made few concessions to the various submissions made to the politicians which had sought greater autonomous power for Maori organisations.

While critics were often realistic about the fact that the ‘authorised voices’ for iwi could possess only that power granted them by the state, many were unimpressed by the ways in which they were to be strictly monitored by it. In the first place, in order to acquire the legal mandate to deliver government-funded social, economic and cultural programmes for their people, iwi were required to meet stiff prerequisites relating to their constitution and operational systems. They were to be business entities, obliged to adopt a corporate model of management along the lines of that which the government had been implementing in the public sector. The statised runanga would embody the longstanding ‘legal fiction’ of ‘incorporation’, by which ‘a body of individual persons … is regarded by law as being in itself a person’, and the franchising of such ‘legal personalities’ would be strictly within parameters which reflected the Crown’s own goals and intentions. There was one significant difference between the Bill and the Act, however. Politicians had taken into account opposition to a mono-institutional delivery system for services to Maori: the ‘authorised voice’ of a Maori collectivity could now be a body other than a runanga, such as a trust board or marae committee.²³

But the government’s concessions amidst its claims to have addressed self-determination issues were seen by critics as ‘a convenient vehicle to sell the policy to Maori’. Many took up past criticisms of the Crown’s intentions, claiming that ‘a general government fixation with corporatization and a social marketplace, had animated the policy’ behind the RIA. Even the limitedpage 243 concept of tribal self-management had come down to a set of official rules as to how Maori should be organised to ‘control themselves’. On the other hand, some Maori leaders and observers appreciated the Crown’s difficulties, especially since it had the pakeha public to consider, and felt that it could not have gone much further in the direction of rangatiratanga at that time. While the mandating processes could have been improved, it was difficult to conceive of any alternative to official certification when public monies and powers were involved. Moreover, given the substantial weakening of tribal bonds since the nineteenth century, it was often not at all clear which groupings or organisations were the appropriate ones to represent the Maori voice in a given area.²⁴

That being said, few believed that the delivery of services to tribal organisations involved ‘any fundamental change in the prevailing distribution of power’. Runanga iwi status was ‘a concession by, and a creation of, the State’ that was ‘limited, conditional and revocable’, a modern form of the old practice of appropriation by the state of Maori structures. To be sure, the proposed partnership was a less unequal one than in the 1860s, the 1900s, the 1940s or the 1960s–70s. But one party was designated a ‘partner’ to deliver services rather than decisions, and to operate under the other’s rules and right of veto.

The Minister of State Services, while claiming that the Act reflected ‘our desire for real partnership in Maori development’, expressed a political truism when he noted that it was not realistic for government to do other than retain ‘the responsibilities to set the basic course and to manage the overall process’. It might well be argued that no other conceivable government configuration at the time could have gone further to meet Maori aspirations for rangatiratanga; that iwi authorities needed, given the very nature of the New Zealand polity and its dominant culture and ethnicity, to be firmly accountable to Parliament and under close Crown direction. Whatever the case, as things turned out, the policies and principles of 1989–90 would be the closest Maori ever got in the twentieth century to institutions embodying some form of partnership with the Crown.²⁵