Free Flowing No Longer? How has God’s rain become the “Iwi Leadership Group’s” private property? And how do the latter propose to finesse the Prime Minister's, John Key's, repeated and emphatic assertion that "nobody can own the water"?
WHAT IF THE TREATY SETTLEMENT PROCESS had begun in the
1960s, instead of the 1990s? What would New Zealand look like? Historical
questions beginning with “What if?” are always fun, even when the factors
working against history unfolding in any other way are insurmountable.
Supposing, for example, that the highly influential Hunn
Report of 1961 had recommended the establishment of a Treaty of Waitangi
Tribunal and the negotiation of multi-million pound “Treaty settlements” in
recognition of the injustices suffered by Maori since 1840 – rather than the
policy of “racial integration” that it did recommend. Would the National Party
government of the day have taken it seriously? Absolutely not.
The government of National’s Keith Holyoake, like the
government of Labour’s Walter Nash which preceded it, was deeply apprehensive
of the social consequences of the rapid pace of Maori urbanisation. In 1931,
thirty years before the Hunn Report was published, barely 15 percent of Maori
lived in urban areas, by 1961, however, that percentage had soared to well over
50 percent. Just a quarter-of-a-century later, in 1986, close to 80 percent of
Maori lived in New Zealand’s towns and cities. New Zealand’s politicians and
bureaucrats (who were overwhelmingly Pakeha) were concerned that such breakneck
social and cultural change might spark serious racial unrest.
The Hunn Report rejected both wholesale assimilation and
forced segregation as solutions to the “problem” of rapid Maori urbanisation.
His great hope was that through intermarriage, the strategic use of public
housing and, most importantly, through the homogenising influence of public
education, Maori would peacefully integrate with the dominant, Pakeha, society.
It’s important to remember that, in 1961, there were clear
alternatives to the policy of racial integration already operating in the
English-speaking world. In South Africa and the southern states of the USA
segregation was mandatory and the very notion of “racial mixing” considered
dangerously provocative. With the violent excesses of Jim Crow and Apartheid
before them, liberal Pakeha hailed Jack Hunn’s recommendations as being both
courageous and progressive.
Jack Hunn: Neither wholesale assimilation nor forced segregation, but peaceful racial integration, was Hunn's vision for the future of Maori-Pakeha relations.
Conservative Pakeha were by no means convinced. In 1961
there were still many New Zealand communities in which informal racial
segregation remained the norm. Pukekohe infamously separated the races at the
town’s barber shop, cinema and pub. Such citizens condemned the Hunn Report as
a dangerously radical document. Their deeply entrenched racism would smoulder
on in both provincial and metropolitan New Zealand, flaring into angry
firestorms whenever racial issues achieved political salience – most
particularly in 1981 and 2004.
So, even if the sort of radicalism that was later to produce
the Waitangi Tribunal and the Treaty Settlement Process had been present in the
minds of any interested party – Maori or Pakeha – back in 1961 (which is highly
doubtful) it would have been rejected out-of-hand by just about everybody.
But what if New Zealand had been ready for such solutions in
1961? How would they have played out?
The short answer is: they would have played out
social-democratically. The institutional expression of the politics of
reconciliation and redress would have rebuffed the politics of hierarchy and
commercialism in favour of participation and collectivism. It would have done
so not only because that was the shape of the increasingly urbanised Maori
society that was emerging, but also because, thirty years after the ravages of
the Great Depression, and just 15 years since the end of World War II, that was
the shape of New Zealand society as a whole.
The formation of such institutions would, therefore, have
reinforced and strengthened the social-democratic temper of the times – with
incalculable (but likely quite profound) effects on the development of the
Labour Party, the trade union movement, local government and the broader New
Zealand economy.
That the Tribunal (empowered to hear claims from 1840
onwards) and the Treaty Settlements Process were created between 1985-1995
meant that the institutions which emerged to implement these changes reflected
a very different set of priorities. The 1980s and 90s were the period in which
New Zealand’s social-democratic society was systematically taken apart. In its
place arose the neoliberal society of today: a market-driven economic system in
which the rich rule and the poor go under.
Successive neoliberal governments took care to ensure that
the energy of the Maori Renaissance was channelled into elite-brokered,
ostensibly Iwi-based, “neo-tribal capitalist” corporations: institutions
functionally indistinguishable from the foreign- and Pakeha-owned corporations
in whose interests New Zealand politics is now transacted. These neo-tribal
capitalists have grown exceptionally skilled at masking the commercial
imperatives that are their true raison
d’être behind the rhetoric of reparation and redress.
How else could God’s rain have become the “Iwi Leadership
Group’s” private property?
But, what if Jack Hunn’s philosophy of integration is as far
as Pakeha New Zealanders are willing to go? What if there’s a line they will
not see crossed? What if this is it?
This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 14 April 2015.
