The Wrong White Crowd

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday November 20, 2004

Louise Williams

Maoris have been told to take a step back and understand that many white people feel New Zealand also belongs to them, writes Louise Williams.

CAN a white man ever be considered "indigenous" in the land his forebears stole or "bought" for a handful of trinkets and beads? New Zealand's most influential contemporary historian, Dr Michael King, insisted he could. King called himself a "white native", a member of a new race of New Zealanders so intimately connected and committed to the land of their birth as to be "no less indigenous" than the Maori people.

New Zealand, he said, was on the cusp of a new era, in which the descendants of white settlers, long severed from their European heritage, and more recent migrants, would no longer be condemned to wander forever as outsiders in a land bearing only Maori spiritual names.

Before his death in a car accident earlier this year, King declared it was now the Maoris' turn to understand the pakehas - the fair-skinned settlers - "in terms of their right to live in New Zealand, to practise their culture and values and to be themselves".

This was no racist backlash.

What was most extraordinary about King's thesis was that it came from a man who had, over decades, chronicled the losses of the Maori people. He argued passionately for the righting of past wrongs, for compensation for lands lost and for public funds to be committed to the revival and retention of Maori culture and language.

Only from history, he said, would come an understanding of the unhappy circumstances that had, by the 1960s and '70s, created New Zealand's brown, poor urban ghettos. He wrote of the Maoris' "shyness" becoming, instead, the truly bitter sense of rejection and alienation later portrayed in the raw, violent film Once Were Warriors. It was no less than an obligation for pakeha to learn how it came to this sorry impasse.

New Zealand, unlike other nations claimed by white settlers, including Australia, legally recognised the Maoris' prior ownership of the land in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. From 1985, New Zealand was committed to settling its historical debts retrospectively, with a complex compensation and land claim process.

King, whose ancestry was Irish, was emphatic that he was not interested in taking anything away from Maoris. But what he wanted was "to ensure that the measures of protection and respect extended from one culture to embrace both cultures", he wrote in the newly published Penguin History of New Zealand, his last bestseller.

Two decades into its Maori renaissance, New Zealand has undergone significant, irreversible changes.

For the first time Maori culture is beginning to influence the dominant Anglo culture. English words are giving way to Maori words and concepts, no translation required. A Maori TV service was launched this year, as was a new Maori Party.

Demographics, too, are steadily pushing change. Maoris make up 12 per cent of the population. By 2021, it will be 17 per cent and 28 per cent of New Zealand's under 14s. Intermarriage is common. Many more pakeha, too, educated during the Maori language revival, will be bilingual. Among young New Zealanders the cultural divide is fading fast. The Maori revival and the policies which made tribal reinvigoration possible, "so changed the face of New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s that their cumulative effect could legitimately be called a revolution", King wrote.

But as a group, Maori are still far more likely to be unemployed, poor, arrested, to die in car accidents or to commit suicide, and can expect to live six to seven years less than their non-Maori contemporaries. King was a respected and learned voice in an often ill-informed and shrill race debate. Identity, culture and belonging are rarely the stuff of the "mutual understanding" King envisaged.

In the lead-up to next year's national elections, this is fertile ground for the deeply divisive politics of race.

"WANT, want, want. People come to this country who don't understand its history and see Maori with their hands out," laments Tariana Turia, leader of the new Maori Party. "It seems in this country you can steal someone's car, then give them back the tyres, and expect them to be eternally grateful," she says.

Loud complaints about a lucrative, backwards-looking Maori "grievance industry" have long been the staple of talkback radio jocks.

Then, Dr Don Brash, the leader of the conservative opposition National Party, laid the race card face up on the political table in January. He was rewarded with the Nationals' first polling spike for years, a big enough public approval rating to have put him in office.

Brash's argument was, basically, this: The Maoris can still have the other parts of their car back, but only if they can get at them in time.

All Waitangi Treaty claims, he says, should be wound up by 2010. And all race-based initiatives have to go. No more Maori seats in Parliament, no race-based social welfare, but welfare based on need. Move on.

"Let me be quite clear. Many things happened to Maori people that should not have happened ... [but] none of us had anything to do with the [land] confiscations. There is a limit to how much any generation can apologise for the sins of its great-grandparents," he says.

Bit by bit, however, the Labor Government has since undercut the Nationals' appeal to an anxious middle New Zealand. Most dramatically, the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, announced the Government would block a Maori claim to the seabed and foreshore along the attractive coastline of the Marlborough Sounds. It would nationalise the coastline instead. A massive protest ensued, and the legality of the Government's moves remains in question. But the political message was clear. Labour, too, has set its high tide mark for Maori claims.

"It's the first time in living history that we are witnessing the further confiscation of our customary lands," says Turia, who quit her cabinet post and set up the Maori Party in protest.

On current polling, the Maori Party could take all seven Maori seats from Labour. And in New Zealand's single chamber parliament, small parties count because they can, and have, held the balance of power.

Labour's response is a very delicate balancing act.

For a start, says the Race Relations Minister, Trevor Mallard - for the benefit of the insecure white community - get some perspective on the so-called grievance industry. Since 1989, he says, the Government has paid out only $680 million in Treaty settlement, less than it collects in one year in tobacco excises alone.

For the benefit of the Government's angry Maori detractors he has borrowed directly from King: "I regard myself as an indigenous New Zealander. For most New Zealanders, regardless of ethnicity, home is here Aotearoa [the Maori term for "the long white cloud"] New Zealand ... we have to banish the demons from our past."

THE Maori came to New Zealand as colonisers to a pristine land of unique flora and fauna. Popular mythology holds that Aotearoa was discovered by a Polynesian navigator called Kupe in about AD950. Four centuries later the legendary "great fleet" of seven Polynesian canoes made the extraordinary open sea journey, over at least 3000 kilometres, carrying the first Maori settlers.

The Maoris, King wrote, "managed to survive as a viable population and to convert an imported culture into an indigenous one with recognisable antecedents in east Polynesia, but inextricably connected to the roots and soil of New Zealand".

But, for any settlers of a new land there comes a time when there is no way back. Should that point be recognised as emergence of a new indigenous culture?

There is, said King, "a growing conviction among pakeha that their culture, like that of Maori, is no longer the same as the cultures of origin from which it sprang - that is has become a second indigenous culture".

© 2004 Sydney Morning Herald

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