Talk of abolishing Maori seats rather sinister
Reproduced from New Zealand Herald 7 May 2003
07.05.2003 By DANNY KEENAN
Not for the first time, a conservative party wants to abolish the Maori seats. Bill English tells us that 18 Maori MPs is enough. In fact, with Maori making up only 14 per cent of the population, it's probably too many - or that's the implication.
Maori now have the same rights as all New Zealanders, says Mr English. National advocates "one standard of citizenship". Therefore, special parliamentary seats are no longer needed, are, in fact, undesirable.
The implication here is that somehow Maori acquired special rights and special seats. How true is this?
Normally, it is safe to assume that political leaders have a passing knowledge of our history. One assumes that Mr English has some idea of how Maori obtained their seats in the first place. When one sees him seeking to tag the Maori seats to "special Maori rights which are no longer needed", it all becomes rather sinister.
What special rights have Maori ever had? What special rights is Mr English talking about? The Treaty of Waitangi conferred special rights upon Maori - could it be these? Probably not, because Maori treaty rights have never been recognised by the Crown.
The treaty gave Maori the right of protection of lands and forests. Yet the land confiscations of 1863 and native lands acts after 1865 stripped Maori of that right, and of their land, and took them to the brink of landlessness.
Perhaps Mr English is talking about the treaty right of pre-emption - the dubious right Maori once had to sell land only to the Crown. The Crown played fast and loose with that right, abolishing it twice before 1862, then restoring it in the early 1890s.
This was done to improve settler access to Maori land. It had nothing to do with Maori rights. In fact, playing around with pre-emption was a direct contravention of a solemn treaty promise.
So, what is left of the treaty rights? What remains is the treaty promise that Maori would have all of the "rights of British citizens". One standard of British citizenship was promised.
In 1862, this was interpreted by the Crown to mean that Maori should have the right to sell their land. Therefore, law was passed to ensure that Maori land could be easily surveyed, processed by the courts, and alienated. You needed only 10 signatures to sell huge tribal estates. As a result, Maori lost thousands of acres.
What other rights came from being a British citizen? Perhaps the franchise was such a right; the right to vote was a major entitlement of all British citizens. It was the mark of a civilised, democratic society. One standard of citizenship meant that all citizens should be granted the vote.
But it was not that simple. When the vote was given to New Zealanders by London in 1852, it was denied to Maori. Maori would first have to alienate their land from its customary estate in order to obtain the vote. So, having the right to vote was not a right of British citizenship after all.
For the next 15 years, Maori argued they were entitled to the vote. They had the right to take part in the governing of the country, at the very least as British citizens. To Maori it was fairly simple. It was not a special right, it was a fundamental treaty right of one standard of citizenship. But the colonial legislators refused.
By 1867 pressure to grant some form of franchise to Maori had become too strong. London was asking questions. Premier Edward Stafford started looking for ways to grant the vote without such an unpopular measure sticking to his ministry.
The Government had to act, since it was finding it difficult to explain why Maori were being denied the vote. The reason was simple: Maori voters could not be allowed to interrupt the process of land dispossession.
The result was a fiddle. Opposition member Donald McLean was persuaded to introduce a private member's bill granting limited franchise to Maori. Four special seats (as distinct from electorate seats) were to be set up, and that was all.
On a population basis the same as Pakeha representation, Maori should have had 15 seats; they were lucky to get four. And these seats were meant to be only temporary. They were to last for five years; but they are still with us today.
The Maori seats, therefore, were not about special rights for Maori, they were set up as an act of denial - Maori were to be denied their rights of full customary franchise as British citizens. Instead, they were to be granted four temporary seats.
Over the years many attempts were made to abolish the seats, especially in the 1890s. The Maori seats survived because to Maori they were at least a continuing guarantee that, in the quickly changing fortunes of political expediency, they would continue to have access to Parliament.
And for 140 years, in an enlarging House well exceeding 100 members, Maori had only four MPs of their own, save for the odd Maori in a general seat, like James Carroll, Ben Couch and Winston Peters.
MMP changed all that. The Electoral Commission wanted to abolish the seats. Maori MPs would increase under MMP, it argued, and Maori would greatly benefit.
But the commission was criticised by Maori because, once again, it saw the seats as a special right when they were not. Maori were relegated by the commission to the status of a special interest group.
This was a far cry from the rightful status of a treaty partner with a fundamental right to the Maori franchise, long denied then reluctantly granted. Maori also said that, far from providing more MPs, MMP was all about fragmenting Maori political interests. It was a divide and rule reform.
A greater number of Maori MPs being appropriated into, and lost to, the overriding interests of party politics? This was hardly what Maori wanted.
MMP was merely a temporary expedient, a stopgap reform that might function until the Crown and the country were courageous enough to face the huge range of issues attaching to an appropriate style and degree of Maori political representation consistent with the treaty.
Such a debate should be about fundamental rights, not "special rights". So should the debate about the future of the Maori seats. Rhetoric such as "one standard of citizenship" should be seen for what they are, devices of denial for Maori.
Maori have, per se, few rights, if any. The Maori seats provide a guarantee, albeit a meagre one, that Maori access to Parliament will continue.
Maori seats were created with best of intentions
Reproduced from New Zealand Herald 9 May 2003
09.05.2003 By MICHAEL BASSETT
Danny Keenan's comments on the Maori seats were selective as to the facts that did not serve his predetermined purpose, snide towards politicians and wrong at several points. It also wilfully ignored the wider context within which settlers and Maori worked out their relationships in the 19th century.
It's a fact that Maori lost most of their land. Confiscations after the New Zealand Wars were excessive, and they contributed to Maori landlessness.
That's why I and my Labour Government colleagues voted for the 1985 extension to the powers of the Waitangi Tribunal. We thought that New Zealanders should acknowledge the wrong done, and pay compensation. Most New Zealanders agreed with that, and still do.
But when Mr Keenan pictures settler history as some grand conspiracy against Maori, he overlooks the mixed, sometimes well-intentioned motivation that often lay behind Government policies towards Maori.
As a historian he should realise that the best plans sometimes go astray; Governments then, and now, set out to achieve good ends, but often succeed in making things worse. That's life. It's the historian's job to separate intent from result.
In his account of the establishment of the four Maori seats in 1867, Mr Keenan oddly overlooked Keith Sorrenson's article appended to the 1986 report of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System. Maori seats were not "set up as an act of denial" of Maori rights. Nor were they a "fiddle".
There were mixed motives, as is usual with any act. The main one was to provide some temporary representation for Maori while the Native Land Court worked through the individualisation of Maori land titles so they could then obtain the same individual property rights which in those days were required for people to vote.
Despite Mr Keenan's assertion to the contrary, the right to vote in the 1860s was not "a major entitlement of all British citizens", only for men of property. The 1867 legislation envisaged that the four Maori seats would be needed for only five years.
They were then extended for another five years, and eventually made permanent when it became clear that the individualisation of title was taking much longer than envisaged. Had the purpose been as Mr Keenan suggests, there would have been no question of a sunset clause.
Certainly, one can criticise the Native Land Court and its intentions, although its purpose has been colourfully, rather than accurately, portrayed by some writers. But a key purpose of the Maori seats was not permanently to deny Maori rights but rather to put them eventually on all fours with Pakeha.
There are other unfortunate examples of historical shorthand in Mr Keenan's article. Pre-emption was included in the Treaty of Waitangi. It was prescribed by Lord Normanby in his instructions to Lieutenant-Governor Hobson. Maori could sell land only to the Crown.
Normanby believed this would save them from speculators, and Maori accepted this protection when they signed the treaty. Profits from onselling land would help finance the colonial Government.
Pre-emption soon became unpopular with both Maori and settlers. Maori found that the Crown had too little money to buy land they wanted to sell to enjoy the trading advantages of having settlers in their midst. And the shortage of money meant the Crown paid poorly for what it did buy.
Settlers who wished to buy the land that Maori couldn't sell directly were equally chagrined. Pre-emption was waived on several occasions to enable not just settlers but Maori, too, to have their way. To argue that Maori always wanted to retain all their land, and that Pakeha always wanted to steal it, is a gross perversion of the truth.
There was constant interaction between the races. Some decent Pakeha, some rogues and many willing Maori sellers would be a much nearer approximation of the truth than Mr Keenan's goodies (Maori) and baddies (Pakeha). Pressure from both races often led to Government compromises.
So far as the Maori seats are concerned, an increasing number of Maori liked the option that opened up to them. If they were half-caste or less, they could enrol on the European roll.
Even today, despite state-funded campaigns to get them on the Maori roll, an overwhelming number prefer to remain on the general roll, as it is now called. No plot is involved, no denial of rights, just a simple exercise of choice by Maori themselves.
I'm not debating whether Bill English is right or wrong with his argument that the Maori seats should be abolished. But it is a fact that by 1980, many Maori, and most politicians, thought the Maori seats had done their dash and were no longer necessary to ensure them adequate political representation.
Surely Mr English has a right to advance his argument that they should be abolished. After all, both Sir James Carroll and, in his last years, Sir Apirana Ngata, thought Maori seats were on the way out. Their usefulness to Maori has always been debated by Maori and Pakeha alike.
* Michael Bassett, a Labour minister in the 1980s, sits on the Waitangi Tribunal. He is responding to Massey University historian Danny Keenan's view that the Maori seats must be retained as a guarantee of access to Parliament.
The piece below was written as a response to Bassett's views (above) and submitted, but was not published by the Herald.
‘Maori seats not well-intentioned’
Danny Keenan
In his In Reply piece on the four Maori seats, Michael Bassett made a number of troubling points about our shared history. Most troubling was his contention that the granting of the vote to Maori was really a well-intentioned process handled by benign, if somewhat flawed, colonial politicians.
This is a view that many would have us believe. But it is really a curious throw back to the 1950s when such opinions were challenged by Bill Oliver and especially Keith Sinclair in his landmark book, Origins of the Maori Wars. Though now largely discreditted, the view persists. In that light, we might examine some of Bassett’s points more closely.
Bassett writes of a ‘wider context within which settlers and Maori worked out their relationship.’
What was this ‘wider context’? Was it all about honouring the Treaty of Waitangi, where solemn promises were made? Was it a context of the Crown providing protections for Maori land and resources?
No, Bassett’s ‘wider context’ is of course the policy of assimilation (it was called ‘amalgamation’) openly preached and followed by the Crown since 1843, when the Treaty was described as ‘injudicious’ (a mistake, in other words). Alan Ward has described this process in great detail in A Show of Justice, our best history book ever written.
One doesn’t need to be a conspiracy theorist (I’m not) to see Bassett’s ‘wider context’ as a disingenuous attempt to soften or mollify what was a century of Crown policy predicated upon dispossessing Maori of their land, and destroying the customary basis of their society.
We know this was so because politicians said so. That is why the government initially refused to give Maori the vote. It could not allow Maori to interfere with that process of dispossession.
Bassett says that the Crown was ‘sometimes well-intentioned towards Maori’ in devising its nineteenth century native policies. But, not surprisingly, he gives no examples, because there aren’t very many.
Is he talking about the NZ Settlements legislation of 1863? MPs did say at the time that, despite the Act’s intention to confiscate huge tribal estates without compensation, it would in fact help other friendly Maori who might have suffered losses as a result of the Land Wars.
Is he talking about the native lands legislation of 1862 and 1865? Politicians did say that these Acts recognised Maori rights to sell their land, grossly manipulating Article Three in the process. Legislative provision was then made for the wholesale alienation of lands through the Native Land Court .
Bassett says the Native Land Court has been ‘colourfully portrayed’ by writers. He may be referring to the consensus amongst historians that the Court was an ‘engine of destruction’, to use David Williams’ term.
Which brings us to the Maori seats. Bassett says there were ‘mixed motives’ in granting Maori four special seats in 1867. In other words, the Crown was as well-intentioned (Maori can have their four seats) as it was hostile (Maori can’t have the fifteen to which they are entitled).
But how does Bassett explain the Crowns ‘mixed motives’? He does it in two ways.
Firstly, we are told that the four seats were temporary, because the Native Land Court was embarked upon a programme of individualising Maori land. In other words, it was expected that all Maori would soon have their ‘one acre and their donkey’. They would then qualify for the vote.
Bassett implies that this was a benign process. But what we are not told is that no provision for communal ownership of land was made in 1852, as a basis for granting the franchise to Maori. Maori therefore had no choice but to face wholesale alienation. That is why the 1862 Native Lands Act stated that its first purpose was to ‘extinguish all native title to land’.
Once all those Maori land titles were extinguished, Maori could get the vote. The seats were temporary because it was thought that wholesale extinguishing of Maori titles wouldn’t take too long – maybe five years, perhaps ten.
In fact, by 1876, the Court was so bogged down, partly by its own corrupt practices, that politicians gave up. The temporary seats were then made permanent. But again, no attempt was made to introduce franchise based upon customary ownership of land. No allowance was made for Maori population numbers which might reflect increased political representation.
Secondly, Bassett says that holding Maori to four seats was not an act of denial. He says that, rather, it was all about putting Maori ‘on all fours with Pakeha.’ In other words, it was about assimilating Maori political interests into those of the Pakeha.
Did Maori actually want this? Most certainly not. The King Movement was established in 1858 because Maori had been excluded from the right to participate in government. There was no Maori voice in the House when the lands legislation of the early 1860s was being enacted. In fact, King Tawhiao and his Tainui people carried a terrible burden for all Maori when they faced the British Army at Rangiriri in November, 1863, and lost.
Maori were never consulted in the early 1860s; and they were not consulted in 1867 when their franchise options were being debated by politicians. Members of Parliament always knew what was best for Maori. In fact, it was long anticipated that the Maori seats would be filled by Pakeha members, not Maori.
The first Maori MPs found Parliament a foreign and hostile place. Keith Sorrenson says that the earliest Maori MPs were quickly disillusioned as Pakeha members paid them and their concerns scant regard. In 1893, when Hone Heke Ngapua (Northern Maori) introduced a Native Rights Bill, there was a mass walkout of all Pakeha MPs.
It is disingenuous to say that Sir James Carroll was opposed to the Maori seats. He was of course a Maori MP himself, from 1887-1893. But he ran for a general seat in 1893 because he was warned by other Maori that he would lose his seat that year, so unpopular was he amongst Maori voters. It is hardly surprising then that he was opposed to the Maori seats.
Granting the four seats to Maori was never a benign or well-intentioned act. There were no mixed motives. Despite what Bill English tells us, it was not about special favours, or special rights. Parliament waited until the land wars were finished, and the King movement was in refuge, before any form of representation could be considered.
Fours seats were all that Maori were given. They were temporary, not because they were a special right that would run its course, as Bassett suggests, but because they were an act of denial that would in time be overtaken by assimilation.
The seats should be retained because they guarrantee Maori access to Parliament. This is surely a most basic Treaty right. Those who support the abolition of the Maori seats will often point to the current number of MPs delivered by MMP, eleven in total
If the Maori seats were taken away, only MMP Maori MPs would remain.Most of these occupy List seats, largely because major parties do not stand Maori candidates in their plum seats. They probably wouldn’t get elected. National, which wants the seats abolished, has but one solitary Maori MP, a List member, Georgina Te Heu Heu.
In that context, it has been interesting to watch the opposition mounting in New Zealand to the List seats. Political parties play around with electoral reform policies. We never know who is going to promise what next. What if pressure mounts to abolish the List seats? If that ever happens, we should be glad we held onto the Maori seats.