Mainstreaming need not be inherently anti-Māori. It will be if it is done badly because it will be anti-those-in need, and proportionally more of them are Māori.
That the Coalition Government says it will deliver public services on the basis of need rather than, say, race deserves consideration, even though many will jump unthinkingly to the conclusion that it is anti-Māori. Such mainstreaming does not cover many issues dear to Māori, such as the promotion of te reo and Māori culture, the status and relevance of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, their role in the governance of the country and remediation of past wrongs. Discussion of these needs to take place, but not in this column, which is a reflection on the policy of mainstreaming.
Not that reflection is common in the dialogue about Māori issues. Statistics New Zealand reported that 19.6 percent of the population counted in the 2023 Population Census said they were of Māori descent. The proportion has increased over time, which is not surprising given that ‘intermarriage’ is common. (The quotation marks are to indicate that the parents are not always married.) Additionally, people learn about forgotten ancestors.
The census does not ask how many of us have European, Asian or Pasifika ancestors. (Its question is for the purpose of calculating Māori seats.) I suspect that if we could work it out, there would be many more New Zealanders with more European ancestors five generations back than with Māori ones.
It was also widely reported that 17.8 percent were of Māori ethnicity, so not all those of Māori descent describe themselves as of Māori ethnicity. Less prominence was given to the 67.8% who said they were of European (or Pakeha) ethnicity or the 17.1% who said they were of Asian ethnicity, 7.1% Pasifika and the 3.0% who said something else. Yes, they add up to more than 100% because people have multiple ethnicities. The cross-tabulations are yet to be published but they are likely to show that over half of those reporting Māori ethnicity also tick European ethnicity.
There is a tendency to report ethnicity on a prioritisation basis. First is all those who say they are Māori including those who tick other categories, then there are those who tick Pasifika but not Māori, as well as the other categories, then Asian on a similar basis, and then only European if they do not tick any other ethnic category as well. The practice can be very misleading. For instance, a high proportion of prisoners are Māori, but some of them – we do not know how many – will have ticked other ethnic categories. (The good news is that the proportion of young Māori who are imprisoned is falling. See here and here.)
All the evidence is that ethnic Māori are a very diverse lot. I add to it, by reporting how they list-voted in the 2020 election. [1] Just over half of Māori descent choose to vote in general rather than Māori electoral seats. They are included in these figures which like all survey results are subject to sampling error):
2020 List voting by Māori.
(Percent Share of Total)
Labour
63.8
Green
7.7
National
7.5
Te Parti Māori
6.8
NZF
5.4
ACT
4.0
Other
4.8
We are not surprised that almost two-thirds of Māori voted for Labour (half the country did), but the rankings of the parties below them are intriguing. The Greens were second; National was above TPM. Altogether, around a fifth of Māori voters voted on the right.
(The 2023 electoral data are not available yet and will report different proportions. I had a very rough shot at estimating the numbers. Labour’s share may have collapsed by a third – most, probably, went to TPM who came second behind them. National may have won more votes than the Greens. ACT’s share may have gone down. I’ll let you know when the 2023 data becomes available.)
The voting data confirms all the other evidence. Māori political views are diverse. Yes, there may be less variation within the group than in the population as a whole, but anyone who says they speak on behalf of all Māori is deceiving themselves, while almost all generalisations about all Māori are wrong unless there are caveats (an exception is that Māori are diverse).
That does not mean there are no tendencies. One is that on almost every socio-economic indicator the Māori population averages worse than the non-Māori population. (That is also true for Pasifika.)
That difference is cited to justify targeting public social services to Māori. The logic is not obvious. For instance, Māori are more likely to be poor than non-Māori. But there are more non-Māori who are poor. Poverty measures which target Māori may support Māori who are not poor (there are more of them than those who are poor) and fail to address the non-Māori poor who are worse off than the average poor Māori.
There is the logic of the Coalition Government’s mainstreaming policies. They have much in their favour but there are caveats. The biggest is whether the government policies will actually address the need rather than just offer pious promises.
or example, the Coalition Government mainstreamed Māori healthcare by abolishing the Māori Health Authority, Te Aka Whai Ora. The public disliked the institution; there was little enthusiasm for it even among Labour Party voters. Perhaps it was a lightning rod for the dislike of the health sector redisorganisation, which abolished the local DHBs replacing them with the centralised Health New Zealand. But the Coalition Government seems to have no idea what it was going to do instead.
Simple mainstreaming does not work if one group in the community is sufficiently different to require different delivery. For instance, those living in rural areas may have difficulty accessing the services that urban dwellers do. What if some Māori feel intimidated by what they see as Pakeha-dominated institutions? That may not be just a Māori problem; it may be that all those with low educational attainment find our medical institutions overwhelming. The Māori middle class may approach a hospital with the same confidence as Pakeha middle class do.
One sort of argument is that Māori poverty arises from different causes. There is a trope that Māori poverty is the result of ‘colonialism’. Whenever I have followed the argument, I have foundered on what ‘colonialism’ means and how it works its way through to lower incomes. I find the term is rarely defined and its meaning can shift from article to article, chapter to chapter, page to page, even sentence to sentence.
I am not unsympathetic to the notion of colonialism as a way of explaining the history of the first peoples. Unquestionably, they were disturbed by the later arrivals. But we need to be clearer.
For instance, the Musket Wars were very disruptive – almost certainly causing poverty to some – to Māoridom, but there were few Europeans in the country at the time. As the name of the wars indicates, the intruders were the guns. Was that colonial?
The New Zealand Wars led to land confiscations – there were fewer than we remember, but it was the best quality land. However, I attribute more damage to the 1865 Native Lands Act and its successors which aimed to individualise land ownership. Not only did they forcibly reduce Māori possession of land, which was the basis of traditional Māori social organisation, but they led to conflict among and within hapu and iwi, which further undermined Māori social organisations. The individualisation would have happened anyway, but it would have been less destructive if it had been at pace determined by Māori.
The Māori economy largely thrived before 1870s. It began spluttering not only because of the loss of land, but because most Māori were living on land which was unsuitable for sheep, when wool and (later) frozen meat were the economic drivers of New Zealand. John Gould’s observation of different average incomes by iwi is explained by observing that higher-income Kai Tahu benefited from the sheep boom because the South Island soils were not compromised. The slogan that colonisation caused poverty implies there was less colonisation in the south.
For the next hundred years, most Māori struggled in rural areas with poorer public services in areas as wide ranging as education and health and infrastructure. They were very badly prepared for their urban migration which accelerated after 1950, having rural rather than urban skills and lacking capital resources. Their poverty became apparent.
Whether the account in the last few paragraphs can be summarised as ‘colonisation’, I leave others to develop. They identify key elements as to why many Māori are poorer today. The story is elaborated in my Not In Narrow Seas and some of my other writings. (e.g. here and here.) It concludes that the Māori poor lack educational, occupational and social skills, as do the non-Māori poor. A colonisation explanation explains poverty for only a quarter of the population – a little more if it is extended to Pasifika. It is neither a comprehensive account of why poverty exists in Aotearoa New Zealand nor does it provide a diagnosis for its treatment.
We cannot rule out that mainstreaming is a viable policy for supplying public services, providing it is culturally and socially sensitive. It need not be inherently anti-Māori, but it will be if it is done badly without commitment, because it will be anti-those-in-need, and proportionally more of them are Māori.
[1] The results are based upon data specially by Jack Vowles. It comes from the 2020 survey of the New Zealand Election Study research program. The surveyed numbers are small – just over 1000 – and subject to error – about as large as the standard political opinion poll. Thankyou, Jack.