From dying race to urban segregation

“The time has come, in our minds, when New Zealand must strike for freedom, and this means the death blow to the Māori race.”

Patea Mail newspaper editorial, 1879

This wasn’t just a passive observation. At times, some in the media encouraged the active extermination of Māori for years after the Crown had invaded Taranaki and Waikato and passed confiscation legislation. As hysteria was rising about the passive resistance to that theft at the community at Parihaka in Taranaki, an editorial in the Patea Mail in 1879 made clear a common settler sentiment: “Perhaps the present difficulty will be one of the greatest blessings ever New Zealand experienced, for without doubt it will be a war of extermination. Justice demands these bloodthirsty fanatics should be returned to the dust. The time has come, in our minds, when New Zealand must strike for freedom, and this means the death blow to the Māori race.”

The Taranaki News expressed a similar view, also in 1879, but also stated the motivation – land.

“Our rapidly increasing population… demand that these lands should no longer be retained by turbulent, semi-barbarous people, too idle to put them to any good use.”

Māori had put those lands to good use. They’d been feeding not only their own people but the growing populations of Pākehā in Auckland and even Australia. But that kind of industry and wealth was seen as inappropriate for a native race.

It wasn’t what they were or weren’t doing with their land that was the problem. It was who they were and the place they occupied in Pākehā belief systems that offended settler sensibilities.

Classification

“Europeans were at the apex of their own imagined racial hierarchy and they arrived in New Zealand expecting to be in charge.”

Vincent O’Malley

“The notion of racial superiority was deeply ingrained in settler populations. There was absolutely that element of Darwinian natural selection and survival of the fittest thinking that was deeply ingrained in the psyche,” says University of Waikato demographer Tahu Kukutai.

Historian Vincent O’Malley says these beliefs were acted on in political ways.

“The assumption that Māori were a dying people was used to justify all sorts of things, including the acquisition of Māori lands.”

But the assumption of a dying race was just part of a whole worldview that permeated the views and actions of settlers, the Crown and the media that mediated the relationship between them.

The relationship between Māori and Pākehā had deteriorated into outright war because the assumptions that had been latent well before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed could be acted on due to a shift in the demographics. Those actions involved violence and theft. But such actions were always accompanied by a corresponding narrative Pākehā told themselves about what that change meant and what place Māori occupied in New Zealand society as a consequence.

One of the assumptions associated with racial hierarchies was that the Crown was there to serve Pākehā settler interests first, regardless of the numbers. State power was there to be exercised, with violence if necessary, on behalf of white supremacy.

O’Malley says the shift in demographics during the 1850s contributed “massively” to the conflicts over land in the following decade.

“In the earliest period of European settlement, Pākehā had been forced to tolerate Māori and their customs because they were not in a position to do otherwise. But that changed over time. By 1858 an influx of settlers had seen them outnumber Māori for the first time, and with this change in the balance of power came a belief that Pākehā were at last in a position to assert their assumed natural dominance. Europeans were at the apex of their own imagined racial hierarchy and they arrived in New Zealand expecting to be in charge, only to find Māori dominant in many respects. As the demographic balance shifts so do the power dynamics.

“Māori are very quickly overwhelmed demographically and that ties in with the Crown’s efforts to crush Māori independence during the main phase of the New Zealand Wars through the 1860s. So by the time four Māori members are elected to Parliament for the first time in 1868 they are hugely outnumbered by 72 Pākehā MPs, many of whom are actively hostile towards Māori and the Treaty. Māori are marginalised within the whole political system for the next century or more.”

He said this change happened within one generation from the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, as a huge influx of Pākehā settlers overwhelmed Māori numbers.

“At the time the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 there were an estimated 2000 Europeans in New Zealand, mostly concentrated in a few places like Northland. Current estimates of the Māori population for the same period are usually around 80,000-90,000. So Europeans were massively outnumbered.”

Colonisation by the British Crown and other European powers was built on assumptions about indigenous peoples that put them in a subordinate position, with or without the numbers.

The Doctrine of the Discovery was a legal instrument that colonisers used to claim property rights and sovereignty in lands before they were conquered. Even treaties like those signed at Waitangi were, in the eyes of the Crown, simply asserting what had taken place when Cook landed – that the British had claims on the lands of Aotearoa and authority over the people that lived there.

But that belief couldn’t be made real until demographic numbers favoured Pākehā. When that happened, settlers used the violent backing of the Crown to assert their dominance says O’Malley.

“Outside a few small coastal pockets of European settlement, Crown sovereignty remained, for much of the period prior to the 1860s, more a matter of negotiation and persuasion with Māori communities than enforcement.”

“But what the Treaty did do is introduce a new player to the local scene in the form of the Crown, as well as signalling the start of a period of mass British migration to New Zealand that would see Māori reduced to a minority in their own country within two decades. And many of those new settlers were not willing to play second fiddle to a bunch of so-called ‘natives’.”

The 1850s were something of a golden age for Māori prosperity as warfare had died down and trade was booming. But that was overtaken by conflict as Pākehā settlers demanded the Crown give them access to land. The Crown was happy to oblige because that had been its intention all along.

“It is no coincidence that the main sequence of these conflicts – 1860-1872 – begins two years after Māori are outnumbered for the first time and during a phase of rapid growth in settlers numbers. In the mid-1850s Māori were still in the majority. By 1874 they are outnumbered by about six to one.”

Māori and Pākehā population in 19^th century

Tahu Kukutai says this massive shift in demographic balances of power is unique to colonial settler states.

“Māori went from being – and other populations have this experience – the demographic majority to the demographic minority in a very, very, very short period of time. So that’s kind of one of the unique facets of colonisation.”

While the Crown was waging war against Māori on behalf of Pākehā settlers, those same settlers were expressing a belief that Māori were a dying race. This belief was widespread during colonisation not only in New Zealand but in other settler countries that were built on white supremacy ideology.

The Māori population had been declining. The 1820s saw a slight decline due to musket warfare. But the worst damage was caused by the biological bomb of introduced diseases that came with a massive influx of European settlers who carried pathogens that Māori had no immunity to due to their geographical isolation.

Māori seemed to understand the connection better than Pākehā. Missionary William Williams argued with Māori who told him in 1827 that the devastating new epidemics showing up were “brought by the ships.” Neither Williams nor Māori understood the mechanisms of immunity, but Māori were making the more scientific observation.

But Europeans from colonising countries concocted a pseudo-scientific explanation that the high death toll of indigenous peoples was not from a lack of immunity to new diseases but was simply evidence of inferior and superior races.

Kukutai says that in this worldview races could be ranked but it was always those doing the ranking who put themselves at the top of the classification.

O’Malley says this view was common among New Zealand’s political leaders of the day.

“In 1856 the Wellington provincial superintendent, Isaac Featherston, infamously said ‘The Maoris…are dying out, and nothing can save them. Our plain duty as good, compassionate colonists, is to smooth down their dying pillow. Then history will have nothing to reproach us with’. That was followed more than two decades later by A.K. Newman’s comment in 1881 that ‘Taking all things into consideration, the disappearance of the [Māori] race is scarcely a subject for much regret. They are dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race’.”

The high death rates lasted well into the 20^th century and the influenza epidemic gave a stark example of the differences in the health of Māori compared to Pākehā – one estimate is that the Māori death rate was eight times that of Pākehā.

“The impacts of influenza on Māori mortality was outsized,” says Kukutai. “And that really reflects the deleterious conditions that Māori were living in. They were living in third world conditions in a first world country, one of the richest countries in the world. The life expectation of Pākehā was very high. So in the midst of a very wealthy country were some of the poorest people. And they were our people.”

The Native Land Courts continued the job that war and confiscation had started by stripping Māori of their land. But the loss of land through the court was also followed by poverty and population decline. Historian M.P.K Sorenson demonstrated that there were “significant correlations between depopulation and the opening of each territory to land purchase and European settlement.”

Perversely, it was during these periods that a slogan would be trotted out by Pākehā that Māori were privileged, even as they were living in abject poverty and were dying as a result. 

“The upshot was that every time Māori were supposedly privileged, they just lost land.”

Dr Peter Meihana

Peter Meihana is a historian who has studied the theme of Pākehā using the notion of Māori privilege and he says it has a long track record going back to the 18^th Century.

“If you look at it, that’s obviously just not true. There’s so many counters to that argument, whether it’s socio-economic disparities, health, justice, all those kinds of things. Obviously Māori are not privileged.

“But historically, when you look at when it’s claimed that Māori are privileged, it invariably occurs just before Māori are about to lose land. If you look to the periods when Māori lost most of the land, and then just go back a wee way before that, what you’ll invariably find is politicians arguing, or debating over what’s best for Māori. And they argue that Māori are privileged. And what that debate then leads to is a change in policy.

“So in 1900 the Liberals pass a piece of legislation, the Māori Lands Administration Act, which has provisions for Māori to to be able to lease their land. Māori didn’t want to lease their lead, Māori wanted to hold on to their land. And they wanted to develop it themselves, but because there was so much pressure to bring land into production, leasing land was kind of like, we don’t really want to do this, but this is probably the only option we have. And so there’s these provisions to lease land.

“But from 1900 to 1905 you have a concerted effort by the opposition in Parliament and the farmers union who became Federated Farmers arguing that leasing was a form of Māori privilege. They also argued that leasing would was bad for Māori because it would make them indolent. They would lease the land out to Pākehā, Pākehā would pay them a rent in Māori would just sit around smoking tobacco and living indolent lifestyles.

“That campaign that Māori were somehow privileged actually worked. You could see that amendment after amendment after amendment was made to the first piece of legislation so that by 1909, all of the protections that leasing was supposed to have for Māori had gone.

“The upshot was that every time Māori were supposedly privileged, they just lost land.”

The Crown was constantly coming up with legislation to alienate Māori of any land that Pākehā thought they shouldn’t have anyway. This continued right up into the late 20^th century.

But if Māori were supposedly dying off, it also followed they didn’t need to be given much in the way of education. The Native Schools were established around the same time as the Native Land Court. If the court was designed to acquire Māori land for Pakeha settlement, the Native Schools focused on assimilating Māori children and reshaping Māori society as a result.

The Native Schools did this by stripping Māori children of their language and defining their place in the economic order, ie. at the bottom. But in the view of some, the Native Schools were designed to erase Māori altogether.

Historian John Barrington notes in his book Separate but Equal? Māori Schools and the Crown 1867-1969 that: “A major aim of the architects of the 1867 Native Schools Act was to turn Māori into what James Belich aptly describes as ‘Brown Britons’. It was an aim expressed succinctly by F.E. Maning when he wrote in 1873 that ‘I have nothing to report except that if all your schools are going on as well as that of Whirinaki there will soon be no Maoris left in New Zealand.”

The establishment of the Native Schools followed patterns similar to other colonising countries. After the Plains Wars in the United States, it was decided that fighting Native Americans was an expensive exercise for the taxpayer and it would be cheaper to kill off future opposition by assimilating indigenous children. “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” was the logic behind residential schools for indigenous children.

The first one was set up by Cavalry Commander Henry Pratt, who shipped hundreds of captured indigenous children to an old army barracks in Pennsylvania which became the Carlisle Indian School. It became the template for similar residential schools throughout North America where generations of indigenous children suffered catastrophic abuse and erasure of their culture and identity. They were also given a less than higher education because they were expected to occupy low-paying roles in society.

Similarly here, Barrington says the Crown’s education policies were deliberately designed to limit the place Māori were to occupy in the national economy.

“Crown officials responsible for Māori education sometimes did regard differences between Māori and Pākehā as genetic, and this influenced their thinking regarding the most appropriate school policies for Māori, not always to the benefit of Māori.”

“A major characteristic of Crown policy which lasted for at least 80 years after 1867 was a preference on the part of officials to favour manual, domestic, agricultural and technical schooling for Māori, rather than schooling of an academic kind…. The expectation of education officials was that the appropriate place of Māori in the social scale was at the lower end.”

But this trend was bucked by the principal of Te Aute College, John Thornton. He encouraged academically inclined students to go to university. Among those students were Apirana Ngata, Te Rangi Hiroa and Maui Pomare, who would go on to be towering Māori leaders of the 20^th century. But Thornton’s approach was opposed by the Education Department, who dissuaded him. He resisted and was eventually removed from his position.

Ngata, Pomare and Hiroa would be the exception that proved the rule – generations of Māori were effectively blocked from reaching their full potential, accessing wider opportunities and acquiring the skills that would benefit their people. This policy carried on officially until the late 1960s and the residual impacts have persisted to the present.

Recovery

“Māori pretty much lived a de facto segregation eking out a menial existence with very high rates of poverty. So with poverty comes disease. Fifty percent of Māori girls wouldn’t make it to their first birthday.”

Dr tahu kukutai

Much of the decline of the Māori population was due to high rates of infant mortality rather than low fertility. And the high infant mortality was usually related to poverty.

“Māori pretty much lived a de facto segregation eking out a menial existence with very high rates of poverty. So with poverty comes disease. Fifty percent of Māori girls wouldn’t make it to their first birthday. The infant mortality rate was really, really high. So you had high birth rates but many of them didn’t survive,” says Kukutai.

The government didn’t pay much attention to these figures, and in many ways Māori were out of sight, out of mind. But Ngata, Pomare, Te Rangi Hiroa and community leaders like Te Puea in Tainui instigated massive changes that brought about a halt in the decline and eventually a rapid recovery from the 1930s onwards. 

Many of the changes were addressing the poor housing and sanitation that went with it, improving diet and vaccinations. It could be argued that the Māori population recovered because of a separate health system that addressed the specific needs of Māori.

Even Ngata himself wasn’t confident that Māori could recover but thought it important to at least try and halt the decline. And that effort was rewarded – by the 1920s Te Rangi Hiroa could say: “The present generation of Māori people refuses to comply with the picturesque but illogical simile of following the way of the vanishing Māori rat and the extinct Māori dog.”

Kukutai says the efforts of these leaders led to a massive turnaround in the Māori population.

“People like Te Rangi Hiroa and Maui Pomare at that critical point in time were very much focused on Māori-led solutions to public health,” says Kukutai. “And so you saw this range of initiatives, which were really politically led but community executed, really improved what we’d now think of as basic quality of life indicators. That actually made a difference in terms of mortality. So sanitation and housing, these things were linked to TB, and that was a very big driver of mortality in Māori communities.”

The census for 1936 showed the Māori population at 82,326. The census in 1961 recorded the Māori population at 167,086 – more than double in 25 years. Māori were still having large families but now those children were surviving into adulthood. This growth skewed the Māori population towards children. The Māori population has had a younger overall demographic structure ever since.

Len Cook says this meant a high ratio of children to adults, which was particularly marked during urbanisation.

“Around 1945, 45 percent of Māori were under the age of 15 years, and 3 percent were aged 65+ years. But by the mid-sixties children were a clear majority of the population, and the elderly a mere 2 percent,” he says.

But this success caught successive generations of political and community leadership flat-footed, both Māori and Pākehā. Government policy was simply not prepared for the success that was the Māori population recovery.

Some individuals saw this challenge coming and raised warnings. In a collection of essays edited by Sir Apirana Ngata in 1940, economist Horace Bellshaw analysed the demographic growth of Māori and the limited land left and noted that only a small proportion of the Māori population could be supported by employment that was land-based. “The remainder of the population must be supported by other kinds of employment. As the population grows, this proportion will increase.”

He foreshadowed the coming urbanisation of Māori and the changes this would bring, for Māori and Pākehā.

“The full implications… are not yet understood either by the Māori or European communities or by the Government.”

By 1963, just over 20 years after Belshaw wrote those words, the Māori population had not only doubled but had switched from predominantly rural to overwhelmingly urban. This trend would continue. 

With the benefit of hindsight, historians and demographers now recognise that this was the fastest urban shift of any population in the world.

Demographer Ian Pool put Māori urbanisation in an international context: “According to a cross-national study at the University of California (Berkeley), this was perhaps the most rapid urbanward movement of a national population anywhere, at least until the end of the sixties.”

But this rapid shift, combined with the massive growth in the Māori population, led to Māori and Pākehā living in close proximity in large numbers for the first time since the 19^th century. And Pākehā weren’t that thrilled with the prospect. The country has still not come to terms with it or figured out what the place of Māori in New Zealand society is.

But running alongside this steep upward trajectory in the demographics of Māori and rapid urbanisation was a generational anomaly in the Pākehā population.

Ian Pool wrote that: “The Māori population did not go through a ‘baby boom’: it just maintained its high level of fertility … The period 1945-66 saw the Māori population reach record growth levels, just under 4.0 percent per annum in 1956-66. It must be stressed that this came about almost entirely from natural increase. In contrast, even with heavy net migration gains and a ‘baby boom’, Pākehā growth rates barely exceeded 2.0 percent in this period.”

While Māori born during the post-war period went through massive upheavals that often led to disadvantage, Pākehā born during this period were favoured by policy-makers and politicians.

Urbanisation

“The land agent closed the negotiations immediately as he had strict instructions from his principals that on no account must any section be sold to a Māori or to a person who married a Māori.”

Māori Affairs report

Despite cheerful propaganda about the best race relations in the world, behind the scenes government officials were mildly terrified about the sudden influx of large numbers of Māori into urban spaces in close proximity to Pākehā. Often they were more worried about appeasing Pākehā than addressing the needs of Māori.

One example is when New Zealand was weighing whether to sign international conventions – because existing racism could cause embarrassment. The International Labour Organisation adopted the Indigenous Populations Convention in 1957, but New Zealand was cautious about whether it should ratify it.

An interdepartmental report said: “A conference of interested departments was held recently to consider whether the discrimination against Maoris which undoubtedly exists in New Zealand is such that the government would be embarrassed if it ratified the convention.”

The report was also concerned the New Zealand public not be ruffled by its findings. “It is most important that this information be kept confidential to the officers concerned. It should not be discussed with other members of the staff, or the public.”

Buried in Archives are numerous reports and documents recording the Government’s response – and the response of wider Pākehā society. Whole thick folders of reports and correspondence record the government’s concerns about the negative response from Pākehā and the challenges facing Māori. Some of the titles speak for themselves – one is called “Incidence of Colour Line 1958-61” and another was called “Race Relations – Integration, Segregation 1963-67.”

While there have always been pockets of Māori communities in the main centres – Ngāti Whātua and Tainui in Auckland, Te Ati Awa in Wellington – their existence was always on the margins where they were had been pushed after the influx of settlers.

One bunch of documents includes a survey by Māori Affairs, recording the living conditions of a group of Māori living in a paddock near market gardens in Panmure in the late 1940s.

One of the families – and their circumstances were typical – was Hare and Moengaroa from Hokianga who were in their late 20s and had five children under 10. Hare worked in the tallow department, dealing with the animal fat, at Westfield Freezing Works while Moengaroa worked on the market gardens. They lived in a tent with an extension made from packing cases. The Māori Affairs officer commented that it “leaked badly, not fit for habitation.” Washing was in a tub outside which was filled from tap water that had to be “carried a distance.” The toilet was the usual “primitive pit privy.”

The officer also recorded that for many of the families: “conditions at home locality worse and they do not want to go back.”

He also noted “large family appears eligible for Social Security but not drawing any. Conditions bad and better accommodation is necessary.”

If Māori had been romanticised in absentia when living in rural areas out of Pākehā sight, the stereotype quickly changed. At first Māori had difficulty getting access to state houses because of resistance from authorities. But they also had difficulty getting access to housing in the private sector. Māori Affairs collated whole reams of examples from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Reports are littered throughout the documents of reports of racism in the housing market. One, from 1965, said: “Hamilton recorded complaints from neighbours who objected to the idea of Maoris being housed next door. One Maori couple were refused accommodation in a block of Rotorua flats for racial reasons.”

Another example shows the prejudice that was aimed at both Māori Affairs, which was trying to provide more housing for the huge influx, and individual Māori. 

It wasn’t just Māori or Māori Affairs who were shunned but anyone associated with them in a report included in documents titled: “Terry Spring, an officer of this Department who married a Māori girl, negotiated for a housing section about two years through one of the local agents. He was taken to this particular subdivision in Tikipunga. After being shown the section the land agent found out he was an officer of the department and immediately questioned him whether the department was going to purchase it. On being assured that the department had nothing to do with this section he proceeded with the negotiation. However, when the deal was concluded Mr Spring disclosed the fact that he had a Māori wife. The land agent closed the negotiations immediately as he had strict instructions from his principals that on no account must any section be sold to a Māori or to a person who married a Māori.”

Even those who lived in Auckland for generations weren’t safe. Ngāti Whātua were booted out of their papakāinga in Orakei in the 1950s and their houses torched so the Queen wouldn’t have to look at them when she visited.

While there were complaints about the state of urban Māori housing, there were conflicting views about what the solution might be. The council in Pukekohe had petitioned central government to address the problem of Māori working on the market gardens living in substandard conditions. Until the 1950s, children were dying in Pukehohe from such poverty-related illnesses as typhoid.

In the early 1940s Māori Affairs implemented a scheme to build new houses and get rid of the existing slum conditions in Pukekohe. “However, once the project was underway the council then objected to having Māori living within the town’s boundaries.”

In many instances Māori taking up residence in predominantly white areas led to adverse reactions from neighbours. A Māori welfare officer was approached by a Pākehā who vented “his feelings about the devaluing of his property by our action in settling a Māori on the adjoining section.” In another instance a Pākehā homeowner built an extremely high corrugated iron fence to shut out the sight of his Māori neighbour. Māori Affairs documented numerous incidents around the country of real estate agents, landlords and developers refusing Māori as customers or tenants. There were also incidents where Māori were refused service or were served differently to Pākehā in hairdressers, pubs, hotels, banks and other private businesses.

Freemans Bay was another area that served as a beachhead for whānau moving to Auckland. The areas around Nelson, Beresford and Howe Streets were regularly in the media for the dire state of the housing. It was one of the first issues Whina Cooper confronted when she moved to Auckland. One letter to the editor of a newspaper described “whole streets of decadent buildings” in the area of which “646 of 730 properties being without basins, 176 without baths, 65 have no sinks and 39 no water-closets (toilets), reveals a sordid picture.” Words like ‘sordid’ and ‘decadent’ were scattered throughout official correspondence.

But by the 1950s the conditions had deteriorated to the point the Auckland City Council and the government decided on a slum clearance using the Public Works Act (a bitter irony, given many Māori had already lost land to this Act which had driven them out of their own tribal homelands and were now losing a home to live in). A line was drawn on a map and many of the decrepit houses inside the line were levelled. 

Quite where the residents were supposed to go was not given any great thought. Eventually the suburb of Otara was created and many of the Māori residents of Freeman’s Bay ended up there, alongside Pacific Islanders who had been brought to the country as cheap labour. Otara’s proximity to industrial areas was no mistake.

The creation of suburbs like Otara in Auckland coincided with the abandonment of an earlier policy referred to as pepper-potting, where Māori were supposed to be scattered among Pakeha to make them assimilate. This was an updated version of a policy in the 19^th century that aimed to plant Pākehā settlers among Māori to civilise the latter and prevent them from rebellion. It was also an attempt to prevent the ghettoisation of inner cities that New Zealand officials were aware of happening in the US with the concentration of African-Americans in cities during migrations to northern cities over the 20^th century.

But the pepper-potting policy collapsed under the sheer weight of numbers – not to mention the objections of Pākehā to having Māori neighbours – and the policy was eventually abandoned. Whole suburbs were created within a short period to house Māori and Pacific Island people. In the end Māori ended up in virtual segregation in certain urban enclaves and clustered in low-skilled sectors of the economy. Alongside a tendency to have larger families, this led to further social and economic pressures.

In one group of documents in the archives, Māori Affairs wrote to government agencies in other countries, including Australia, the US and even Israel, asking how these countries managed their immigrant populations. Māori were effectively being viewed as a foreign population in their own country.

Authorities were originally resistant to Māori accessing state housing, but once they did, state housing started to become stigmatised as for poor brown people, not working class Pākehā.

Despite these prejudices, many whānau enjoyed and benefited from the opportunities that their new environment offered. But when the economy began to turn from one of full employment during the 1950s and 60s to a labour surplus from the early 1970s onwards, social and economic pressures increased. Pacific peoples had been imported during labour shortages of the 1950s but during the 1970s they were targeted by immigration and police for deportation.

But Māori who had been relocated during the same period for similar reasons could not be so easily ‘sent back’. 

Containment and Control

“There is probably no subject in the field of law and order that can provoke more selective and distorted coverage from the media, or more emotive and often ill-informed rhetoric from those in authority, than gangs.”

Sir Clinton Roper in “the Report of the Committee of the Inquiry into Violence, 1987″

It was during this period that Māori children – and whole communities – were targeted by welfare and police. A policy of police and welfare working together led to J-Teams, teams of welfare officers and police patrolling areas like South Auckland. The original intention of the policy was to support children but it ended up funneling thousands of children into welfare institutions where they suffered violence and abuse. Many of these children then went on to fill prisons and form the core of ethnic gangs that emerged and escalated in the 1970s in particular. 

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care has found that up to 40 percent of Māori children who went through the welfare system ended up in prison. But this connection was already known about back in the 1970s and 80s. A Department of Justice report on Paremoremo Prison in 1986 by John Meek tracked the background of prison inmates and found that many had been through the welfare system and then progressed straight into the criminal justice system. 

“Many have spent a large proportion of their lives in state-run institutions and some have experienced the whole gamut of social welfare, penal and psychiatric institutions. A not unfamiliar pattern is for an individual to have progressed through the social welfare system to Kohitere Boys’ Training Centre, from there to borstal, then one or more short prison sentences in lower security prisons before arriving in maximum security having been sentenced to a major term of imprisonment for a serious offence.”

“Many characteristics of the Paremoremo inmate group apply equally to the general prison population. There is a massive over-representation of Māori inmates, extensive previous offending and prevalence of deprived backgrounds. A high proportion have histories of family disruption and pathology, poor material conditions during childhood, education failure, early entry into the criminal justice system, drug/alcohol abuse and emotional instability. These features tend to be even more pervasive among maximum security prisoners.”

In another later report on gangs in 1992, Meek pointed out the police were the government’s and media’s main source of information about gangs, which distorted the picture and left out a number of causative factors. 

“The main source of information about gangs is the police. However, the police approach to gangs as a ‘crime problem’ rather than a social phenomenon has severe limitations.”

“The media publicise gangs; they don’t tell us much about them.”

Meek quoted Sir Clinton Roper in the Report of the Committee of the Inquiry into Violence, known as the Roper Report, in 1987:

“There is probably no subject in the field of law and order that can provoke more selective and distorted coverage from the media, or more emotive and often ill-informed rhetoric from those in authority, than gangs.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Because of the Crown’s previous education policy, Māori who moved to the city had limited options in the employment they ended up in. Many became concentrated in industries like roading and freezing works, which was fine when these jobs were plentiful. But this made Māori vulnerable to sudden shifts in politics and the economy. That sudden shift arrived on both fronts in 1984 with Rogernomics, although dark clouds had been on the horizon since the energy crisis of the early 1970s. 

While farmers still had their land when reforms hit during the 1980s and most hung on, the impact of the removal of agricultural subsidies cascaded down to those at the processing end of the industry who only had their labour to make a living. This was acutely felt in places like Patea and Hawkes Bay, that saw whole Māori communities tossed out of work overnight.

Whakatu Freezing Works near Hastings closed in 1986, sending more than 2000 staff out of work overnight. Tomoana Freezing Works followed in 1994. Mangaroa Prison opened in Hawkes Bay in 1989.

While Māori were constantly adapting to the economic and social upheavals of this period, they were also challenging the political status quo. The Crown had either ignored or patronised or punished previous generations of Māori leaders and political movements, including the Kingitanga, Kotahitanga, Ratana and other significant collective responses. But a generation of Māori who had grown up in cities had more experience dealing with Pākehā and were prepared to be more confrontational.

The Crown had regarded the Treaty of Waitangi as a practical and legal nullity that was to be gradually done away with as Māori were effectively erased by assimilation, but Māori of the post-war generation had different ideas. Their fathers had fought in the Māori Battalion as the price of citizenship and they believed it was time the Crown honoured that commitment and the obligations of the treaty. Pākehā assumptions about New Zealand society’s race relations were rattled and are still unsettled. Māori political expression and participation has constantly been portrayed as some kind of threat to Pākehā dominance.

But while Māori were going through these changes and challenges in the post-war period that have shaped Māori society to this day, Pākehā during this era were going through a generational spike that still has a massive influence but in quite different but parallel ways.

Pākehā born between 1946 and 1963 – a cohort often referred to as Baby Boomers – are something of a demographic anomaly. Globally, white Baby Boomers in Western countries have been a dominant force throughout their lives, something they expect to continue.

“There was no baby boom for the Māori population, it is exclusively a Pākehā phenomenon,” says Kukutai. “Pakeha fertility was declining. And then you’ve got the Baby Boom. Well, it’s actually more of a marriage boom with a lot of premature babies, very large, very large, very, very large, premature babies being born,” she laughs.

“That lasted longer than other similar countries. You get through that baby boom period and then fertility continues its downward trend. So the baby boom was, in the long range, a bit of an aberration. But it didn’t happen for Māori. Māori fertility was always high.”

But this anomaly and those who belong to this cohort have enjoyed advantages throughout every stage of their lives. Their childhoods coincided with the economic prosperity of the post-war period, they were the first generation to go to university in large numbers when it was free and then the economic restructures of the 1980s – which they instigated – have, in the long-run, largely benefited them while leaving others behind (including many from among their own numbers).

The experience of Māori born during this period has been completely different and now their mokopuna are going to be an even larger part of Aotearoa’s future.

But will the incoming government continue to govern in the interests of Pākehā Baby Boomers, even though they are entering their final decades? Or will it look to the future that is going to be increasingly defined by growing generations of Māori and Pasifika?

NEXT: A Young, Browner Future for NZ

• Made with the support of the Public Interest Journalism Fund