Maori Identity: Tahu Kukutai - Imagining a Post-Settlement Future: In this together?

Students playing basketball at Albany Senior High School. Tahu Kukutai writes that New Zealand has yet to make the most of its greatest asset: its people. [Image by phototek.]

Imagining a Post-Settlement Future: In this together?

by Tahu Kukutai

Abstract

Demographic changes, the rise of the Māori economy, and the longer-term effects of the Treaty settlement process call for new ways of thinking about national challenges and where Māori fit. Māori people and iwi organisations may well yet turn out to be this country’s most under-utilised resource.

With the November general election in sight, and fractures appearing on either side of the political spectrum, we can expect a good deal of posturing about what is needed to deliver practical and workable solutions to New Zealand’s key challenges. Lifting our poor productivity ranking within the OECD and closing the growing income gap with Australia will be high on the list. Treaty settlements and race relations will also invariably feature. However, rather than envisage how Māori can contribute to tackling New Zealand’s ‘wicked’ problems, early indications are that Māori will be assigned, yet again, the tedious status of wicked problem-maker.

As New Zealand seeks to dig itself from the trenches of second-tier OECD countries, polarized race politics can only distract. Demographic changes, the rise of the Māori economy, and the longer-term effects of the Treaty settlement process call for new ways of thinking about national challenges and where Māori fit. New Zealand faces serious structural impediments in terms of its spatial isolation, low connectivity, and low population scale and density. The onset of rapid population ageing and the persistence of ethnic gaps in education, health and employment pose additional challenges. In the age of globally-connected knowledge-driven economies, New Zealand has yet to make the most of its greatest asset: its people. Māori people and iwi organisations may well yet turn out to be this country’s most under-utilised resource.

The new BERL report, The Māori Economy, Science and Innovation: Scenarios of Potential, Opportunity and Value, estimates the value of the Māori economy at $37 billion – a modest but growing contribution to the national economy. It identifies the crucial role that science and innovation must play if the Māori economy, and New Zealand, is to capitalise on the progress that Māori have made in the last decade, and estimates the losses that will ensue under a ‘do nothing’ scenario. Rather than dismiss Māori self-determining aspirations as racially divisive and fiscally inimical to national advancement, the way ahead surely lies in leveraging Māori aspirations for the collective good.

Long-term investment and effort in developing labour force skills and capabilities is a priority. By 2026 Māori are projected to comprise nearly one fifth of the younger working aged population (15 – 29 years), with the percentage much higher in some regions. While government gears up for big increases in the number of older Europeans, the implications of shrinking cohorts at the younger ages, where Māori and Pasifika peoples are most concentrated, have barely registered.

Making the most of the youthful Māori age structure requires long-term strategic planning and sustained investment. To wit, the proportion of Māori and Pasifika boys leaving school without a formal qualification remains unacceptably high. In a post-settlement context, iwi increasingly have the wherewithal and, one hopes, the political will, to assume a greater role in building a well-educated, highly-skilled, and culturally confident Māori workforce.

Māori as global citizens

The post-settlement era also affords the opportunity for Māori to re-imagine their place in the world. Indigenous self-determining aspirations might be parochial in focus and motivation, but are increasingly pursued in the context of globalization and agglomeration; of rapid technological change and innovation; of risk and uncertainty. New Zealand’s stagnation vis-à-vis Australia means ideas that might have once seemed absurd, for example, a single Australasian capital market and currency, and even incorporation into an Australasian federation, now seem less so.¹ Shifting regional alliances will raise thorny questions about the role of the Treaty, indigenous rights, and the place of Māori. For some, the response will be to resist change and champion existing arrangements: a ‘two people’ paradigm on the edge of the global economy.

This in part reflects a fear that the status and rights of Māori as Treaty partner and tangata whenua might be eroded by greater incorporation into a regional or global polity. Such anxieties are magnified when conservative elements continue to deny the unique status of Māori as original peoples, while espousing an antiquated, Eurocentric vision of ‘one country, one people’. In navigating Māori through the changes that will inevitably occur, bold and visionary leadership will be required.

In a demographic sense Māori are already pushing the boundaries of Te Ao Māori beyond the shores of home. About one in six Māori now live in Australia and, like their non-Māori counteparts, are becoming more transnational, moving across the Tasman regularly, and having familial and financial roots in both places. Māori populations also exist in North America, Asia and the United Kingdom, and tend to be better educated and more skilled than Māori on either side of the Tasman. As long as the trans-Tasman income gap endures and well-educated Māori can get higher returns on their education investment offshore, they will leave in significant numbers. How Māori and iwi organisations and businesses respond to these shifts in coming decades will reveal much about their readiness to adapt to external exigencies. Engaging with the global Māori diaspora is not simply a practical matter of leveraging skills and capital. It also involves grappling with tricky questions about collective identity, obligations, community boundaries, and belonging.

Rethinking ‘intimate others’ at home

As more iwi move from grievance to development mode, and as New Zealand undergoes rapid ethnic diversification, Māori are also being forced to rethink relationships with ‘intimate others’. Mason Durie has cautioned against fetishizing the Treaty and notes the missed opportunities that will arise if Māori continue to be locked into an adversarial relationship with the Crown and, relatedly, with Europeans.² Changing demographics suggest the Māori-European relationship is an historical moment that might well be relegated to the rear-view mirror in coming generations. In 1981, 83 per cent of the population was classfied as European but by 2026 the share is projected to be around 68 per cent. By that time peoples from Asia will almost certainly equal Māori in number, and their growth will continue to outpace that of Māori.

There will invariably be tensions as Māori adjust to the implications of no longer being New Zealand’s largest ethnic minority. As ethnic diversification ensues, there is the risk that Māori will be relegated to the bottom of a new ethnic hierarchy, particularly if there are large gaps between the education and skills levels of Māori and expanding migrant groups. The ongoing marginalization of native Hawaiians is a case in point. Ethnic hierarchies are remarkably difficult to shift once embedded. Now is the time for Māori individuals, communities and organisations to be thinking about the relationships they want to have with non-European New Zealanders, and how best to foster them.

Internal segmentation

As globalization and technological change create larger cleavages between core and peripheral economies, the potential for segmentation between nations, within nations, and within peoples also increases. In a post-settlement context, there is a real risk that the growth of Māori and iwi wealth will exacerbate, rather than reduce, social class differences. Inequality is found in all societies and Māori are no exception, with a growing body of work attesting to large gaps between Māori across a range of social and economic outcomes. In general, those who identify solely as Māori are more disadvantaged than those who identify as both Māori and European, which in unsurprising given the legacy of European privilege. More recent work suggests that the costs and opportunities associated with ‘being Māori’ vary depending on how Māori identity is measured. In short, considerable care needs to be taken when trying to draw causal linkages between ethnicity, indigeneity, and disadvantage.³

Looking ahead, a key challenge for Māori will be to minimize the distance between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ by growing the Māori middle-class and reducing the share living in poor economic circumstances. In a post-settlement context, Māori owners of capital have the means and moral obligation to engage in the broader goal of realising the potential of all Māori, not just elites. For iwi this means having a robust and transparent distributional model and fair governance that genuinely represents the interests of the collective. Most iwi will be keen to avoid privatized dependency and to foster greater participation and connectedness. Drawing those on the periphery firmly into the centre of iwi wealth will be a difficult but necessary task.

Footnotes

1. McCann, P. 2009. Economic geography, globalisation and New Zealand’s productivity paradox, New Zealand Economic Papers, 43: 3, 279 – 314. back ↩
2. Durie, M. 2009. Pae Mana: Waitangi and the Evolving State, The Paerangi Lectures: Maori Horizons 2020 and Beyond. back ↩
3. Kukutai. T. 2010. The thin brown line: Re-indigenizing inequality in Aotearoa New Zealand, unpublished PhD thesis, Stanford University. back ↩

About the author

Dr Tahu Kukutai (Waikato-Maniapoto, Te Aupōuri) is Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis, University of Waikato. She specializes in Māori population research and has written extensively on issues of Māori identity, inequality and population change for New Zealand and international audiences.