The Treaty Settlement Process: Neoliberalism with Maori characteristics
WHEN THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT OF 1990-99 came up with the “Treaty Settlement Process” (TSP) it created a winning strategy. No single state initiative has done more to pacify the principal casualties of the economic and social changes of the past 30 years. By laying the foundations of what Dr Elizabeth Rata calls “neo-tribal capitalism”, the TSP interposed a rapidly expanding Maori middle-class between an impoverished Maori working-class and the Settler State elites. Without the TSP, the huge transfer of wealth and resources from ordinary New Zealanders to those privileged elites could not have been accomplished.
By the time the Fourth Labour Government was voted out of office at the end of 1990, its neoliberal policies had laid to waste huge swathes of Maoridom. Whole communities had been devastated by mass lay-offs in the state-owned forests, Post Office and railways, as well as the privately owned freezing-works and car assembly plants. A disproportionately large number of these displaced workers were Maori.
The Treasury’s preferred method of dealing with mass unemployment was to let the jobless rot on a benefit. Retraining and re-employing redundant workers was deemed to be both cost ineffective and ideologically unsound.
The results were entirely predictable. In a frighteningly short period of time all the familiar social pathologies of poverty: drug addiction, child abuse, domestic violence, marriage breakdown and gang-related crime; began to unravel the working-class Maori suburbs of Auckland and Wellington. While dealing with these pathologies imposed a massive fiscal burden on the state, the alternative – an activist government intervening to create jobs and strengthen communities – was dismissed as unacceptable. The whole point of the Douglas-Richardson Revolution was to put an end to state interventionism.
The skewed ethnicity of this new “underclass” (as journalists were beginning to call it) did, however, present the new National Government with a problem. Maori nationalist sentiment had grown rapidly in the 1980s – most particularly in the agitation for tino rangatiratanga – Maori Sovereignty. The possibility that these radical ideas might be transmitted to and taken up by unemployed Maori was a source of considerable concern among Pakeha elites. A mass Maori uprising, inspired by tino rangatiratanga, could only be contained by the use of deadly force – a course of action that would almost certainly spark a civil war.
The TSP, by contrast, could serve as an effective diversion from the misery and anger gripping urban Maori. By nominating traditional iwi as the Crown’s key negotiating partners the Settler State offered a sense of historical continuity and by enlisting the talents and shifting the focus of Maori nationalist leaders it deprived the Maori underclass of the tino rangatiratanga firebrands who might otherwise have set it alight.
Even so, it was a near-run thing. The occupation of Moutoa Gardens in Whanganui in early-1995 balanced on a taiaha-edge between peaceful protest and violent insurrection. The Government of Jim Bolger and Douglas Graham (the minister responsible for the TSP) held their hand and the occupiers refused to be provoked. The Whanganui confrontation, which could so easily have ended in disaster, caused the Crown’s negotiators to redouble their efforts.
By the end of the decade the TSP was well entrenched. The multi-million dollar Ngai Tahu and Tainui settlements had demonstrated the awesome commercial potential of the neo-tribal capitalist model. The tribes’ corporate structures were offering employment to Maori graduates, and tribal scholarships were supplying the Settler State with the highly-educated Maori personnel it needed to give bureaucratic expression to the “Treaty partnership” which the New Zealand Court of Appeal deemed to have existed between Maori and the Crown since 1840.
The creation and consolidation of the Maori middle-class which the TSP and the partnership model facilitated has proved to be a shrewd investment on the part of the Settler State. It has been achieved at a fraction of the cost of effectively educating and gainfully employing the tens-of-thousands of untrained and unemployed rangatahi. Indeed, the transfer of wealth (in the form of Crown cash and resources) from the poorest Maori communities to wealthy tribal elites (the Iwi Leadership Group) mirrors neatly the transfer of wealth from the 99 percent to the top 1 percent of income earners that is the hallmark of neoliberalism globally.
The cost – a large urban Maori underclass in the grip of all the evils to which poverty gives rise – has not yet risen to the point where the Pakeha elites feel compelled to do more than refine and expand their techniques for social control. That the new Ministry for Vulnerable Children will feature a large number of middle-class Maori professionals, appointed to ensure that the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi are upheld, even as the children of Maori poverty are made the guinea-pigs of National’s “social investment” ideology, merely reinforces what an extraordinary success the TSP has become.
“The TSP, by contrast, could serve as an effective diversion from the misery and anger gripping urban Maori. By nominating traditional iwi as the Crown’s key negotiating partners the Settler State offered a sense of historical continuity and by enlisting the talents and shifting the focus of Maori nationalist leaders it deprived the Maori underclass of the tino rangatiratanga firebrands who might otherwise have set it alight.”
The TSP is a political “success”, a kind of “appeasement” process, the governments of past and present having conned Maori as a whole into being given the impression that past injustices have been corrected or compensated for, to some degree at least.
For some Maori they may have regained a feeling of dignity, the iwi leaders have been able to pat themselves on their shoulders, but as Chris writes, many urban Maori seem to be getting little or no benefit through the treaty settlements. Some will argue, they should reconnect with their iwi and hapu and try and take advantage of some benefits they may enjoy by working with their traditional leaders.
But in the end, this was all a bit of a side show, I reckon, as the settlements are deemed to be FINAL, so there will be no legal coming back to claim or reclaim more, once the last chapter is closed.
That is where it will eventually unravel. Those that thought they will have some land and finances to work with and prepare for a better future of Maoridom, they will soon enough see, they live in a capitalist and commercial world, where business competes. You may have Maori businesses or even corporations, but they will have to deliver the “profits” or gains for their shareholders and owners.
If they cannot compete or hold their ground, they will eventually fail and go under. They will perhaps also be forced to sell assets, to survive, and we will be back to square one.
The same applies to individual Maori or living in small hapu and within their whanau, they are still having to compete on the labour markets and all other markets.
And when the population grows the land does not grow at the same time, so more needs to be done with it, and smartly. Some though will have covenants placed on it or limited potential for use.
The world has not changed, that is the world we have, for the treaty settlements that occurred.
So a bigger plan must be worked out, to ensure Tangata Whenua will have their secure, proud and well protected, advanced, developed place in New Zealand, for ages to come, rather than remain in significant part the poor cousin on the margins.
Perhaps it is time for a new movement or sorts?
Great analysis. The trick of the right is to take something that could be good and beneficial like the treaty settlements, but turn it around, by making normally good people into greedy guzzling cronies of their ideologies with generous cash and asset payouts and weasel words. Somehow they get tied up in this and can’t untangle.
Urban Maori got nothing. Less than nothing as the growing underclass has proved.
A lot has been said about Chinese only owning 3% of NZ land (if you believe Natz statistics, which I don’t) but in the context of Maori only own 5% of land that is a lot in 8 years and is probably a lot higher than 3%. Our country is for sale to foreigners and the TPP will take away any control over Maori land for them anyway.
The blame game that will come with disillusionment will point in all directions but the right ones and increased racial tension will result.
Non-Maori in general will somehow be blamed for cheating the urban poor Maori of their promised settlement advantage, while the non-Maori middle class will say: “you’ve had your money, you’re not getting more.”
Meanwhile, the elites on both sides, profiting from the situation, remain either invisible or sacrosanct.
Unfortunately for them – and us – the situation in New Zealand will eventually become unmanageable.
On the other hand, in the meanwhile the elites will have fully embraced globalism, so when the shit hits the fan they will all happily decamp for Hawaii or the GC.
The only useful way to counter the threat will be for meaningful plans to be made to intervene through multi-layered education, social restructuring and job creation. And the sooner the better. This will require foresight, compromise and commitment on all sides. I doubt if the Nats will be much interested in attending that one either.
A great leveler is heading our way: https://www.dollarvigilante.com/blog/2016/08/21/trillionaire-rothschild-warns-central-banking-system-failing-buys-gold.html
The biggest privatization program in this country’s history.
Where do we go if we want to see aboriginals “doing well”? I assume that by “doing well” you mean abandoning their own culture and traditions and assimilating into European settler culture? The French who did the same when the German Nazis invaded were called “collaborators”, and it wasn’t meant as a compliment. When the totally unsustainable white Australia experiment sputters and dies (as energy descent and climate change will force it to sooner or later), the Māori there will not be doing so well, and nor will any aboriginals who have managed to be “doing well” under settler rules. At that point the aboriginals who have resisted the massive environmental destruction caused by an extraction-based economy might be publicly recognised as the heroes they are, despite the fact they aren’t “doing well” by the standards of capitalists and their casually white supremacist fellow-travellers.