Time to put the house in order

LAST year was not a very good one for the New Zealand Maori. Some would say few have been since the arrival of the European, but a few years ago things were starting to look up.

The success of Te Maori , the first comprehensive exhibition of 1000 years of Maori art to be mounted oversea.?, boosted pride in the uniqueness of New Zealand among Maori and pakeha alike. Many recognised for the first time the beauty, wealth and strength of a heritage they had taken for granted. [ It raised the awareness of Maori, especially the young, to the richness of their culture. The acclaim the exhibition received when it toured the United States in 1984-85 made pakeha New Zealanders

appreciate that they shared something special

which for years they had tended to ignore. 1 Te Maori coincided with something of a renaissance in the Maori language, culture, song, the performing arts, carving and weaving. Kohanga r eo kindergartens made sure that Maori toddlers Could speak their own language as well as English

:>> the time they went to school. Even pakeha started taking Maori language classes and the schools began to ensure that European youngsters learned something of the history and culture of their

Blow countrymen.

But all this could not hide the fact that the Maori were as |isad\ antaged and underprivileged as most minorities in devel >ped Western countries, and in many cases more so Several years later, there has been little change in this situation.

Radical reform of the New Zealand economy, which was just retting under way when Te Maori opened, continued apace luring 1991 and if anything the plight of the Maori along with hat of their Pacific Island cousins worsened.

Official figures show that the odds remain stacked against the Maori from birth. Maori infants are admitted to hospital at twice he rate of Europeans and are twice as likely to fall victim to cot lea th. The average pakeha lives seven to eight years longer.

Nearly 40 per cent of Maori students leave school with no formal ualifications. By age 17, four out of 10 have been before the courts.

Maori account for more than half the prison population.

Nearly 28 per cent of Maori men and 26 per cent of Maori -omen are unemployed the national average is 10 per cent. )nly 42 per cent of Maori own homes, against three-quarters of le rest of the population. The health statistics are horrifying: Maori women have the highest rate of lung cancer in the world; )ur to five times more Maori die from diabetes, rheumatism and eart disease than non-Maori, and Maori have a high dependence n alcohol and drugs.

“We are poor, unskilled and unqualified, in bad health and irgely dependent upon the state for our economic existence,” says inner Maori Affairs Minister Winston Peters. “Maori are on the

New Zealand

outside of society, looking in.”

It is a situation that disadvantages Maori and deprives all of New Zealand. An official report noted last year; “This will become increasingly significant as Maori progressively make up a greater percentage of New Zealand’s population.

Already some 20.4 per cent of children in primary school arc Maori. For such a large group of New Zealanders to be disadvantaged is a severe impediment to the social and economic progress of New Zealand.”

Part of the problem has been the failure of Maoridom to unite, define its needs and work together to bring pressure on the government to improve the lot of its indigenous people.

Sadly, although the need became greater in 1991, the year saw this failure to achieve unity exacerbated. There was probably more friction within Maoridom than there has been for years.

Maori leaders were at loggerheads and pakeha sympathy for their cause began to diminish in the wake of increasing confusion within Maoridom.

European patience began to ebb as Maori fought among themselves and demonstrated repeatedly that much as they sought greater control over their own affairs, whether they were capable of looking after them was seriously arguable.

A classic example of this was a report on the office of the Maori Trustee, a sort of combined investment, land and rent manager, family lawyer and social welfare agency. The report showed a disgraceful state of affairs, in which the office had been running an operating deficit of more than 5735,000 a year for six years and had accumulated a loss to beneficiaries of more than 524 million in the same period.

Of 125,000 beneficia lies, the office knew the correct names and addresses of only 8000. It was a hopeless muddle, worsened by the trustee’s SIS million involvement in a controversial Maori deal to buy the Quality Inns hotel chain in New Zealand.

Peters sacked the Maori Trustee for allegedly ignoring instructions to stay out of the deal, but he was then reinstated before retiring, apparently for legal reasons. Peters (at the time of writing the most popular politician in the country) was himself subsequently sacked as Maori Affairs Minister ostensibly not over this affair, but because of his refusal to stop criticising the government’s economic policy.

It all underlined pakeha confusion over just what is going on in Maoridom and prompted calls from one or two outspoken Maori to their people to stop blaming Europeans and the government for their woes and start putting their own house in order. As Maori author Alan Duff [Once Were Warriors ) wrote; “For God’s sake, let’s end this moaning and finger-pointing and go out and start doing for ourselves, eh? Because quite frankly, other New Zealanders are getting sick of us.” n

David

Barber