MAORI SEATS’ DODGY ORIGINS

Although I appreciate the Editorial view (“Basic instinct”, July 29) that inviting a majority to rule on the rights of a minority is undesirable, I am dismayed by the assumption shared by many Pakeha that the Maori seats owe their existence to our colonising forebears’ desire to give Maori a voice in government. If only such nobility were the truth.

The historical reasons for the creation of the four original Maori electorates is described in Professor Alan Ward’s excellent 1974 historical account A Show of Justice: Racial “Amalgamation” in Nineteenth Century New Zealand. As he explains, the colonists had for years successfully barred Maori from political representation by deeming that land held “in common” did not meet the Westminster requirement that only male landowners were entitled to vote.

However, over several years, the efforts of the

Maori Land Court to break down communal title so that the land could be more easily alienated led to the situation where in many of the electorates of the 1860s, Pakeha landowners were in danger of being outnumbered by Maori, now beginning to hold land in individual title.

Foreseeing what to them were undesirable consequences of creeping individualised title, the political leaders of the day negotiated a “solution” designed to lock Maori into a permanently powerless minority of four in a House where Pakeha numbered 72.

The deal was quietly conducted between the leaders of the provincial councils of the time. The proposal was that

three seats would be located in the North Island and one in the South Island. On a per capita basis, if altruism had been the Maori Representation Act’s motivation, Maori in 1867 would have been entitled to 14-16 seats.

The Winston Peters proposal to hold a binding referendum on a subject about which most of the Pakeha voting public is abysmally ignorant is at best merely dodgy dog-whistling. At worst it invites us to entrench the blatant racism of our political forebears through sheer lack of understanding of the ways our country’s past continues to shape our present. Surely we are better than this? Barbara Menzies (Avondale, Auckland)