A Trojan horse

Whanau Ora is the child of MMP. It is the Maori Party’s policy for tribal selfdetermination. While politicians will claim it’s not a Maori-only policy, the documentation shows it is. It has been designed to direct hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into empowering tribal groups for self-rule, independent from the state but funded by it.

The policy has had a long gestation. It was first announced in January 2000, under the guise of ‘Closing the Gaps,’ as a flagship policy of Helen Clark’s Labour government. The Prime Minister established a special Closing the Gaps Cabinet Committee and committed $140 million to the policy over four years. Tariana Turia, then associate Minister of Maori Affairs and a member of the Closing the Gaps Cabinet Committee, explained the agenda underpinning the policy was “iwi self-determination through effecting a Treaty-based partnership . . . or Maori, the main point of the closing the gaps policy is to ensure Maori are not prevented from having the best possible chance to lead, manage and control their own development”.

Sold as a policy to reduce disparities between Maori and non-Maori, the aim of ‘closing the gaps’ was to devolve state funding to Maori control. Through ‘closing the gaps,’ Labour was embracing the radical self-determination agenda of the Maori sovereignty movement, and by promoting ‘capacity-building,’ taxpayers were being forced to pick up the cost of up-skilling tribal groups ready for separatist self-rule. The policy was on course to deliver massive funding to Maori over and above the level of state funding available to other New Zealanders, until Simon Chapple, a senior policy analyst at the Department of Labour, released a groundbreaking report that exposed a fundamental flaw in the government’s closing the gaps strategy.

Using census and Statistics New Zealand data, the report revealed that rather than widening, the gaps between Maori and nonMaori were closing. While disadvantage did exist, it was found across all ethnic groups. It pointed out that intermarriage had blurred the boundaries between races, and that ethnicity was not a pre-determining factor for socio-economic disparity.

The paper acknowledged that significant disadvantage was being experienced by some Maori, who lacked education and skills and lived in isolated areas where there were no jobs, but it reiterated that those who were the most disadvantaged in society crossed all ethnic boundaries, and that government policy to support and lift those families should not be race-based.

The paper warned that policies that are based on the transfer of large amounts of taxpayer funding for the purpose of reducing inequality are doomed to be captured by tribal corporations: “broad-based policies which target the Maori population, which may be thought to close the gaps (such as fisheries settlements, other Treaty settlements, cheap access to radio spectrum etc) risk being captured by the considerable number of Maori who already have jobs, skills, high incomes and good prospects”.

Opposition to closing the gaps increased. Winston Peters called it “social apartheid”. Dr Rajen Prasad, the Race Relations Conciliator, complained that the affirmative action policies were discriminating against non-Maori, and recommended that legislative proposals for health treatment to be interpreted in terms of the Treaty of Waitangi should be dropped. Plunket said poor health was linked to lower incomes, not race.

In response to mounting concerns, Labour changed the window dressing. Prime Minister Helen Clark announced that closing the gaps was to focus on people in need across the board, not just Maori. The Closing the Gaps Cabinet Committee was re-named the Social Equity Committee. But in spite of cosmetic changes, and the sidelining of some of the more radical elements of the policy, the practice of delivering preferential social services to Maori continued.

Fast forward to the 2008 general election, and when National won the right to form a government, with the support of Tariana Turia’s Maori Party. One of her conditions was the re-establishment of the closing the gaps Whanau Ora policy. In spite of knowing that disadvantage is not race-based and that the Maori Party’s separatist plan for tribal self-government uses Whanau Ora as a first step, in June 2009 Cabinet approved the establishment of a Whanau Ora Taskforce to plan the implementation of the scheme.

Whanau Ora was launched in 2010 amid extravagant claims that independent Maori social service providers would eventually be resourced to the tune of $1 billion. And while National went to great pains — as Labour had done — to point out that this initiative was non-discriminatory and open to all members of society, even a cursory examination shows it is designed by Maori for Maori.

There were many teething problems with the programme. The police reported that “Intercepted conversations between Mongrel Mob members reveal they used funding from the Whanau Ora programme paid to a Dunedin anti-violence trust to buy cannabis for drug-dealing.” Winston Peters questioned why $60,000 was given to a rugby club “to research the vaguely-termed ‘whanau connectedness’ and ‘resilience’ in the community.”

The Herald highlighted how Willie Jackson and John Tamihere had put in an application to become administrators for Whanau Ora with a bid that was more than the funding was worth.

Here’s the simple truth. Whanau Ora is not going to help Maori become less dependent on the state. As is inevitable with political schemes that lack transparency, have low levels of accountability and pursue nebulous outcomes that cannot be easily measured, it will become a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money.

New Zealand is a country that values freedom and self-reliance. The future is being built through hard work and aspirations for a better life. That’s what the government should be encouraging — not state-funded tribal self-governance. Whanau Ora is not needed. Our state agencies are more than capable of addressing the needs of New Zealanders, regardless of race.