Category Archives: Maori

The Principles of the Treaty

Hardly anyone says what are ‘the principles of the treaty’. The courts’ interpretation restrain the New Zealand Government. While they about protecting a particular community, those restraints apply equally to all community in a liberal democracy – including a single person. Treaty principles were introduced into the governance of New Zealand by the Treaty of Waitangi Act…
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The Stability of Ethnic Identity and Reporting

Note written for circulation, December 2023 Ethnicity is not a well-defined notion for the majority of the population, but when asked for ‘official’ purposes (usually with a choice of tick boxes) most can ethnically identify themselves.  (Typically, they may check as many ethnicities as they wish.) In the Population Census data used here there is…
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Notes on Tāone Hapū – Māori Gangs

Commentary: Aotearoa New Zealand Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 3 No. 1 (2023) Abstract This paper aims to promote discussion on the complex issue of Tāone Hapū (Māori Gangs), recognising the substantial literature which already exists but adding two further directions which tend to be downplayed: – while it is accepted that the urban Māori…
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What the hell happened at Waitangi?

Review in ‘Newsroom’ 9 May, 2023 In 1972, The New Zealand Journal of History published the article “Te Tiriti o Waitangi: Texts and Translations” by Ruth Ross (1920-1982). Its impact continues 50 years later, and is likely to remain significant in another 50 years. It’s one of the most influential pieces of work by a…
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We Must Avoid Treating Māori As Living Fossils.

There are times when tikanga needs to be broken for tikanga to survive. I recently gave a presentation on Māori economic history based on my Not in Narrow Seas. Its most important message was that Māori proved to be a very adaptable people continually evolving as new opportunities arose. The European tradition recalls the Duke…
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A Brief History of the Māori Economy: How Things Change

Presentation to a Statistics New Zealand Seminar, 23 February, 2021. Māori involvement in the economy has been an integral part of New Zealand’s story, even if we ignore the first 500 years when there was only a Māori economy. Unlike many of our histories, Not in Narrow Seas does not. There are about 40,000 words…
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Maori have been trapped in a poverty cycle

Dale Husband | May 15, 2018 This was published in e-tangata. Brian Easton is a 75-year-old economist, statistician, academic, historian, columnist, and author. For much of his career, he’s made a specialty of explaining to New Zealanders what’s going right and what’s going wrong in our economy. In his latest book, Heke Tangata, which was commissioned…
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Whadarya?

The Ethnic Future for New Zealand Is Unknown. But It Will Be Diverse and Different  The promise of increased future ethnic diversity is undoubtedly true, but often the statistical projections are both misleading and obscure the real issues. Each Population Census asks the respondents’ ethnicity. That is not their race, which is a genetic notion….
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Trading Water Resource Consents

‘Iwi leaders and the Government have agreed on a deadline to sort out Maori interests in fresh water by Waitangi Day 2016.’ (News: 5 February 2015) Law and economics recognises three distinct aspects of property rights. There is the ability to use the property, the ability to transform it into something else, and the ability…
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Ethnicity, Gender, Socioeconomic Status and Educational Achievement: An Exploration

Research Report Funded by PPTA. Completed in April 2103 and Launched 9 July, 2013. A short summary is at http://www.eastonbh.ac.nz/2013/07/how-good-is-our-schooling/   This column was rejected by The Listener. It was published in Pundit on 8 September, 2014.   Keywords: Education; Maori     Executive Summary (Conclusion)   The average PISA scores on the three dimensions of reading,…
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How Good is our Schooling?

Presentation at Launch of ‘Ethnicity, Gender, Socioeconomic Status and Educational Achievement: An Exploration”, 9 July, 2013. The full report is here. Keywords: Education; Maori While there is much grumbling about our education system, the evidence suggests it is doing very well. Every three years the OECD surveys a sample of 15 year old students. The…
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Exercises in New Zealand’s Demography and Economic History

This is an earlier version of a paper published in New Zealand Population Review, which was a festschrift to D. Ian Pool (Vol 7, 2011 p.178-182) Introduction In the course of writing Not in Narrow Seas: New Zealand History from an Economic Perspective I was found myself not only reporting demographic history, but using demography…
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Water Rights and Ownership

Listener: 4 August, 2012. This column has previously advocated making greater use of market mechanisms to allocate the use of water. New Zealand has a comparative abundance of water, but we benefit if it is allotted as efficiently as possible. Those familiar with the issue acknowledge the argument, but many point out that the “P”…
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Value in Goods Exchange

VALUE IN GOODS EXCHANGE Listener: 7 January, 2012. Keywords: Maori; Political Economy & History; My marginal contribution to maritime historian Joan Druett’s book Tupaia: Captain Cook’s Polynesian Navigator was to comment at a dinner table that the Tahitian chief’s considerable part in the development of New Zealand was hardly acknowledged. The observation was made as…
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