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 on the topic – a book in its own right –
beginning with the societies that our first Polynesians came from. My book does
the same for the British and Pasifika immigrants, because each migrant wave
brought its cultural baggage; for instance, the first proto-Māori shelters were
modelled on their island equivalents.
The book calls them ‘proto-Māori’ because the first
arrivals were not Māori but evolved into what today we call ‘Māori’. The answer
to where Māori came from is ‘Aotearoa-New Zealand’. Their ancestors came from
East-central Polynesia – say near Tahiti – and can be traced back to near Xi’an
in inland China. No, they were not Chinese, but a different people who worked
their way to the coast about 5000 years ago, learned how to sail and eventually
explored most of the Pacific.
There is a lesson here central to the book. Māori
proved to be a very adaptable people continually evolving as new opportunities
and challenges arose. The European tradition recalls the Duke in the novel The
Leopard, telling his nephew ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things
will have to change.’ Māori have a parallel whakatauki ‘Me whati te tikanga,
kia ora ai te tikanga’; there are times when tikanga (practices) needs to be
broken for tikanga to survive.
Adapting means the present and future will be
different from the past. We should not impose our current preoccupations onto
the Māori past, a particularly tempting exercise where there is no written
record.
The Origins of Māori
For instance, we do not know how the first arrivals
700 years ago, reacted for they came to a land mass far in excess of anything
they were familiar with elsewhere in Polynesia. Yes, they ate moa but the
evidence from the middens is they depended on fish, as had their Pacific Island
ancestors, and continued to do so for the next 500 years.
In their sort of economy, about 80 percent of economic
effort was devoted to feeding themselves – compared to, say, 10 percent today.
Then the seas and shores were rich in fishes. The nutritional challenge was
adequate energy – not protein. In the north it came from kumara, in the far
south it came from seal blubber. That is why there were fewer Māori in the
middle of the country.
There are many intricacies in their story – climate
change has a role in at least two ways – but the basic economy was affluent;
there was probably a lot of leisure time except in the peak season. Hapu were
largely self-sufficient. There was trade among them but generally it was for
what amounted to luxuries. Their life expectancy was lower than today, but
similar to the most robust European societies,
The rules for this exchange were rather different from
today’s commercial format which focuses on the value of the product being
exchanged, not those involved in the exchange. In traditional gift exchange
economies the focus was on those involved in the exchange rather than the
product.
The First European Impacts
Yet when outsiders turned up, Māori proved adept at
bartering. The very first exchange – between Cook’s Endeavour off the
Hawkes Bay shore and the waka that came up to investigate them – is instructive.
Māori at the time were neolithic – that is, they used stone tools and gardened –
although, as I have indicated, they were a sophisticated society. They proved
much less interested in the iron nails Cook’s officers offered for fish, and
more in the tapa cloth that the seamen did. However, by the time Cook got
ashore, Māori had got the hang of metals and the spikes had become very
attractive. We’ve just seen two adaptations. First, from gift exchange to
barter and second, the introduction of new technologies.
Exchange involves two sides – two perceptions. In the
early exchanges between Māori and visitors, the differences were large, quite
unlike the equilibrium market transactions of economic theory. For instance, ‘the
natives [were] eager to exchange a 10lb fish for a ten penny nail’ in 1815. The
report has a European perspective that Māori were exchanging something valuable
for something cheap. But they would have seen the value imbalance the other way
around: as a part of a normal day’s catching, the fish probably cost them
minutes rather than hours of labour. A metal implement was far more efficient –
labour saving – than a stone one.
One of the complications of trying to understand the Māori
economy is the very rapid change following the European impact. For instance,
the missionaries brought literacy for Bible reading; by the middle of the
nineteenth century Māori were probably more literate than the Europeans.
Europeans also bought diseases – dysentery, influenza, measles, STDs, whooping
cough – to an immunologically virgin population. The resulting mortality and
infertility seems to have resulted in a greater reduction of the Māori
population than the fighting of the nineteenth century; certainly it had a
greater impact than the 1918 influenza or today’s covid pandemics.
The impact of new technologies was also mixed. To
focus on just one – the musket – to illustrate how we can misleadingly impose a
contemporary frame on a historical event. The Musket Wars – from 1820 to 1835 –
were devastating and caused considerable death and turbulence to Māori society.
It is from them that the latter-day perception of Māori as warriors arises. But
it is not obvious that, before the musket, the inter-hapu fighting was
particularly vicious. The fighting would have been hand to hand and the weapons
not too destructive; perhaps they were a bit like rugby matches, with similar
injury rates and exaggerated memories of conflict.
The musket transformed the affray; it was a bit like
arming one team in a rugby match with flick knives, although hand-to-hand
fighting became less important. Eventually, both sides became armed and by the
mid-1830s Māori were looking for ways to reduce the tensions – that was a role
of James Busby, the first British resident.
So were Māori a warrior culture? Possibly not, unless
you think rugby is about war. While I do not want to minimise their warrior
contributions in the twentieth century, recall that it is said of all New
Zealanders – brown and white – that they were slow to wrath but stern in
battle. Does that make us a warrior nation?
For another example of how easy it is to impose the
wrong framework, consider how early relations between wahine and European males
have been described as ‘prostitution’. However, the contemporary reports – and
indeed most subsequent comment – evaluate the exchange from a (typically
judgmental) European perspective. Almost certainly, Māori had a different
account. We have very few indications of what the women’s attitudes were but
one wahine had tattooed on her arm the name of each seaman she stayed with,
which is hardly what a conventional prostitute would do. Perhaps the notion of ‘seasonal
wives’ may be a better place to begin.
So the two peoples struggled to come together often
with misunderstandings. Perhaps the greatest one was over land. It is a long
story and takes up some space in the book. To summarise, after a generation of
Māori bartering food and other resources for their commodities, it might have
seemed obvious to Europeans, coming from their commercial backgrounds, that Māori
would treat the exchange of land rights in the same way. But for Māori, land
was very different from fish or nails; it was a taonga. Cook regretted that he
was unable to acquire other taonga, a greenstone mere. In return, Cook refused
to give Māori guns.
Land belonged to this latter non-tradeable category.
This may seem antiquated today; or does it? If someone wants to export – that
is, exchange with a foreigner – food or manufactures, we applaud their
enterprise. But if someone wants to exchange (sell) land to a foreigner, as
likely as not they will require permission from the Overseas Investment
Commission.
To summarise thus far the two salient lessons. First,
Māori proved remarkably adaptable to the new circumstances although they did
not always get it right at first. Second, we must be careful not to impose our
understandings – and misunderstandings.
The Arrival of the Commercial Economy
Māori proved adept at getting involved in the
commercial economy, supplying settlers and provedoring visiting ships.
Initially they kept some Māori ways of doing so, working in community groups
and distributing the proceeds according to customary practices, say the way
they allocated fish from an expedition.
However, there were various economic problems in the
early exchanges. One was that the new technologies could require management
outside their experience. For instance, they were horticulturists and not
agriculturists. So they failed to introduce new seeds each season and so over
the years the grains they harvested became infested with weeds. A second was
that they built up stocks to supply ships, but when the ships did not come
because of a commercial downturn in Europe, they found themselves overstocked
with no buyers.
More subtly, they became major suppliers of European
settlements. But the Europeans were borrowing offshore to establish their
settlements and fund purchases from the Māori. This was unsustainable and the
settlements had to turn to supplying themselves, thus reducing the demand from
Māori.
At a very early stage then, the New Zealand economy
faced today’s problems – the vagaries of the global economy and the risks of
depending on overseas borrowing. Welcome to the globalised world.
I skip through the New Zealand Wars, except to mention
a major misunderstanding. I was taught that they, then called the ‘Māori Wars’,
were a conflict between ‘them’ and ‘us’. In fact Māori fought on both sides. It
is not helpful to describe those on the Crown side as ‘loyalists’. There were
deep political divisions in Māoridom and sometimes that led to warfare in which
the Crown was involved almost as an adjunct.
Even so, the wars are an uncomfortable period in New
Zealand’s history. They are associated with the confiscation of land but the
whole story is more complicated.
The settlers were hungry for land; recall Edward
Gibbon Wakefield’s advice: ‘Possess yourself of the Soil and you are Secure.’
Before European arrival, Māori had possessed all the land but eventually most
of that land came into European hands by fair means and by foul. Forgive me for
skipping the details – the book does not – but as important as the change of ownership
was, the mode of land tenure also changed; Māori and English land tenure
regimes were quite different.
English common law on ownership of land is based on
William the Conqueror’s feudal doctrine that the sovereign was the absolute
owner of all land and all others held interests directly or indirectly from her
or him. The Saxon regime before him had been allodial (absolute) ownership;
those who owned the soil had no obligations to any higher authority. Māori
ownership was closer to the Saxon doctrine. The British settlers, not
understanding this, insisted on imposing the feudal regime which applies in
today’s New Zealand.
Because land is integral to a society, the transfer of
regimes – usually involving the individualisation of title – disrupted Māori
society, changing it from a communal one to one which was more individualistic.
Such a change may have happened anyway. The market economy is a ruthless
individualiser, an issue with which Not in Narrow Seas is preoccupied.
The End of the Nineteenth Century
By the end of the nineteenth century, then, the
typical Māori was on their own bit of land although they would have continued a
rich social life based on whanau and marae. Little of their land was of high
quality but, even more important, it was poorly connected to the market
economy, since roading development was skewed towards linking up Pakeha farmers
with ports.
Even more disastrously, the land was in the wrong
places. We have to go into Pakeha economic development to explain this.
Increasingly, from the middle of the nineteenth century the economy was founded
on sheep – first wool and then, from 1882, frozen meat. (Dairy became important
at the beginning of the twentieth century.)
The indications are that Māori could have become
successful sheep farmers. However, the majority of them did not live on land
where sheep prospered. In about 232CE – before there were any humans here – the
Taupo super-volcano erupted. It was a huge one, the most violent known in the
world in the last 5000 years. The caldera is Lake Taupo. Its ash, which fell
mainly to the east and the north, lacked key trace elements needed for
livestock to thrive, while the new course of the resulting Waikato River left
swamps through the Waikato basin.
Because of bush sickness and footrot, sheep farming
was not practical north of Taupo. It was incredibly bad luck that the majority
of Māori lived in this area and so they were cut off from the sheep boom to the
south. Thus they did not go though the economic transformation that Pakeha did.
For the early parts of the nineteenth century European
small farms – excluding the great sheep stations which were almost feudal
estates – were largely in a subsistence mode of production and consumption.
They sold a little produce from the farm but largely consumed what they
produced; often their cash flow came from the men labouring off the farm so it
was the women who ran the farm assisted by their men doing the heavy lifting.
Refrigeration changed this. You can track it in farm
diaries. As the opportunity of farming crossbred sheep arose, the men moved
back to the farms, which became more productive and more commercial, fully
joining the cash economy. Thus evolved the family farm which was at the core of
New Zealand’s political economy for a century.
Where they were on land where sheep could not thrive,
Māori farms did not have that transformational opportunity. Six decades after
the advent of refrigeration, Apirana Ngata observed that
‘There are Māori communities which
are satisfied to live on minimal reserves, where they grow the vegetables they
require, from which they make seasonal excursions into the labour field to
obtain the minimum resource for the purchase of clothes and food, and where
they rusticate [live a country life] between periods of employment.’
That was in a book, The Māori People Today,
which is both an invaluable description of the state of Māori in 1940, and yet
fails to forecast their future. For while its contributors were some of the
most informed people of the times, they included no demographer and so did not
see that while Māori were then mainly a rural people, the land they were on
could not sustain their burgeoning population, especially if Māori farm
productivity rose to Pakeha levels. After the war, there would be the great Māori
migration into the cities, which is described in Not in Narrow Seas, and
also in my Heke Tangata.
Heke Tangata: Māori Urbanisation
There had been some movement of Māori to the cities in
the interwar period but it was a trickle compared with the flood of
urbanisation after the war. Māori were 71 percent rural in 1951.By 2013 only 15
percent of Māori lived in the countryside. Around 10 percent of Māori lived in
the main cities in 1926; by 2013 this proportion had grown to 66 percent, not
too different from the non-Māori figure of 75 percent, which had crossed the 50
percent threshold before 1926.
There was both a push and pull to the great migration.
Māori were pushed by the lack of opportunities in the countryside and pulled by
the opportunities in the cities. Typically, those urban opportunities involved
low and general skills but as the economy evolved towards high and specific
ones – a trend which seems to have accelerated from the mid 1960s – opportunities
for Māori became less available.
Māori were ill-prepared for urban living. They had
little wealth to bring with them and they lacked education. Rural education
tends to be inferior to urban education, but The Māori People Today was
adamant that Māori rural education was even worse. The required skills for
countryside farming, fishing, hunting and labouring are not those which schools
teach easily. Modern education arose because industrialisation and urbanisation
required literacy and numeracy. (Interestingly, Māori women seem to have
adjusted to the urban economy better than men – presumably reflecting different
skill sets and demands for female labour.)
It was a vicious cycle. Because a critical element in
educational attainment and employment prospects is the transmission between
generations, underqualified and underemployed parents means underqualified
children who as adults have lower incomes and poorer employment prospects.
Society needs to make an enormous effort to break the economic cycle. New
Zealand did not.
You see this in the unemployment statistics where,
even today, Māori do worse. I report the inferior employment a little
differently from the conventional approach which looks at the unemployment
rate; an unemployed person is without a job but actively seeking one. That
excludes the discouraged who are jobless but do not seek work because hard
experience has shown that they are never successful. One of the ways of
avoiding the psychological trauma is to give up looking.
To allow for such discouragements, my Heke Tangata
looked at the employment participation rate: the proportion of those in a group
who are in employment. Its complement provides a measure of all those who are
not employed but might be, whether they are actively seeking work or not.
(Various caveats and complications are reported in the book.)
Because of the different age structures of the various
ethnic groups, it is better to compare the employment rates by cohort. Here is
a tabulation: (Unfortunately there is no data by gender and age together.)
Employment
Participation Rates by Age and Ethnicity (Percentage), 2013
Age Group All Māori
15–19 years 33.7 29.7
20–24 years 65.0 55.8
25–29 years 73.6 59.1
30–34 years 75.2 63.6
35–39 years 77.3 67.8
40–44 years 80.2 70.0
45–49 years 81.7 70.7
50–54 years 81.1 70.7
55–59 years 77.4 67.5
60–64 years 67.8 61.2
65 years and over 22.1 26.2
TOTAL 62.3 56.5
(Source: 2013 Population Census)
The table shows that the employment rate for Māori is
almost always lower than for everybody. In total it is about 10 percent lower –
allow for age composition and it would be higher. This is a better indicator of
the difference in relative unemployment rates between Māori and the population
as a whole. The census reported rates were 10.4% for Māori and 4.8% for all, a
difference of only 5.6 percentage points. However, if we allow for lower
employment participation of Māori the difference is not quite double that. (The
higher participation rate for Māori over 65 years old probably arises because
they have lower levels of occupational superannuation and retirement savings,
and Māori elderly are younger.)
The evidence is that there has been a very slow socioeconomic
convergence between Māori and Pakeha. If the trend continues it will be decades
before they will be close to equality.
The Meaning of Māori and Pakeha
However the meaning of Māori and Pakeha will be very
different by then. Indeed, as a consequence of urbanisation, that is already
happening. ‘Māori’ no longer has the meaning that it had when they were
primarily a rural people.
This is nicely captured by a decision that Statistics
New Zealand made in the early 1980s. Up to then, it had used what was jokingly
called a ‘hydraulic’ definition: the proportion of Māori ‘blood’ (or descent)
compared to proportion of non-Māori ‘blood’. This objective descent measure has
been replaced with a subjective ethnicity measure of how an individual wishes
to describe themselves. People often mix the two notions up but formally, data
is usually collected on an ethnicity basis. (The Population Census asks a
question about people’s ethnicities, although there is also a question about Māori
descent – but for no other descent group. This is necessary for calculating the
number of Māori electorates; subjective ethnicity would be impracticable for
legal purposes.)
New Zealand artist, Peter Robinson, confronts us with
the problem when his works displays ‘3.125%’ That is one thirty-second and
referred to the fact that one of Peter’s thirty-two
great-great-great-grandparents was Māori. At the time – he was in his late
twenties – Peter was being provocative about racial issues, ethnicity and
identity. Not wanting to be pigeon-holed as an identity artist he has moved on,
but the figure leads one to muse about how he, or someone like him, might
classify themselves.
Presumably Robinson ticks the ‘Māori descent’ box in
the census, but what might he do to the ethnicity question: ‘Māori’? ‘Pakeha’?
or both? About half of those who give a Māori ethnicity also give a second one.
Let us call those who tick both boxes ‘Māori-Pakeha’ to distinguish them from
sole Māori who tick only one. (A few tick other ethnicities such as Māori-Pasifika.)
In which case those of Māori-Pakeha ethnicity would be our third largest ethnic
group; they may be second largest in 2023.
A person of one thirty-second Māori descent may choose
to register on the Māori electoral roll or he or she may not. Only about a half
do.
Once we move outside the statistical data base, our
knowledge is even murkier about what – and how – people classify themselves.
Some may do so differently in different circumstances and their classification
may change over time. For instance, the Health Inequalities Research Programme
at the University of Otago’s Wellington School of Medicine found that the
ethnicity on a death certificate did not always correspond to the
census-reported ethnicity. The discrepancy was sufficiently large to modify
some of their findings.
One further research finding which adds to the puzzle
is from comparing socioeconomic status between those who report ‘sole Māori’
and those who report ‘Māori-Pakeha’. Here is an example using employment
participation rates by ethnicity and gender. The female participation rates are
just over 10 percentage points below the male ones for all ethnicities. The
ethnic differences are much the same as in the earlier table although the data
comes from a different source.
Employment
Participation Rates by Ethnicity and Gender (Percentage), 2007/17
Female Male
Pakeha 64.0 75.1
Māori-Pakeha 65.7 75.8
Sole-Māori 57.9 69.7
(Source: Household Labour Force Survey,
average 2007Q4–2016Q2)
Strikingly, those who classify themselves as ‘Māori–Pakeha’
have employment responses similar to Pakeha. They may be slightly higher
because of different age profiles. (The database does not allow us to explore
this.) One is left with the uneasy feeling that subjective ethnicity may be
influenced by objective socioeconomic characteristics.
What we cannot be sure of is how these definitional
issues play out. But evidently there is a disconnect between the public
perception, which is still too dependent upon the rural Māori of a century ago,
and the reality of a socially and economic diverse urban population, as survey
responses show.
Conclusion
This paper has travelled over some 700 years. It is a
story of Māori economic development evolving; of tikanga being broken in order
for tikanga to survive. Māori have adapted to new opportunities in difficult
circumstances extremely well. But the urbanisation of the last half century has
proved a challenge which has not been fully met, in part because it has happened
so rapidly but also because the nation was so unprepared for it.
Too often we impose our uninformed prejudices on Māori;
prejudices which are often based on historical misunderstandings and do not
allow for Māori adaptation. Māori are not living fossils but, like Pakeha,
evolving and adapting. We need to keep our thinking evolving and adapting too.
‘Me whati te tikanga, kia ora ai te tikanga’.