No Right to the City? The denial of indigenous urbanisation in Aotearoa
Chapter 5 of ‘The Revolution that Nearly Was: How Aotearoa New Zealand’s progress was frustrated, and utopia mislaid’
WHEN we think about New Zealand’s mid-nineteenth-century colonial wars, we probably to think of them as happening in wild and scenic places such as the settings of the 1983 epic Utu (its title the Māori word for payment or, in another context, ‘just deserts’.)
However, the reality is that most of the action in our frontier wars took place in more domesticated settings, not far from the nearest wharf and, today, nearly or even actually suburban.
Consider, for instance, the battle of Pukehinahina, more commonly known as Gate Pā, where, in April 1864, 230 well-dug-in Māori held off 2,000 British attackers at a location next to today’s Gate Pā Shopping Centre in Tauranga, a port southeast of Auckland. Pā, in this context, means fort, and the Gate Pā was so-called because it blocked a settler road in and out of Tauranga, nowadays known as Cameron Road after the settlers’ commander, even if he was not successful on the day.
Or for that matter Drury, today one of Auckland’s southern industrial suburbs, where in November 1863 one of its defenders, British this time, wrote that:
The once happy New Zealand, a land of homesteads and farms, cattle, and rosy children playing on the green meadows, is now the scene of ruin, desolation and bloodshed of the most barbarous character, and, worse than all, the destruction is by our own defenders, the lawless mob introduced from Australia. . . . What fearful scenes I have witnessed of late, years of toil destroyed by Maoris & defenders while the inhabitants are out defending another part. Such is Auckland now.
The New Zealand Wars were perhaps the only major frontier conflict of the time that was so ‘littoral’, or waterfront, in character, as opposed to being waged far inland and far from navigable water in the manner of America’s frontier wars of the same era.
In those days, such watery locations were where most Māori lived, only to find that they were the locations most highly prized by British settlers as well.
Thus, a fortified isthmus where canoes were portaged from the Tasman Sea to the Pacific and vice versa, known as Tāmaki-makau-rau or ‘place desired by many’, became Auckland, New Zealand’s largest settler city.
Before, during, and after the wars, a multitude of settler cities sprang up on the coast and on navigable rivers; indeed, to the point that it was not long before the typical New Zealander was no longer a stalwart of the soil, but in reality the inhabitant of an urbanised Riviera.
According to a web-page by New Zealand’s Ministry for the Environment (accessed 8 July 2024),
As an island nation, many of our ancestors arrived by waka and by boat. We are drawn to the coasts and approximately 65 percent of New Zealanders live within 5 kilometres of the sea. Much of our major infrastructure is close to the coast . . .
In his 1996 history of nineteenth-century New Zealand, Making Peoples, James Belich observed that the rapid urbanisation with which our coastal pattern of settlement was associated gave the lie to bucolic, or ‘arcadian’, myths of the essential nature of New Zealand society:
Arcadianism, involving native natural abundance and steady, natural, farm-led growth powered by virtuous individuals, contested with utopianism: abundance stemming from the British insemination of raw New Zealand nature, and fast, artificial, town-led growth powered by progressive collectivities. In the colonising era, 1840s-80s, it was utopianism that predominated; only to be retrospectively replaced with arcadianism as a new present rewrote history to suit itself.
. . . . .
Arcadia features larger in mythology; Utopia featured larger in colonial history. (pp 306, 350)
As to why most New Zealanders (like most Australians) should have been, and indeed remained, so fond of living in what the geographer Geoff Park dubbed Australasia’s beach-heads of first arrival, while tending to slight the interior, there can be no doubt that the charms of the coast in a country that mostly enjoys good weather, as well as its actual length in comparison to the area of the interior, are significant parts of the explanation.
But the rest of the explanation lies in the forbidding nature of the interior: that dividing range of a submerged continent, that I mentioned in the previous chapter.
As I implied, though perhaps I should have been more explicit about it, even Australia has ten times as much arable land per capita as New Zealand. Argentina, for its part, has seven and two-thirds times as much. Specifically, according to World Bank’s latest figures as of the time of writing, Australia has 1.22 hectares of arable land per person, Argentina 0.92, and New Zealand 0.12.
Thus, as James VII said of the Kingdom of Fife in his day, New Zealand is “a beggar’s mantle fringed with gold.”
The eviction and resettlement of so many Māori into the more inland and beggarly locations was not always accomplished by war.
Indeed, at first, it took the form of misunderstood, dishonoured deals by which large areas of the country, including its interior fastnesses, were ‘sold’ wholesale to the colonial state for peppercorn considerations, like Manhattan (or so that story goes), on the understanding that a tenth or so, in the most favourable areas, would be returned to the Māori who lived there after being surveyed by modern methods and provided with hospitals and schools.
The problem was that these promises were often dishonoured. As the New Zealand Herald article ‘Shady deals laid city foundations’ makes clear, the site of the future Auckland was made over by Māori to the newcomers who had arrived under the protection of Governor Hobson, in 1840, for a peppercorn consideration that would come to be treated as final by the colonists as they grew more powerful and as their little settlement grew into a city, formally proclaimed as such in 1871.
In a 1971 documentary made to commemorate the centenary of Auckland’s city status, the art historian Hamish Keith describes the original price of of the land on which the new settlement would be established.
In Keith’s words,
… Hobson came, and for fifty blankets, fifty pounds of money, twenty trousers, twenty shirts, ten waistcoats, ten caps, four casks of tobacco, one box of pipes, a hundred yards of gown pieces, ten iron pots, one bag of sugar, one bag of flour, and twenty hatchets, he bought three thousand acres of the Waitematā.
A year later, at something like fourpence an acre, another thirteen thousand acres were added.
In other words, a quarter-acre section could be had for the price of a loaf of bread in the time of the Treaty; for that was what a penny would also buy back then. Talk about getting onto the Auckland suburban property ladder at the ‘ground floor’ level!
Not a bad price for a piece of land reckoned to be worth at least a thousand million dollars. But that’s inflation for you.
Unfortunately, there has been quite a lot of additional inflation since 1971; with the land component, which ceased to be included in New Zealand’s Consumer Price Index from 1999 onwards, pulling far ahead of most of the things that remain, thereby effecting a further wave of dispossession.
Meanwhile, over the preceding generation, there had been a strong drive among Māori to return to their former habitations, now urbanised, in order to become townsfolk and participate in modern society.
The scale of the great urban migration, for Māori, is captured by an entry in the online official encyclopaedia Te Ara, which reads, as of the time of writing (9 July 2024), that:
The urban migration of Māori has been described as the most rapid movement of any population. In 1945, 26% of the Māori population lived in the towns and cities. By 1956 this had increased to 35%. Mass migration continued into the early 1960s. The urban population grew to 62% in 1966, and reached nearly 80% by 1986. As a result, many rural villages were depopulated.
Elsewhere in Te Ara, we read, in a section called ‘An urban proletariat’, that:
A third major change in the post-war period was the transformation of the Māori labour force. In 1945 most Māori workers were concentrated in primary industry, but by the 1970s most were in manufacturing jobs. Meanwhile, the non-Māori labour force had increasingly moved into higher-paying, higher-status jobs in the tertiary sector. These labour-force shifts were a key factor in improving Māori social and economic wellbeing.
Though the Māori labour force was disadvantaged relative to Pākehā, the shift out of primary industry provided access to more stable and better-paid work. This changed from the mid-1980s, when economic restructuring reduced the manufacturing sector and Māori disproportionately bore the brunt of job losses. Not all were able to find new lines of work. Some returned to rural homelands; others migrated to Australia.
The urbanisation of the Māori was very topical, even among those who were sympathetic to their return. Whether much of what was authentically Māori could survive the urbanisation process was still an open question in 1960 when the government film The Maori Today was made.
Were Māori ways innately incompatible with modernity? Or was there the prospect of some kind of alternative Māori-influenced modernity?
Perhaps the presence of the Māori would remind the Pākehā of old-time villagey values that they had themselves forgotten in their rush to ‘tame’ and commodify a new land.
In a 1990 New Zealand Geographic article, Timoti Kāretu describes the traditionally communal concept of land in Māori culture, tūrangawaewae, as ‘The clue to identity’. From that point of view, a Māori is defined by having such an attitude, as opposed to seeing the landscape as merely so much real estate.
Of course, it is not just the Māori who have such sentiments, nor words for them: the concept of the dùthchas in Scots Gaelic is practically the same.
And more metropolitan languages also have similar concepts, such as Heimat and Landschaft in German, the first of which has Heim, ‘home’, as its root, but with a collective ending added, which the second means ‘landscape’, but in a more resonant sort of a way, as when we might speak in English of a ‘landscape of memory’.
Swedish has trygghet, a traditional word meaning not having to worry about ever being superfluous and precarious (a bit like the famous Danish hygge), and folkhem, ‘home for the people’, the latter admittedly a term made up in the twentieth century.
Dutch has gezelligheid, a word for cosy intimacy which is itself said to be the clue to Dutch identity, and with a similar significance to Gemütlichkeit in German.
Such are the attitudes of the allegedly chilly northerners of Europe; the sense of community is said to be stronger in the Mediterranean lands, where they have words like querencia, Spanish for the place where you feel secure.
In fact, English is a bit of an odd one out linguistically speaking, in that we don’t have easy recourse to such words for a social or emotional relationship to the land even if we can approximate them with phrases. Perhaps that is one reason why the English-speaking peoples have proven more generally susceptible to neoliberalism and speculative excess than other cultures which are — so it would seem — less rootless.
Thus, an infusion of Māori culture might, in the view of some, have helped Pākehā to overcome their rootlessness, worse than that of the stay-at-home English because not only is their language impoverished in that sense, but also, because the Pākehā are colonisers descended from those who made landfall, as Allen Curnow said, in unknown seas.
And within comparatively recent historical times as well. The Pākehā of Curnow’s day thus awaited “some child born in a marvellous year” who would, as he put it, learn the trick of standing upright here (which is what tūrangawaewae literally means).
The real question, perhaps, was whether this re-injection or rediscovery of roots was possible in the cities to which more and more people of all ethnicities were moving, or whether such sentiments could only be upheld in traditional settings.
We did not come to a satisfactory conclusion. But in the meantime, a growing urban multiculturalism had become a fait accompli by 1970, celebrated in a hipsterish instant coffee advertisement.
Other Pākehā, though, were more concerned by what they saw as an unnatural development, given that indigenous people were, from their point of view, supposed to be leading traditional lifestyles in exotic places.
Places such as Rotorua, where cultural re-enactment had long been the specialty of the Arawa, a group of iwi (tribes) who dwell across the Yellowstone-like geothermal region that has Rotorua at its heart, and who developed what was perhaps the world’s first cultural tourism industry as an adjunct to the region’s natural wonders.
In the June 1959 issue of Te Ao Hou/The New World, of which the cover was reproduced earlier in this essay, Keith Sorrenson of Auckland University and Ngāti Pūkenga observed that:
The idea grew up that the city and city life was not for Maoris — they should stay in the country at their settlements. As late as 1935 the Auckland mayor Mr (later Sir) Ernest Davis was stating the ‘Maori is a child of nature, and it is better both for him and the pakeha that he should live in the country and not in the town.’ The Maori was being considered as a museum piece of the countryside, little of which he now owned. It was good for tourism to show him off to visitors. Rotorua, not Auckland, was the best place for this.
This mentality, which was also applied to Pacific Islanders (or Pasifika) just then migrating south to New Zealand, as the closely related ancestors of the Māori had done some 800 years before, led to heavy-handed policing of a mostly youthful migrant population, discriminatory immigration crackdowns (the so-called Dawn Raids) and, worst of all, a growing prison pipeline of abusive institutions for allegedly wayward youth.
Despite these issues, urban Māori otherwise benefited greatly from the terms of the settler contract, as John E. Martin had called it, that insured all New Zealand urbanites of working age against precarity (Chapter One).
As its name suggests, the settler contract had its origins in schemes to attract British and European settlers to a country that was at the utmost end of the Earth from their point of view. Its benefits flowed naturally and automatically to the latest migrants, even though they were no longer British and European.
In his 2001 history of twentieth-century New Zealand, Paradise Reforged, James Belich quotes a statistic by Sorrenson to the effect that “In 1961, the average income of Maori males was 89.8% that of non-Māori males.” Belich then goes on to comment that:
Historians sometimes cite such figures to demonstrate persisting Maori disadvantage, but they surely represent a massive improvement on the situation 30 years before. Added to this, Maori from 1945 at last became fully eligible for the benefits of the welfare state. They were quite generous at the time, and you did not have to be unemployed or sick to get them. In the 1950s, the family benefit must have been a real boost to large Maori families, increasing incomes by around 50 per cent. In terms of cash if nothing else, the period 1945–75 was something of a golden age for Maori. The era of Maori protest and activism that began around 1970 did so at a time when Maori were economically better off than they had been for a century. (p. 474)
The protests to which Belich refers were driven for the most part by the discriminatory measures and heavy-handed policing to which I have just referred, by land grievances such as the famous occupation of Takaparawhau / Bastion Point, and by a desire to see more state support for such cultural treasures as the Māori language, so that it would not die out.
Even so, with regard to cultural heritage, many protest leaders were wary of the trap described by Sorrenson in 1959, of undermining their position in the city by too much emphasis on tradition.
That is to say, of undermining what the French intellectual Henri Lefèbvre once famously termed ‘the right to the city’. For Lefèbvre, this idea had an egalitarian and socially reforming significance: the idea that the city should not be a mere mine for landed-wealth windfalls but rather a nest or cradle that would promote the wellbeing of all who dwelt within it. In short, a modern tūrangawaewae, dùthchas, Heimat, or querencia: the very concept for which the twentieth century Swedish coined the word folkhem.
For Māori, the question of the right to the city included, by implication, the Lefèbvre version of the idea, but also the even more basic idea that Māori had a right to be considered as a people who were in the city to stay and whose presence might enrich it, as opposed to being mere sojourners.
Unfortunately, nearly every received image of the Māori has tended to favour the latter notion.
For instance, the tūrangawaewae, ‘The clue to identity’ as Kāretu described it, has usually been framed as some kind of land of lost content far outside city limits, somewhat as in the closing scenes of the 1971 Australian film Walkabout or even, for that matter, the Scottish documentary-trailer about the dùthchas above.
Delightful as it was, a strictly un-urban, traditional and tribal understanding of tūrangawaewae as the clue to Māori identity made it seem as though urban Māori were indeed only sojourners in the city: either that, or not ‘proper’ Māori even though they were, by 1990, overwhelmingly the majority of Māori.
With such thoughts in mind, in a special December 1970 issue of his MOOHR Newsletter, the founder of the Maori Organisation on Human Rights (MOOHR) and a co-founder of the later and better-known protest organisation Ngā Tamatoa, Tama Poata, condemned the widespread view that indigenous urbanisation was still, somehow, untypical and temporary in nature:
WE ARE GOING TO SPEAK OUT ABOUT THE MAORI WAY OF LIFE
The Maori Way of Life is on the freezing works chain, in the shearing gangs, on the waterfronts, driving trucks and bulldozers, working in mines and construction sites, in forestry gangs and lumber mills, in factory and farm and food processing and now in offices too…
The Maori Way of Life often means living in substandard accommodation and ghetto-like areas, getting the rough end of the stick from the law…
THIS MAORI WAY OF LIFE is not the FAIRY WAY OF LIFE shown on the tourist brochures.
When it came to the city, at least, some Māori and Pasifika activists of the 1970s were inclined to reject traditional views of Māori and Polynesian identity in favour of parallels with the position of Africans in the American city. Whence, for example, the Polynesian Panthers.
Misplaced Motorways
In fact there were quite a few parallels between Auckland and the American metropolis in those days: parallels that included a significant concentration of identifiably non-European populations in a run-down, pre-gentrification inner city that the authorities of the time treated as fit only to be bulldozed for new motorways.
The urban motorway was originally conceived of, around the year 1940, as an exclusively suburban form of transportation: a system of high-speed ring-roads that was to go around the older part of the city but not through it.
If such peripheral routes were built through the countryside before it became suburban, they would be comparatively easy and cheap to build. And no buildings or parks of any great value would need to be sacrificed to make way for them.
The planners and engineers who came up with this idea understood, from the outset, that to force the motorways to converge on a central junction in the inner city would not only be more difficult and expensive than in the suburbs-to-be, and more culturally vandalistic to boot, but that it would also create a magnet for congestion.
This was common knowledge. Even General Motors, usually cast as the villain of the piece, warned readers of its 1940 publication Magic Motorways of the unwisdom of building motorways into the inner city. Even General Motors. As three modern-day American urbanists note in their book Suburban Nation,
By 1940, the rules that should govern the development of a transportation network for the healthy growth of society were well known. They were widely acknowledged, thoroughly disseminated, and, apparently, immediately forgotten. (original 2000 edn., p. 67)
For, centripetal motorways and their easily congested, and for that reason endlessly enlarged, inner-city junctions were built in the United States and New Zealand, at the expense of such beauty spots as Auckland’s Grafton Gully.
And one of the reasons why was that that, in America and Auckland alike, such misplaced motorways — literally, in the wrong place — created a pretext to bulldoze the inner city and relocate minorities of colour to the periphery, a practice the American activist James Baldwin dubbed ‘Negro removal’.
Our equivalent of the same meant that South Auckland, which still played second fiddle in the 1960s map above, would soon overtake the inner city as the main concentration of Māori and Pasifika minorities in Auckland.
Inner city motorway construction of the most disruptive kind was less widespread in Australia, Canada, Britain, or Continental Europe. In those countries, visibly different minorities were generally less prominent in the inner city or less of an object of moral panic at the time, while in some of them the inner city was also judged to be so culturally significant as to be off-limits to motorway builders in any case.
A good example is the Canadian city of Vancouver. “Arriving in Vancouver on a misty humid evening,” wrote one Kiwi visitor in the 1950s, “I thought it could have doubled for Auckland even down to its North Shore, which is always lit up at night.” Yet today’s Auckland has a massive downtown ‘Spaghetti Junction’, while Vancouver does not.
In sum, building downtown motorway junctions was always optional, and the reasons for building them were always bad.
Some differences, as well as similarities
Having said all that regarding the similarities between the post-World War II history of Auckland and that of many US cities, it does seem that the position of the Māori and Pasifika in Auckland was, nevertheless, not as bad as that of inner-city minorities in the American metropolis.
One point of difference is that the leadership of the Polynesian Panthers, harassed as they were, could at least be reasonably sure of not having to worry about whether this was the day they would perish in a hail of police bullets.
As I pointed out in the Introduction, Kiwi cops hardly ever shot anyone in those days. Handguns had been banned for most purposes nationwide since 1920, even for beat cops, and there was a British-type understanding that this state of affairs would persist for as long as the criminals remained unarmed as well.
Such a sense of security — that it was practically unthinkable that anyone should ever get shot on the streets of mid-twentieth-century New Zealand, or in the course of a police raid— was, regrettably, not one that the Black Panthers could share.
And there were other differences, given that we still practiced a degree of social democracy in those days via our settler contract.
With source emphases reproduced here, Matthew Rout and his colleagues from the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre of the University of Canterbury note in a recent paper from 2020, The Impact of Housing Policy on Māori in Tāmaki Makaurau, that:
From the 1960s-1980s Māori gained access to mainstream state housing whilst able to access tailored schemes. This coincided with rapid Māori urbanisation and migration from traditional kāinga to Tāmaki Makaurau. Māori relocated from central Auckland to new state housing developments in the south and west. During this period Māori access to quality housing improved rapidly alongside improvements in health and social outcomes.
• Māori home ownership rates in Tāmaki Makaurau also increased considerably reaching their peak in 1986 (North Auckland, 60%; South Auckland, 58%; and West Auckland, 69%).
• Through ownership and state rentals, Māori had long-term security of tenure from the 1960s-1980s.
• Given the rapid increase in the Māori urban population during the 1960s-1980s the improvements appear remarkable (nationwide, 13,000 houses were provided to Māori between 1961–1971).
As Bill Oliver suggested in the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, the expansion of New Zealand’s settler contract to include the Māori came about under our First Labour Government of 1935–1949, which depended on Māori electoral support as a backup from 1935 until 1946 and then absolutely from 1946 to 1949, the years of its so-called ‘Māori mandate’.
The following thumbnail leads to a 1945 newsreel in which the second story, after a brief intro concerning the arrival of the wartime military commander Lord Alanbrooke, depicts a grand parade of Māori and trade unionists to celebrate the first ten years of the First Labour government.
As with our progress in the development of manufactured exports between 1960 and 1985, one wonders where we might be in terms of our communal relations and equality between the different population groups, had neoliberalism not intervened, in 1984, to derail the progress that was being made in communal terms.
Progress in regard to which things were still imperfect but nonetheless a considerable improvement on the war-torn, land-grabbing frontier of the nineteenth century.
On the eve of the fortieth anniversary of the coming of neoliberalism to New Zealand, we were informed by a 2023 official report called The State of the City: Benchmarking Tāmaki Makau Rau’s International Performance, that the homeownership position of Māori in Auckland is, on the basis of international comparison between Auckland and a number of peer cities overseas, now the worst among that of all indigenous minorities among a series of comparison cities:
Auckland places joint last — alongside Vancouver — for the share of indigenous population who own their home (18% in Auckland vs 32% peer average) (local census data, share of Māori who own or part own home).
A homeownership rate of 18% is only about half that of the Catholics in late-1960s Northern Ireland on the eve of the Troubles, an era in which demonstrators were marching under the slogan ‘Jobs and Houses for All’ and when, in the recollection of one activist, “The most crushing handicap of working-class Catholics at that time was the housing shortage.”
Though kept out of the suburbs in their most affordable era by ‘redlining’, the African-American population of the USA also has a much higher percentage of homeowners today, at around 44%, than the Māori of Auckland.
With regard to this particular comparison, the shoe is now on the other foot. At least as far as the impoverishment of minorities goes, things are now worse in neoliberal New Zealand than in the United States, and indeed by a considerable margin.
Cultural Crumbs?
There has, of course, been a so-called ‘Māori Renaissance’ over the same period, an officially sponsored revival of Māori culture and language, albeit in ways that continue to be framed in ways that are somewhat traditional, tribal, and heavy on re-enactment, in ways that were never that unfamiliar even before the Māori Renaissance.
Official support for the Māori Renaissance arose as a consequence of the Māori and allied protest movements of the times, which had assumed significant proportions by the time of the 1981 Springbok Tour, the Springboks being the touring rugby team of Apartheid-era South Africa, as it then was.
Unfortunately, living conditions for many Māori would soon become dramatically worse under neoliberalism, in the ways that have been documented above, and by Shirley and Locke (Chapter 4), among others.
What Hamer, in 1963, had called the “superfluousness and precariousness” that 1960s New Zealand professed to have exorcised (Chapter 1) had returned to haunt a neoliberal Aotearoa with its contracting industries, inaccessible apprenticeships, rising house prices, monopoly-driven inflation in the price of basic goods such as food and electricity, and similarly increasing tuition fees for courses of dubious value.
And no community was more haunted by the return of superfluousness and precariousness than the post-1984 Māori, with Pasifika a close second.
As it evolved under neoliberalism, the officially sponsored Māori Renaissance therefore came to be accompanied by a growing historical revisionism, by which the condition of the Māori prior to 1984 was depicted as one of marginalisation, compared to which the Māori of today have never had it so good.
This legend is to some extent based on kernels of fact— for instance the excessive policing of Māori and Pasifika youth, as well as the fact that the Māori language was in steady retreat in those days, not yet an official language until 1987 — but the view that everything changed for the better in the 1980s serves to draw attention away from the actual impoverishment of many Māori (and Pasifika) since the coming of neoliberalism, as well as the extension of the settler contract to cover Māori under the First Labour Government, whence the short-lived statistical equalisation reported by Belich and by Rout and his colleagues at the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre.
All of this reproof to the present is either passed over in silence or subjected to a misleading condescension of posterity, as when Amal Samaha, in An interesting but flawed article called ‘Transformation and Progressive Ghosts’, urges us to forget about the First Labour Government and its charismatic first Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage —
— in tones that suggest Samaha has already forgotten quite a bit himself, at least when it comes to historical accuracy:
Savage’s vision was funded by a lucrative refrigerated goods trade, colonialism in the Pacific, and the belief that Māori didn’t need to be included in social spending because they could “live off the land”. None of this makes much sense to people in a modern Aotearoa.
There is, of course, a spectre haunting a society that has managed to erect such an upside-down pyramid, and to camp in its shadow.
This is the return of a seriously radical protest movement that, like Poata, demands the right to the city and is not tempted by cultural crumbs of the sort that trail away from the city and back to the hills of exile.
Why is it, this reborn protest movement may ask, that the Pākehā invested so heavily in their settler contract in the days when the urban working class was still predominantly European, only to tear up the settler contract as Māori and Pasifika migrated to the city to become, as Te Ara puts it, an urban proletariat?
An urban proletariat whose jobs were highly sensitive to de-industrialisation under a neoliberal policy, which also ruined housing affordability at the same time.
Neoliberalism thus dispossessed economically vulnerable Māori all over again, except that this time the dispossession was done within the littoral space by the pen, rather than in ways that involved the sword and physical exile to the hills.
A physical exile that was, in our history, the approximate equivalent, for Māori, of the trail of tears, and known in Māori by the similarly resonant name of raupatu, a word that literally means ‘hundred blows’.
But there is an important difference, and that concerns the relative numbers and demographic status of New Zealand’s indigenous people.
Since 1987, Māori, the shared language of all New Zealand’s indigenous iwi , who also share the same heritage— whence the name, which means ‘common’ — has been an official language of New Zealand alongside English, which is only official de facto.
In that regard Māori is not the community language of an isolated group, as with the indigenous languages of all the other Anglophone-majority countries, but has, instead, a national status like that of French in Canada or Gaelic in Ireland.
And the Māori number one million out of a total resident population of just over five million. These numbers, and a national bilingualism put one in mind of no other indigenous group in a predominantly English-speaking country. The nearest comparison would in fact be the position of the French-Canadians.
And this should concentrate the mind, because it is easy to ask, and answer, the question of how long Canada would remain in one piece if the French Canadians were as poorly off relative to the Anglo-Canadians, their hopes raised only to be dashed, as the Māori of today.
The haunting spectre created by the original 1860s raupatu and the broken promises that preceded it— our national Id-Monster if you like — was outlined by William Martin, the first Chief Justice of the colony, in his 1863 ‘Observations on the Proposal to take Native Land by an Act of the Assembly’. Namely, that:
The example of Ireland may satisfy us how little is to be effected towards the quieting of a country by the confiscation of private land; how the claim of the dispossessed owner is remembered from generation to generation, and how the brooding sense of wrong breaks out from time to time in fresh disturbance and crime.
Already, in the mid-1970s, a future of imminent communal strife was predicted for Auckland by Gordon McLauchlan in the opening pages of his nonfiction bestseller The Passionless People: New Zealanders in the 1970s, and for the North Island as a whole by Craig Harrison in his 1975 play Tomorrow will be a Lovely Day and 1976 thriller Broken October: New Zealand 1985, also very topical at the time.
As such, it is difficult, in hindsight, to fathom the folly of embarking, just a few years after the Springbok Tour protests and at a time when things were broadly coming right in New Zealand as measured by a growing socioeconomic equality, upon a second raupatu: a second dispossession of the Māori, albeit by the pens of economists and lawyers rather than the swords of soldiers this time around.
And of imagining that even if an immediate insurrection of the kind predicted by McLauchlan and Harrison were avoided — though the Springbok Tour protests came close to fulfilling that prophecy — that a revival of traditional culture and bilingual signs (as worthy as they are) would suffice to paper over the nation’s weak seams as they came apart over the following decades, as they inevitably would.
Above all, as a pointer to future instability in Aotearoa and its best remedy, to the extent that there is still time to remedy it and that we have not yet completely run out the clock, there is the remarkable fact that of our national population — which is as a whole crammed into an urbanised Riviera — nearly half is also crammed into a comparatively small part of the North Island, centred on Auckland and including Tauranga and Hamilton; the last of which is a city of 185,000 built entirely on land confiscated from the Māori and, for the time being, named after a British officer who fell at Gate Pā.
An urbanist named Nicolas Reid has produced a graphic which shows the districts containing half of New Zealand’s population, in orange, as one proceeds outward from Auckland in both directions, north and south.
Even this graphic understates the degree to which New Zealand’s population is concentrated in the north by almost a factor of two, as the great peninsula to the north of Auckland, known as Te Tai Tokerau or Northland, is itself one of the more thinly populated parts of the country. Its southern two thirds are only included in the orange region as an artifact of the way the map was constructed, by radiating the orange region outward from Auckland by equal amounts in all directions until half the country’s population was counted.
(The largest city in Te Tai Tokerau/Northland, Whangārei, only has a population of about 60,000, equal to one of the smaller suburbs of Auckland or about a third of Hamilton.)
To a first approximation, therefore, we can say that half the country’s population lives in Auckland and the southern half of the area shown in orange, alone.
Interestingly enough, it is in this southern half of the region shown in orange that the bulk of the fighting of the 1860s took place. And it is a region that is, even today, the most ethnically diverse and divided part of the country. To continue the Canadian parallel, this region is therefore, to some extent also, our Quebec.
So there is something of an unmastered past there. At the same time, 160 years on, a massive present-day concentration of population in and around the three cities of Auckland, Hamilton, and Tauranga can only be justified or sustained in comfort by the development of this region’s urban economy.
There is no way that half the country’s population can live off the fat of the Waikato Plains that surround Hamilton, even if they were the main bone of contention in the 1860s. Such a hope, today, guarantees cities of slums, which are indeed arising.
Such is the essential paradox of the North. On the one hand its rapid urban growth, with Tauranga tripling in population since the mid-1970s to its present 162,000 and thus beating Auckland in the relative growth stakes — Auckland having doubled since 1980 or so, to 1.7 million — suggests that this region is the land of the future.
Indeed, the Auckland-Hamilton-Tauranga triangle has been called New Zealand’s ‘golden triangle’.
And it is the land of the future in the sense that its future prosperity also depends utterly on urban economic development, and less upon farming and natural resources than the regions to its south.
Yet at the same time the urban North is the part of New Zealand with the most seriously unmastered past, and land-grabbing frontier vices to which it returns.
It is the principal site of both the first and the the second raupatu. It is the region in which Māori homeownership in its biggest city, Auckland, fell from something like two thirds to only 18%, over the same decades in which Auckland doubled and Tauranga tripled. And in which its second city, Hamilton, is built entirely on confiscated land and named after one of the would-be conquerors of the local Maori.
There is a saying that as Auckland goes, so goes the nation. This is probably even more true of the wider North. If we can overcome the current tensions in the golden triangle, New Zealand will prosper. If not, the whole country will join the ranks of the Pacific’s other failed or troubled states. Just because we are more populous and ‘developed’ doesn’t mean we can’t go the same way as Fiji or New Caledonia. To suppose otherwise is a real conceit.
The idea that we could neglect the modernisation of the golden triangle was, as we have seen, the hope of the Rogernomes: who probably did not consciously plan a second raupatu, the evident structural racism of their decision to tear up the settler contract, after observing that it was increasingly benefiting Māori and Pasifika, doubtless rather more of the unconscious and clueless kind.
They genuinely thought that the (allegedly unnatural) expansion of the population in Auckland and wider points north, fuelled by powerful urban agglomeration effects and decades of support for manufacturing industries, was either coming to a natural end (see Chapter 2) or that it could be switched off, and that the people thus thrown out of work would easily find new jobs in a countryside of allegedly boundless fertility.
Indeed, such attitudes to the great population concentration in the North remain quite prevalent, even among Aucklanders themselves.
Attitudes that also make it easy to blame the victims of disinvestment and deindustrialisation for not having the gumption to create their farms and build their own log cabins in our supposed land of plenty.
Now, drawing all these threads together, it seems clear that if New Zealand should be so foolish as to continue down the neoliberal-cum-agrarian chauvinist course of the last forty years, and not return as quickly as possible to earlier policies of industrial stimulus and affordable housing, suitably updated for the age of renewable energy— which these days we might well term a Green New Deal for Aotearoa— the spectre of radicalisation will once more come to haunt the North.
That some kind of utu might yet be payable along these lines has long been perceived by artists and journalists with sensitive antennae.
However, in practice, the Springbok Tour was as rough as things got, no doubt because of the still-recent legacy of full employment and the still-affordable nature of our housing stock, which one ageing baby boomer recalls fondly in a comment, with regard to that very year, as follows:
When we bought our first house in 1981 We had a $10,000 deposit on a $32,000 house in central Johnsonville. Paying off the balance was easy peasy. New Zealand then was PARADISE!.
Well maybe not quite, but you can certainly see why some might be nostalgic for the time before neoliberalism, even if we did only have two channels of television, Dawn Raids, sporting contacts with Apartheid South Africa, and no Internet.
But today our social cohesion is far more frayed than in the still- affordable New Zealand of the 1970s, as we can tell from the three-week 2022 occupation of Parliament’s grounds and news stories like this one:
Woolworths NZ, formally known as Countdown, told NZME in April the company had experienced a 326% increase in thefts from its stores over the past six years. At the same time, there had been an 806 per cent rise in security incidents and a 303% increase in physical assaults.
Above all — in ways that must make all our Id-Monsters stir the more — zero-sum conflicts over land, tamped down by egalitarian measures for half a century before the 1980s, have returned to the fore.
In a rejoinder to a 3 June 2012 New Zealand Herald article by Bernard Hickey called ‘All our eggs are in the wrong basket’, a commentator named ‘John’, who claimed to have been “a property investor since 1974,” argued that “Land, land, land is the only long term holding. It is not subject to fashion, styles and renovation.”
John’s comment is no longer online, but I definitely took note of it at the time, for it seemed to capture an important aspect of our newfound atavism.
The fact that only 18% of Auckland Māori are homeowners is the flip side of the base neoliberal coin of speculation.
And while the second raupatu might be thought to have nothing in common with the first, they are connected by 150 years of conveyancing.
As the seventeenth century polemicist Gerrard Winstanley put it in A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England, against England’s Norman overlords who bought and sold land originally gained by the sword in 1066,
WE whose names are subscribed, do in the name of all the poor oppressed people in England, declare unto you . . . That the earth was not made purposely for you, to be Lords of it, and we to be your Slaves, Servants, and Beggers; but it was made to be a common Livelihood to all, without respect of persons: And that your buying and selling of Land, and the Fruits of it, one to another, is The cursed thing, and was brought in by War; which hath, and still does establish murder, and theft, in the hands of some branches of Mankinde over others, which is the greatest outward burden, and unrighteous power, that the Creation groans under: For the power of inclosing Land, and owning Propriety, was brought into the Creation by your Ancestors by the Sword; which first did murther their fellow Creatures, Men, and after plunder or steal away their Land, and left this Land successively to you, their Children. And therefore, though you did not kill or theeve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand, by the power of the Sword; and so you justifie the wicked deeds of your Fathers; and that sin of your Fathers, shall be visited upon the Head of you, and your Children, to the third and fourth Generation, and longer too, tell your bloody and theeving power be rooted out of the Land.
The relevance of such polemics to post-colonial New Zealand is obvious, and they grow more relevant the more that we return to the idea that ‘land, land, land’ is the measure of all things and the only source of opportunity.
Of course, many a prosperous Pākehā of the older generation claims that the Māori want ‘something for nothing’ in terms of access to land and a state that might once more invest as much in opportunities for young people as it used to.
But as beneficiaries of current windfalls and past policies of assistance to young people, this is hypocrisy of the kind long ago called out in the parable of the mote and the beam.
To this observation, we should add that the wider political hypocrisy of extending a pay-it-forward settler contract to British and European settlers until the 1980s, but then tearing it up thereafter on the unstated grounds that then-recently urbanised Māori were trying to get something for nothing, violates Article 3 of the Treaty of Waitangi.
What’s the Time, Mr Wolf?
Via a coming era of radicalisation we may, in effect, gain the whole package of the return to the past that those who have made ‘land, land, land’ their credo have been flirting with for the last forty years.
In the tradition of those who have been proposing since 1975, if not longer, that communal tensions over land and thwarted opportunities for young people may lead to renewed conflict at some point, Greg McGee, writing as Alix Bosco, recorded, in a 2009 Auckland-noir thriller called Cut and Run, that:
I once saw a woman, now living in Australia, who told the television interviewer that she’d left New Zealand because she thought it was ‘about to explode’. She wasn’t talking about volcanoes: she’d been a social worker in South Auckland. (pp. 27–28)
One could call this crying wolf; after all, another fifteen years has gone by since 2009 without much sign of renewed civil strife or revolution in Aotearoa as yet, apart from the abovementioned Parliament-grounds occupation and a generally growing incivility.
But it is often forgotten that the moral of the story about the boy who cried wolf is that, in the end, the wolf does come, a point made by Southside of Bombay’s chiliastic early-90s song ‘What’s the Time, Mr Wolf’, a phrase uttered in one of the scenes in Utu.
What’s the time now? Well, one thing we know for sure is that come the last election in 2023, we had, by then, six years less of the historical clock to run out on putting right the consequences of neoliberalism’s second raupatu than we had when Jacinda Ardern promised a ‘government of transformation’ in 2017, in the face of precisely these sorts of tensions, as documented in Wayne Hope’s “This is a state of emergency” — New Zealand at the turning point’, posted in February 2018.
Unfortunately, it is a matter of record that while acknowledging New Zealand was at the turning point, for the next six years, Ardern’s government then failed to deliver anything more than desperate half-measures: themselves very often of a cultural, symbolic, and tokenistic nature, as if performative caring was still regarded as an effective talisman against future upheaval. The potential for which was made evident by the exponential increase in incivilities, over the same six years, that was described just above.
Interestingly enough, the example of Ireland, which so impressed William Martin, affords a six-year parallel of its own in that regard. Except that in that context, instead of a turning point, they spoke of crossroads.
But crossroads and turning points always afford at least two paths. As such, we could still all learn the trick of standing upright here, and apply ourselves to a Green New Deal for Aotearoa,
Print References
“Such is Auckland now:” ‘Fred to his parents’, 5 Nov. 1863, letter with the Haslam family. Quoted in Ben Schrader, The Big Smoke: New Zealand Cities 1840–1920, Wellington, Bridget Williams Books, 2016, in two passages that are presumably sequential in the order given, emphasis given by an underline, on p. 179, references notes 86 and 87 on page 439.
The 1950s quote in which Vancouver is said to resemble Auckland on a misty night is by Peter Blish, as published in The Weekly News (NZ), 29 April 1953, p. 22.
