MPs: Maori MPs
Former Maori Affairs Committee Room. View as panorama.
Important leaders of Maori society have represented their people in the House: Maui Pomare, James Carroll, Matiu Rata, and most famously, Apirana Ngata. These and other men ― and they were all men until 1949 when Iriaka Ratana was elected ― could be lonely Maori voices in a Pakeha-dominated House. It was not until the 1980s, and then with MMP from 1996, that Maori entered the House in greater numbers and represented electorates outside the traditional Maori seats.
The Maori seats
Through the 1850s and 1860s Maori pressed for political representation as a right of British subjects. Some politicians supported general Maori representation, but in the end Parliament decided to have separate Maori seats in which only Maori could vote. It was thought that the greater number of Maori in some areas would swamp the Pakeha vote. Four Maori seats were established, three in the North Island and one in the South, in time for the first elections for Maori members in 1868. The Maori seats were only meant to be on trial for five years, but in 1876 they became permanent. There were still only four seats a century later, and it was not until MMP that there were more ― five in 1996, and then seven in 2002.
The first Maori MPs
Mete Kingi Te Rangi Paetahi.
Frederick Nene Russell, Mete Kingi Te Rangi Paetahi, Tareha Te Moananui and John Patterson took their places as the first Maori MPs in the House in 1868. Te Moananui was the first to speak, and he urged the government to enact wise laws to promote good, and for Maori and Pakeha to work together. The speech was in te reo, and his words were translated by an interpreter organised at the last minute. Owing to the difficulties of language and being a Maori minority in a white Parliament, these and other early Maori MPs struggled to make a difference.
Paremata Maori
Many Maori gave up on the 'Pakeha Parliament' in the 1890s, for it was not seen to be serving Maori interests. The confiscation of Maori land following the wars of the 1860s, and the continued process of taking Maori land led the Kotahitanga movement to hold a number of Maori Parliaments (Paremata Maori) as an alternative forum. Prominent politicians, including James Carroll, visited the Maori Parliament, but Premier Richard Seddon remarked that it was really only a runanga – there was 'only one parliament in New Zealand, and it would never give up control of the Maoris or their lands'. A proposed boycott of the Land Court failed and the Kotahitanga movement faded away.
Early Maori MPs encountered problems in the House. There was the language barrier for a start, although interpreters were provided in the House. Maori MPs faced a hard road in taking government policy out to their people, for bills and other parliamentary papers affecting Maori were seldom translated into te reo. Between 1889 and 1910, an annual series of relevant Acts were printed in Maori, and between 1881 and 1906 there was a Maori Hansard, Nga Korero Paramete, which contained the speeches of Maori MPs.
The Young Maori Party
Apirana Ngata.
In the early 1900s a new group of dynamic Maori MPs emerged who would have a profound effect on Maori society and politics for years to come. The 'Young Maori Party' was a loose association of like-minded individuals who were committed to working within the system to improve Maori health, develop Maori land with state assistance, and foster Maori arts and crafts. Perhaps the most prominent of these men was Apirana Ngata, who was elected for Eastern Maori in 1905 and promoted to cabinet in 1909 as Minister for the Public Trust Office. Ngata continued to promote Maori land development, and on becoming Native Minister in 1928 (as the Minister of Maori Affairs was called until the 1940s) initiated many land schemes. He was knighted in 1927, but had to resign from cabinet in 1934 because of irregularities in the administration of the schemes. He retained his seat until 1943, by which time he was 'Father of the House', the title given to the longest-serving politician.
A Maori Prime Minister
James Carroll.
James Carroll, who had once worked as an interpreter in the House, was a key Maori politician a century ago. He was the first Maori to win a general rather than a Maori seat; no other Maori MP would do this until 1975. Carroll's central place in the Liberal party in the twentieth century was recognised when he became acting Prime Minister in 1909 and 1911, the first Maori to hold that position. In 1892 he was appointed as a member of the Executive Council representing Maori and from 1899 to 1912 he was Minister of Native Affairs. Carroll saw the need for compromise in dealings between Maori and Pakeha, although he could never hold at bay the continual demands of government and Pakeha settlers for Maori land.
New alliances
A new group of Maori MPs appeared in the 1930s when the first MP with a connection to the Ratana religious movement was elected to Parliament. The Ratana church forged an alliance with the Labour government, elected in 1935, and for many years after Labour's Maori MPs were Ratana members. It had been the goal of Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana, the founder of the faith, to have his hand-picked members — the Four Quarters — in all the Maori seats, and this was achieved by 1943.
These MPs pressed for greater recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi, but their sway in government was limited. It was the Minister of Maori Affairs who wielded the real power in Maori matters in Parliament. Nearly 50 years were to elapse between the appointment of Ngata as Minister of Native Affairs in 1928 and the next Maori promoted to the Maori Affairs portfolio. Matiu Rata, appointed as Minister in 1972, steered through some significant measures, including the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975. His tenure was brief — Labour lost the election in 1975 — and he resigned from the Labour Party in 1980 to found the Mana Motuhake Party, which focused on issues of importance to Maori.
In its turn, Mana Motuhake, along with other small parties, entered the Alliance in 1991, and in 1993, Sandra Lee, its first MP, was elected. She was also the first Maori woman to win a seat in a general electorate. Mana Motuhake was the first, and longest lived, of a small cluster of Maori parties that emerged from the 1980s to try to represent Maori issues in the House.
Hear Clerk of the House of Representatives T.D.H. Hall discuss Maori MPs using te reo in the House (142k, mp3). See transcript and more information about this recording.
External links
History of Maori and the Vote (Electoral Commission website).
Maori MPs (Parliamentary Service website).
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