by Michael King
The effect on the electorate of successive governments of different colours enacting controversial policies for which they had neither sought nor obtained a mandate was to increase considerably the widespread mistrust of politicians (a poll in 1975 had revealed a 32 per cent public trust of politicians and Parliament, but by 1992 that had dropped to 4 per cent). Calls mounted for electoral reform. After a royal commission recommended that a mixed-member proportional system (MMP) like that operating in Germany would better suit New Zealand’s needs, a majority of the electorate voted for that option in a binding referendum in 1993. The National Government undertook to implement it in 1996. The new system would provide 120 MPs (up from just under 100), 60 of whom would represent electorates and 60 from party lists. The proportionality of Parliament would be determined by the percentage of party votes won by each party. To win any list seats a party had either to elect at least one member for a constituency seat or pass a threshold of 5 per cent.
Prior to the 1996 general election, there was a good deal of manoeuvring as some MPs defected from established political parties and formed groups which they hoped would be able to garner 5 per cent of the vote. Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble peeled off from Labour and set up the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers (ACT), attracting some support from like-minded former National supporters such as Quigley. At the other end of the spectrum, former Labour MP Jim Anderton welded his group of small parties into the Alliance, which generated policies closer to those of traditional Labour. Breakaway National Maori MP Winston Peters had founded New Zealand First – more conservative than Labour but somewhat more liberal than National, according to conventional political values. Despite a measure of disintegration, National and Labour remained the largest parties in Parliament.
The first MMP general election in 1996 achieved some of the advantages claimed for the change of system. The number of Maori in Parliament increased from five to fifteen, leading, inevitably, to renewed calls for the abolition of the Maori seats; the number of women rose from 21 to 35; and there were three Pacific Island MPs and one New Zealand Chinese. In addition, a far wider range of political and philosophical views was represented than had occurred under the first-past-the-post system. All these ingredients would make political management a more taxing task than it had been previously.
The time it took National to form its coalition with New Zealand First, who held the balance of power with seventeen seats, had the effect of eroding public confidence in the new system, however. So did the antics of some of New Zealand First’s MPs, including the party leader, in the years that followed. National dropped Jim Bolger as leader before the Government’s term was over, in part because it had doubts about the manner in which he was dealing with Peters. He was replaced by Jenny Shipley, a former teacher who had held the Health and Social Welfare portfolios and who then became the country’s first woman Prime Minister. But she failed to win a general election as party leader. After falling out with her coalition partner, she kept National in office for a further one-and-a-half years by cobbling together a second coalition of New Zealand First fragments and an independent MP expelled from the Alliance, and retaining the support of ACT and the one United MP. But the prognosis for both the Government and the MMP system was not good by the time of the next general election in 1999.
Labour was by this time led by Helen Clark, who had succeeded Mike Moore after he took Labour to a second defeat in 1993. After a shaky start as Opposition Leader, when it seemed more than once that her colleagues might replace her, she had developed into the most commanding figure in Parliament. It was no real surprise that she led Labour and its pre-announced coalition partner, Jim Anderton’s Alliance, to victory in 1999. The manner in which the new Government quickly completed coalition formalities and the fact that the agreement lasted almost until the following election – when the Alliance imploded with internal dissension – went a long way towards restoring public faith in a political system that had been on trial in the previous three years and found wanting.
Despite the controversies generated by Labour’s 1984–90 reforms, few of them were reversed by subsequent administrations. The Bolger National Government even retained Labour’s anti-nuclear policy, which had forbidden visits to New Zealand ports by nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered vessels. This new strategy, which grew out of a ‘people’s peace movement’ in the 1970s and 1980s and opposition to French nuclear testing in the Pacific, was strengthened by the considerable overlap in membership between that movement and the Labour Party. It strained relations with New Zealand’s traditional allies, Britain and the United States. It also ended – at the insistence of the Reagan-led American administration – New Zealand’s participation in ANZUS, and hence in shared intelligence and exercises with American forces. The determination of both David Lange and the wider New Zealand electorate to persist with this policy of ‘independence’ was only increased when, in 1985, French secret service agents sank the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour. Both the American and British Governments of the time declined to condemn this act of terrorism by one of the leading members of the Western alliance. New Zealand was learning that there was a price to pay for being independent from that alliance, but it showed no inclination to change its stance in the face of bullying or ‘punishment’.
Some former ministers in the Lange Government hinted subsequently that the Government as a whole had never intended – nor had the cabinet – to break the alliance with the United States, an action which inevitably had consequences for trade prospects in addition to defence implications. In their view, the anti-nuclear policy was embraced by the Prime Minister to cement his own ties with the Labour movement – ‘to enter his inheritance as its leader’, as Michael Bassett put it. While other ministers were preoccupied with the considerable burden of reforms in their own portfolios, the Prime Minister allowed negotiations with the American administration to drift to the point where the relationship was unsalvageable and the break with ANZUS became inevitable. However much truth there is in that scenario, it is undeniable that other members of the Lange cabinet embraced the anti-nuclear policy and its consequences when they recognised its electoral popularity.
Partly because of the falling away from the bilateral defence connection with the United States, New Zealand through the 1980s and 1990s became more heavily committed to United Nations-sponsored peacekeeping operations. The country had been involved in such operations before, but only on a small scale and usually using police or territorials. The scale of involvement increased from the 1980s, in both the number of operations and the number of regular defence force personnel used – in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Balkans and the Pacific. Over these two decades New Zealanders earned a high reputation for being good at specific tasks, such as mine clearance and training locals to do this work, and for being skilled in interacting with civilians who had been traumatised by their proximity to armed conflict. The latter success owed something to the ‘hands-on’ approach, by which everyone from senior officers to lower ranks were involved in all duties, and was partly explained by what one commentator called the ‘Maori–Pakeha mix and lack of formality’.
These successes culminated in a large commitment of troops to Bosnia between 1992 and 1996, after the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Three army contingents were sent, each 250-strong – the first deployment of New Zealand troops to Europe since World War II. Troops were also committed to East Timor between 1999 and 2002, in what most New Zealanders were prepared to recognise as the country’s neighbourhood. This operation involved 6000 personnel from all three New Zealand services. Five lost their lives: one in a militia ambush, three as a result of accidents, and one from suicide.
Despite the cooling of relations with the United States, New Zealand was generally well regarded in multilateral organisations through this period, as shown by its election to one of the UN Security Council rotating seats in the 1990s, and by the election of former Prime Minister Mike Moore to the direct
or-generalship of the World Trade Organisation in 1999 and of former Deputy Prime Minister Don McKinnon as Commonwealth Secretary-General in 2000, the position his compatriot Alister McIntosh had narrowly missed out on 35 years earlier. (To those unprecedented achievements, two more could be added: by the early years of the twenty-first century two of England’s most ancient and revered educational institutions, Eton College and Oxford University, were also headed by New Zealanders, John Lewis and John Hood respectively.)
The other international arena in which New Zealand continued to depart from traditional patterns was in seeking trading opportunities with countries outside the United Kingdom. Whereas the percentage of exports going to Britain had been 87.4 in 1940, by the close of the twentieth century that had fallen to a mere 6.2. There was a substantial rise in exports to Australia over the same period, accelerated by the Closer Economic Relations agreement, from 2.9 per cent to 21.4 and to the United States, European Community, Canada, Japan and other Asian markets such as China, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.
The relative proportions of commodities sold had also altered considerably. Wool, which had made up nearly 50 per cent of the country’s exports in 1880, constituted a mere 2.8 per cent by 1999. Meat was down from 27 per cent in 1940 to a smaller but still significant 13.2 per cent in 1999. And dairy products – butter, cheese and various milk derivatives – made up 23 per cent in 1999, a drop from its 1940 peak of 36 per cent but again still important. Forestry exports were up to 11.3 per cent from almost nothing 60 years before. Exports of other commodities such as seafood (5.5 per cent), wine and various pastoral products were also growing.
While most New Zealanders who lived overseas did so in English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the United States, the ethnic mix of the population within New Zealand was changing, with significant increases in the Asian and Pacific Island populations. While the Pakeha majority made up almost 73 per cent of the total population in 2001 (most with British ancestry) and those of Maori descent 18.4 per cent, some other ethnic groups which had not been significant before the mid-twentieth century were now growing: New Zealand Asians totalled 6 per cent and Pacific Islanders 4.6 per cent. Of those with a Pacific Island background, the largest groups were of Samoan and Cook Islands descent, followed by Tongans, Niueans and Tokelauans. Small Middle Eastern and African communities were growing as New Zealand took a low number of refugees from those regions.
Most interestingly, perhaps, the proportion of the New Zealand population born in New Zealand in 2001 was 80.5 per cent, as against 64.8 a century before. The largest portion of those born elsewhere, 6.3 per cent, still came from the United Kingdom, but that was well down from the 29 per cent of New Zealanders born there 100 years earlier. The next largest group in 2001 was the 4.7 per cent born in Asia, up from 0.7 per cent in 1896.
This far greater degree of ethnic diversity than the older British-Pakeha and Maori New Zealanders had known did create anxiety and insecurity in some quarters, and there were signs that the country’s earlier racism towards Chinese immigrants was reviving. There were also occasional disturbances between particular minority groups. But it was Maori who were most affected by the social and political changes occurring in New Zealand at the end of the twentieth century. In this sector, the new policy directions initiated by the Lange–Palmer Labour Government and carried on after 1990 by the Bolger National Government were so extensive as to amount almost to a form of social engineering.
In this set of politically bipartisan policies, as many government services as possible, especially those associated with health and welfare and those previously the responsibility of the Department of Maori Affairs, were to be devolved from the Public Service to iwi authorities. These authorities were to be well resourced either from state funding or from successful claims against the Crown for breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi. It was also accepted that the state had a responsibility under the Treaty of Waitangi actively to fund the promotion of Maori culture and language rather than simply allowing them to co-exist with mainstream Pakeha culture. As part of these policy shifts, the old Department of Maori Affairs was dismantled and replaced with a slimmed-down Te Puni Kokiri or Ministry of Maori Development.
A variety of measures contributed to these new directions. One of the most important, as noted earlier, was authorisation for the Waitangi Tribunal to consider claims going back to 1840. This new policy saw the number of claims registered with the tribunal swell from half a dozen in 1984 to almost 1000 by the end of the century. The largest settlements achieved in the first decade of the new policy were with Tainui and Ngai Tahu, for compensation packages of $170 million. Ngai Tahu began a programme of judicious investment and commercial activities which immediately began to increase the worth of their assets. Tainui, in part because of leadership disputes and personality clashes, got off to a near-disastrous start and lost large sums of money.
Another far-reaching policy change affecting Maori resulted from the restructuring of the state sector. The 1986 State Owned Enterprises Act had given the Waitangi Tribunal power to adjudicate on the status of land being transferred from government departments to SOEs. The following year, in a case arising out of this process, the Court of Appeal ruled that ‘the principles of the treaty override everything else in the State Owned Enterprises Act, and these principles require the Pakeha and Maori treaty partners to act towards each other reasonably and with the utmost good faith’.
This decision, and subsequent references to the Treaty of Waitangi grafted onto other bills and amendments to previous Acts, such as those governing health, education and conservation, gave the Treaty an explicit place in New Zealand jurisprudence for the first time. They also represented an acknowledgement by Parliament that the Treaty had not been simply a mechanism for transferring the sovereignty of the country from Maori to the Crown, but that it was now recognised as providing a framework for the present and future relationship of Maori and the Crown, the two Treaty partners.
While this wide interpretation of the significance of the Treaty was broadly accepted by the leadership of the country’s two major political parties, it was not without controversy in other quarters. Some conservative politicians complained that the ‘judicial activism’ of the Court of Appeal had forced Parliament’s hand, to which the president of the court, Sir Robin Cooke, replied that it was the responsibility of the courts to give ‘sensible meaning’ and effect to government legislation. Early in the twenty-first century the National Party showed some signs of wanting to retreat from the position it had taken on the issue almost two decades earlier.
In another major settlement, the National Government in 1993 offered Maori the so-called ‘Sealords Deal’, by which the Crown purchased 20 per cent of the nation’s fish quota for allocation among Maori tribes. In return Maori were asked, and agreed through their tribal leadership, to drop Treaty-based claims to the country’s fisheries resources. The actual distribution was to be carried out by a government-appointed Waitangi Fisheries Commission, which then became bogged down for more than a decade in trying to devise a formula that would accommodate all Maori claims and ensure that some of the multimillion-dollar resource also found its way to urban Maori, who lived outside recognised iwi boundaries and organisations.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, major and irreversible adjustments had been made to the relationships between Maori and Pakeha and between Maori and the Crown. Maori had become a far more visible component of every aspect of the country’s life than they had been a generation earlier, though they were still under-represented in the professions and higher-income suburbs and over-represented in crime statistics. Maori elements were increasingly apparent in the arts, literature and rituals of the nation (and beyond: Keri Hulme’s novel The Bone People had won the Booker Prize in London in 1985). Thanks to MMP, there were now 18 members of Parliament who identified as Maori rather than the smaller number who had held the specifically Maori seats.
For the first time, all the country’s institutions were bending slowly but decisively in the direction of Maori needs and aspirations. The momentum of these changes would be maintained – but not without controversy.
Part V: Posthistory
Chapter 30
Configurations Old and New
As the population of their country reached four million in April 2003, New Zealanders waited for new social and cultural patterns to coalesce and new understandings to percolate through society to restore a measure of the cohesion that had been lost when they dismantled so many of the traditional certainties which had laid a foundation for a coherent and national view of the world – in trade, defence, the use of primary resources, the operation of the parliamentary system, social welfare, the ethnic composition of the country’s citizenry, the balance of the primary relationship between Maori and Pakeha. The combined effect of these changes would produce a period of adjustment and uncertainty. On the other hand, they also had to face the possibility that the price for plurality in so many sectors of national life might prove to be a permanent degree of disjunction and social divergence.
Nowhere was the uncertainty about future configurations more clearly demonstrated than in the country’s ambiguous relations with Asia. As trade with Britain necessarily diminished, New Zealand had sought to direct more of its products and produce towards the largest markets in the region, in the populous countries of South-east Asia. Prime Minister Bolger even began to talk of New Zealand finding at least part of its identity from its proximity to Asia. But even more of those exports went to a combination of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries – the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States and Canada. Moreover, the vast majority of New Zealanders resident abroad chose to live in the UK and the ‘neo-Europes’ in preference to Asia and the Pacific. And increased immigration to New Zealand from Asian countries in the 1990s – from Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and Korea – reactivated anti-Asian prejudice which had been so strong 100 years earlier, particularly in Auckland, which received most of those new immigrants. Statistics New Zealand estimated that there were 346,000 Asians living in the country in 2003, and expected that figure to rise to 604,000 or 13 per cent of the local population by 2021. This projection was taken as a warning by some political parties, especially New Zealand First, whose very name was an attempt to gain electoral traction from exploiting the feelings of insecurity which many Pakeha New Zealanders felt as the face of New Zealand became more ethnically diverse.