Blanding-out New Zealand’s vibrant multicultural society into a coffee-coloured uniformity, while a 'right-on!' notion in 1969, would strike most contemporary New Zealanders as a terrible idea, writes Chris Trotter

By Chris Trotter*

It could not be recorded today, let alone top the charts. Blue Mink’s anthemic “Melting Pot”, released in 1969, was a product of that brief sunny moment in history when people genuinely believed the world would be a better place if all of its peoples could “just get together in a lovin’ machine” that turned out “coffee-coloured people by the score”.

The problem was that, by 1969, the world had already moved on from the idea of a single human family. Dr Martin Luther King’s self-sacrificial creed of non-violent civil disobedience had died even before he did, replaced with the “Burn, Baby, Burn!” of ghetto insurrectionists and Black nationalists. In New Zealand, too, the rise of Nga Tamatoa and the Polynesian Panthers offered a strong challenge to the 1960 Hunn Report’s policy of integration.

As the Seventies rolled into the Eighties, the First World’s adoption of what would become known as “Identity Politics” was already far advanced. On the Left of New Zealand politics especially, the claims (some would say the irreconcilable claims) of class, race and gender were poised to supersede the universalist principles that had driven the huge protest movement against the 1981 Springbok Tour. Indeed, the barbed wire had hardly been coiled up, and the batons stowed away, before the nascent Māori nationalist movement was demanding to know why leftists who recoiled from South Africa’s apartheid system, had so little to say about the dispossession and subordination of their own country’s indigenous population.

Whipped into a coherent doctrine by Donna Awatere in a series of essays entitled “Māori Sovereignty”, published in the feminist magazine Broadsheet, the Māori nationalists made it clear that the tangata whenua were not only seeking the return of their land, but also the restoration of their power. This was a revolutionary demand, and Awatere and her fellow nationalists knew it. In the early Eighties, however, the superior Māori birthrate had many nationalists looking forward to that moment when, in the not-too-distant future, the population of the indigenous people of Aotearoa would overtake that of the Pakeha descendants of New Zealand’s British colonisers.

The huge attraction of this notion was that it allowed the revolutionary changes required to restore Māori sovereignty to be achieved democratically. There was no need to outgun the Pakeha – not when Māori could simply outvote them. Provided Māori parents taught their children well about the changes they would soon be in a position to enact, and provided the dwindling number of Pakeha were properly prepared for the big cultural transition, everything could proceed smoothly – and, more important, peacefully.

At about the same time, either by accident, or design, the New Zealand state was contemplating a very different demographic future for its citizens. In the mid-1980s, Pakeha politicians, bureaucrats and academics, no longer willing to countenance what practically, if not officially, amounted to a “White New Zealand” immigration policy, produced a policy review that “quite explicitly sought to ‘enrich the multicultural fabric of New Zealand society’”.

The pale-skinned immigrants of yesteryear would be joined by the peoples of East and South Asia. Chinese, Taiwanese, Hongkongers, South Koreans, Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis would take their place in the immigration queue alongside English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Dutch, Canadians and Americans – not forgetting New Zealand’s highly valued (if poorly remunerated) “guest-workers” from the Pacific Islands.

Throughout the Nineties, the number of immigrants swelled significantly, dramatically altering the cultural “vibe” of a nation which had, for most of its history, been unashamedly Anglo-Celtic. Winston Peters made his populist bones decrying what he branded the “Asian Invasion”. Not to be outdone, and to the consternation of most New Zealanders (not to mention most geographers!) the National Party Prime Minister, Jim Bolger, described New Zealand as an “Asian Nation”. The economic and political changes of the next quarter-century would, however, make a prophet of Bolger. By the 2020s the Peoples Republic of China had become New Zealand’s largest trading partner.

What could not be disputed, as New Zealand plunged forward into the Twenty-First Century, is that the ambitions of the authors of the 1986 Review of Immigration Policy had been entirely fulfilled. New Zealand had become a multicultural society of enormous diversity and energy. By 2018, more than a quarter of those living in the country had been born somewhere else. What’s more, New Zealand’s population had grown to five million a full decade ahead of the demographers’ expectations. The impact of this rapid growth on the nation’s ageing and increasingly inadequate infrastructure, and New Zealand real-estate market, was massive.

But not as massive as its impact on the hopes and dreams of the Māori nationalist movement. Quite why they did not anticipate the “colonisers’” response to the prospect of a Māori majority – mass immigration to keep the percentage of Māori New Zealanders below 20 percent – is difficult to fathom. But, if they were caught by surprise by the “Asian Invasion”, they lost little time in coming up with a Plan-B.

Having been thwarted in their hopes of overtaking the Pakeha population, and thereby denied the opportunity of reclaiming their land and power democratically, it was necessary for Māori to come up with a plan that did not rely upon superior numbers and the democratic process for its success. Somehow, their being a minority of the population had to be rendered unimportant and irrelevant. Somehow, the mere fact of being Māori had to become a justification for being accorded equal authority with Pakeha.

Whether by accident, or design, the New Zealand Judiciary came through with all the legal and historical arguments necessary to transform what had been a Treaty-based relationship between the Crown, exercising full sovereignty over its legally subordinate-but-equal Pakeha and Māori subjects, and the territories they inhabited; into a relationship “in the nature of a partnership” based upon the “principles” of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which, expert testimony assured the nation, did not entail a cession of Māori sovereignty.

Meaning, that if Māori are equal “partners” of the Pakeha, by virtue of Te Tiriti, then their numbers, expressed as a percentage of the population, are entirely irrelevant. Their right to equal authority emerges from their relationship to the land, not to how many of them there might be at any given moment in history. This being the case, on all important matters pertaining to the Treaty “partners”, solutions should be arrived at through a process of co-governance.

It may not be the outcome envisaged in Blue Minks hit song. Blanding-out New Zealand’s vibrant multicultural society into a coffee-coloured uniformity, while a “right-on!” notion in 1969, would strike most contemporary New Zealanders as a terrible idea. For Māori New Zealanders, however, it must be difficult to avoid the conclusion that, since 1986, the demographic fix has been in. Co-governance, the Māori defence against being tyrannised by a majority that was either deliberately, or accidentally, manufactured by the institutions of the state, a policy for which no government has ever asked for, or received, a popular mandate, can only be regarded as masterful – as clever as it is controversial.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.