The Press TUESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1971. Five Maori seats?

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32789, 14 December 1971, Page 16

The Press TUESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1971. Five Maori seats?

The Maori Graduates’ Association is complaining that it requires 55,000 Maoris, but only 31,000 Europeans, to return a representative to Parliament These graduates have done their sums wrongly. Supporting an opinion that there should be three more Maori seats in the House of Representatives, the association has looked at the whole Maori population instead of at the number of Maori people who demonstrably look to the Maori members for representation. What seems to be the most reasonable way of assessing Maori representation can be explained by referring to the last General Election.

In December, 1969, there were about 220,700 Maoris in New Zealand; of these, about 88,000 were of voting age. A month earlier, at the General Election, some 58,500 Maoris were registered on the Maori electoral rolls or were deemed qualified to vote. (The exact figure cannot be ascertained because of a breakdown in the official reporting of voting figures from the Northern and Eastern Maori electorates.) It may be assumed that the remaining Maoris of voting age, being of half Maori blood, chose to enrol as European electors; or, like some Europeans, some Maoris might not have enrolled at all. This likelihood is hardly helpful to an argument in favour of increasing Maori representation. Nor is it helpful to point to the proportion of Maori electors who cast their votes. In two Maori electorates 72 per cent of qualified electors voted, compared with an average of 89 per cent in the European electorates. It is not possible to produce a reliable figure for the other two Maori districts. What is clear is that not all Maoris sought to be represented by the Maori members of Parliament If the whole Maori population is divided in the same proportions as the Maoris of voting age appear to have divided themselves between the two rolls in 1969, about 147,000 Maoris were represented by the four Maori members.

The population quota for defining North Island electoral districts before the 1969 General Election was 30,400. If the same quota could have been applied to determine the number of Maori districts the 147,000 Maoris associated with the Maori representatives would have had five members in Parliament. The calculation involves some small areas of guesswork: but these cannot alter the conclusion that the population of the Maori electorate was approaching a figure that justified five seats. The important assumption in this calculation is that young Maoris have, or will have, the same attitude towards their representation as have their elders of voting age. It might well be, of course, that more and more young Maoris of half blood will choose to enrol as Europeans. In this event a purely statistical way of determining the number of Maori seats might one day result in a reduction in the number. Such figuring does not, of course, settle any of the fundamental questions about separate Maori representation in Parliament; but if statistics are to be used in the discussion they should at least be used sensibly.