Tribes are being organised to help own people

Press, 18 June 1986, Page 19

Tribes are being organised to help own people

The exciting developments seem destined to remain among the Maoris, and in the moves to get fresh impetus by the revamping and strengthening of the Maatua Whangai programme.

This was established in 1982 to encourage Maori families to foster Maori children, but is already being used to provide limited funding for community care and will be used more extensively under the new Maatua Whangai policy. It is being switched to a tribal base, the aim being to cut back the number of Maoris in social welfare penal institutions by allocating each tribe money to care for its own people. The concept is now being promoted around the country by a small but committed travelling circus of departmental officials. They are asking the tribes to produce a register of their mem-

bership and its distribution, and to have them completed by the end of November, this year. They are also asking them to set up administrative networks: a central management committee in the home-base and smaller committees in the other centres — wherever they have members.

Funds will be given to the home-based committee which will be responsible for their allocation over each year, with accountability not to the Government but to the tribe.

The scheme is designed to be self-regulating, to reduce Maori dependency on the State, and to deliver a degree of self-deter-mination. By bolstering the tribal unit, it should also provide a firmer base for community care throughout New Zealand. Offenders, wherever they live can be referred to their own

tribe for sponsorship and, at least in the eastern Bay of Plenty, there will be new scope for dealing with the gangs. This is because gang affiliations in the region tend to correspond broadly with tribal divisions; Black Power being largely Tuhoe and the Mongrel Mob, Ngati Awa.

The connection is due to geographical accident; different tribes tend to be based in different settlements and a small settlement is big enough for only one gang. The potential it offers is, however, enormous. It is an area that the Whakatohea Maori Trust Board is already exploring through policies which might almost have inspired the new Maatua Whangai programme. The trust covers most of the Opotiki Valley and has been extraordinarily successful. It was established in 1955 on

the proceeds of $40,000 compensation payment for excessive land confiscation.

Today, its assets are worth about $3 million and include two big dairy farms and a half share in a third; a big maize acreage; and ownership of a boot factory leased to a company which began by employing six people and now has about 40. These resources and a series of Government grants are being used by the trust to create jobs in the district for the Whakatohea tribe, the vision being to reverse the drift to the cities.

The trust was asked by Judge Wilson to become involved in community care when the sentence was first introduced and is now sponsoring four offenders and a parolee from Paremoremo.

It works mostly with the Mongrel Mob, and its programmes

are job-based rather than specifically marae-based, administered through a special employment and rehabilitation committee. At base, the strategy is to guide gang-members toward a sense of responsibility as beneficiaries of the tribe. To get this message across, the board has met Mob representatives in its office where it has sat them round the table and told them that it is part of their inheritance as Whakatohea. Consistent with this tribal emphasis, the trust requires offenders in its community care programme to give an undertaking in court that they will use their influence with others in the gang “to regain respect and loyalty to their tribe and elders.” Deliberately, its seeks to move away from the case work attitude of the probation service,

which it regards as damaging because of being alien to the tradition Maori concept of the individual as part of the group. Community care fitted easily into this philosophy and was taken up by the board with characteristic efficiency. Its approach has been two-pronged. It has forged a link between the gang and the elders through a series of meetings on the marae, sometimes involving instruction in the Ringatu religion and sometimes discussions on tribal history and culture. It has also set up work projects. These include: • A forestry contracting scheme involving 10 Mob members. The board gave them a suspensory loan to buy tools and arranged skills training through the Labour Department; • A craft centre, again for the Mob. This has proved quite suc-

cessful and has been commissioned by the ANZ bank in Opotiki to do a carving; • A concreting contract and an eel farm, both still in the process of being set up. Plans are now to establish a smallwood factory using local timber which is expected to create 25 jobs at the outset. Work trust members have been told that if they keep within the law and show reliability in their present contracts, they will be considered for steady employment in'the plant when it is established.

The Whakatohea Trust Board, in a report this year on its community care programme, said progress was being made and that the attitudes of the offenders were changing — "albeit rather slowly and a test to patience.” One, the parolee from Paremoremo, has since had another brush with the law and will appear in court later this month after a drunken incident in which he tipped a pub pool table over. But the board is prepared to be patient.

Tomorrow: Peter Luke reports on the effect of community care jn Christchurch and Patricia Herbert concludes her series with a report on the part being played in the programme by a residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre at Kahanui.