Mama Motuhake – Still in a holding pattern.

Tu Tangata, Issue 5, 1 April 1982, Page 15

Mama Motuhake - Still in a holding pattern.

Peter Isaac.

Mat Rata. He has become the Elder Statesman of Protest. The issue now is: how long will it take this voice from the Outside to , xaut r it ivroA/r a/txui return once more to the Inside of political life? Mana Motuhake Maori came second in all four Maori seats, ahead of both National and Social Credit. The power base is there. The issue now is to develop the party's own structure.

“The issue now is development,” emphasises Rangi Walker, a founder of Mana Motuhake and today very much the keeper of the spritual flame. “We must expand our toehold.” In effect Walker sees the objective as a mass communications operation. “What is the point of being on the side of the angels if we cannot get our message through to them?” he notes. Nowadays Mana Motuhake appears to be in a holding pattern. A round of strategy meetings is scheduled, though, to discuss intensively the most profitable way in which to use the handfull of power among voters so graphically illustrated by the general election results.

There is still no sign of a reconciliation between Mat Rata and the Labour Party. Even though Mana Motuhake and the Labour Party did unite in their condemnation of the Prime Minister’s comments on anti Games protesters being inherently violent. Mana Motuhake remains and will remain a political force. The

results of the last election were at once encouraging and disappointing. Certainly the party had reasonably hoped for a seat. But on the other hand, in the words of Mat Rata, the party can’t expect “miracles.” Fourth powerful Today, Mana Motuhake has the fourth most powerful political organisation. There is a permanent office with a secretariat. There are 100 active branches and around 15,000 members. The only direction now is a forward one. Few things fall away more quickly than support for a political party which does not look as if it wants to win. Mat Rata meanwhile continues to

busy himself with Maori causes, this time as an independent consultant. He acts for Maori landowners affected by the Paeroa flood works, and he consults on land ownership schemes. His work as a freelance consultant keeps him constantly in touch with events in Maoridom. The more he sees, the more con-

vinced he is that the only answer to widespread commercial development is the cooperative movement. It is a notion he wishs t 0 instill in Maoris tOO .. why didn't the Wellington dustmen use their redundancy pay to start their own con- “ 3^ then tender for

People first According to Rangi Walker the central aspect of Mana Motuhake is its “humanism.” People come first, the profit/loss side of life second. Rata believes that this solidarity with ordinary people gives it an important transcendence over Labour, a party which he claims is “abandoning” the Maori people. It is, he claims, “a party devoid of ideology” and because of this absence of philosophical base will “always founder.” Both Walker and Rata emphasise that Mana Motuhake is open to people from varied backgrounds. Ten per cent of the members have no Maori blood. In

the next election they hope to sprinkle a few Mana Motuhake candidates around the general seats. “We are determined to put the best people in the right places.” The essential Mana Motuhake demand is that you recognise that there is a “social alternative.” That you realise that the Maori culture has made no im-

pact on the daily life of the country. That even Maori greetings are uttered in strangled embarrassment in everyday life.

Absense of gestures.

This absence of even gestures to the Maori way is at the root of the Mana Motuhake discontent. “There is no difference between the Health Department in Whitehall (London) and the Health Department in Wellington.”

Mat Rata’s breakaway from traditional two-party politics reflected the undertow of dissatisfaction in many quarters by the continual East-West variation in values. Under Norman Kirk, Mat Rata seemed to surge along, powered by a renaissance of the Maori ethic. He became an influential cabinet member. Kirk listened to what he had to say. Then came Norman Kirk’s death, and Rata came to believe that Maori values were not receiving the prominence they deserved. He began to slide in influence and then off the front bench of the opposition.

Surfing in.

Rata’s greatest task in his new bid for political power is to break the grasp of the two political parties. Even John A. Lee never found a seat as an independent. But now Mat Rata may be surfing in on changing times. There is a new central party in Great Britain.

Social Credit MP Gary Knapp has called for disaffected National and Labour party MPs to get together to form a new party.

The argument over trade union allegiance has split the Labour Party and isolated its leader Bill Rowling from the bulk of his official party. The old two party system that dominated New Zealand politics for half a century is beginning to shift and crack.

Moderate portrayal.

Strategically, the Mana Motuhake leadership appears now to be anxious to portray itself as moderate. It is also committed to the retention of the Maori seats. The future of the four Maori seats now seems to be at the same

crossroads as when the dying prophet Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana determined their succession.

Ratana told his followers that he was dividing his body into four quarters. Each quarter representing a Maori electorate. Each seat for one of his disciples. Thanks to the support of the Labour Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage the prophesy came true.

Savage was not to realise the longer term effects of this Labour/Ratana pact. Though Labour, of course, wins the seats in successive elections, the seats contain far more votes than is needed to keep them out of the hands of National.

If these votes were re-directed to marginal general seats, would they ultimately result in more seats than the safe Maori one? It remains one of the biggest question marks in politics.

Drawn in.

Rata and his followers believe that the Members of Parliament from the Maori electorates inevitably become drawn into Western-style representation. They lose touch with the people and their aspirations.

Following the 1981 general election, Mat Rata has proved one thing. He is the nosecone of an active, potentially powerful organisation. His problem though remains very close to the problems of the party he foresook. He must be moderate enough to attract the bulk of the electorate, and radical enough to win the support of the activists, the reformers, the single-ideal people who change things.

There are some aspects of life he and his party are definite about. Perhaps the most important is that he wants the Treaty of Waitangi ratified. “We want to know what it is that we have signed. We really do not know. So we say ‘let’s sit down together.”

Precedence.

He sees an historical precedent in the ratification of the Treaty, noting that the Magna Carta was never ratified until hundreds of years later when the Bill of Rights was passed through

the British Parliament. He believes that Maori representatives and the Crown should once again sit down and evaluate the Treaty and its points.

Chiefly, though, he wants acknowledgement of the Maori influence to permeate all aspects of New Zealand life. “The attitude is ‘put a few more brown faces in, start a special unit’.” He believes that it should be made a point of law that people look after their elderly.

Conversely, he notes that parents should be compelled to be responsible for their children an antidote to the gang problem. He believes that traditional Maori family standards should become part of the fabric of everyday life of both races.

Youth bulk.

One set of statistics troubles him especially. It is the extreme youth of the bulk of the maori population. He estimates three times the youth as an average over the population as a whole. “So they should be getting three times the assistance.” He wonders aloud why the skill centres in New Plymouth, Palmerston North and Christchurch were closed.

He brushes aside past programmes to cope with Maori youth as “cosmetics”. The Government, he says, is “bluffing”.

For Mat Rata, the honey-tongued former truck driver, the objective is to convince enough people that it is not enough to have the Maori Way merely an adjunct to daily life, a concert culture. He wants them to believe that Maori traditions must be built into the very fabric of life and become an integral part of everything we do. He wants a recognition that we live deep in the South Pacific, as far as a man can go before turning back.

The Maori heritage, he believes, “presents New Zealand with a social alternative.’’ Years ago now during his term as Minister of Maori Affairs he once defined his attitude toward a grasp of the Maori alternative this way. “You are a Maori if you believe yourself to be,’’ he said.