Issue 75 - editorial

Preoccupations

Tena ano tatou

The last couple of months have seen a number of major events take place in Maoridom.

The possibility of major Maori protests about unfair treatment in land settlements loomed when the Government’s Office of Treaty Settlements – a better name might be the Office To Frustrate Treaty Settlements – declined to landbank land offered to it by Landcorp, who then put it up for sale. In one case on the Coromandel Peninsula, Ngati Hei occupied Whenuakite Station, a high value coastal property that it might have expected to have returned in a future settlement.

While much of the criticism was heaped on Landcorp, in my view it should have been shared at least equally with the aforementioned Office of Treaty Settlements. Last year a number of iwi lodged complaints with the Waitangi Tribunal about unsatisfactory treatment from that office whose staff negotiate the fine detail of settlements on behalf of the Government. It may be of course that Government has ordered the office to play hardball with iwi, especially as the one billion dollar fiscal cap to cover all settlements is now proving to be inadequate - as Maori said it would be when it was first put in place.

After a few front page headlines and pictures and TV news stories about Ngati Hei and their occupation of Whenuakite, the government caved in. Or did they? Yes that land and Rangiputa Station, for sale up north have been taken off the market, and an investigation is being carried out into how the Government disposes of land. But I don’t think Ngati Hei or the Taitokerau people should begin counting chickens. In the statements by Ministers, I heard a lot of talk about land belonging to ‘all New Zealanders’. In the past when those words have been used, Maori have not fared well.

It seems almost every week there is an awards evening for this or that in Maori circles; and some people have been getting good use out of their tuxedos and evening dresses attending such ceremonies. It would be easy to think ‘enough’. But one string of awards is worth commenting on. About a month ago the University of Waikato held a ceremony to recognise the 42 Maori who graduated with doctorates in 2006. Given that a Doctorate of Philosophy (or PhD) is the pinnacle of the Pakeha mainstream education pyramid, that seems to be quite an achievement. But it is even more so when you consider that since Waikato University started holding these awards in 2002 , 148 Maori have graduated with doctorates from universities in this country and Australia. Not bad indeed.

And you may have caught up with the breakdown of figures from the last census. It’s official - the average Maori is a 22-year-old woman. There are in fact 16 500 more Maori women than blokes in our Maori population of a bit over 565 000.

We make up about one in seven of the total Aotearoa population and we are younger. Our average age is about twenty-two and a half – the average age of the rest of the population is nearly 36.

So maybe it’s about time they started treating us better; because it’ll be our young people who will be generating the country’s income to pay for those other people in their old age. Are you listening in the Office of Treaty Settlements?

One person who’s got some catching up to do is our cover girl Phyllis Tarawhiti. She turned 50 the other day, but had spent more than a fifth of her life locked away in a Thai jail. Read her story and find out why, and how she got on.