Kevin Rudd’s newly elected Labor government in Australia is pledged to apologise to the country’s indigenous people over the “stolen generations” scandal which saw thousands of Aboriginal children taken from their parents and put in internment camps, orphanages and other institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries. This has been one of Australia’s biggest race relations issues since the 1997 publication of the Bringing Them Home report on those grim historical events. “Sorry” became the hardest word in the English language for Liberal prime minister John Howard to say. In the face of public pressure, Howard put forward a motion of “deep and sincere regret over the removal of Aboriginal children from their parents” which the Federal Parliament passed in August 1999, but the “S” word would not pass his lips, despite him acknowledging that “the stolen generations” represented “the most blemished chapter” in Australia’s history. An unofficial “National Sorry Day” has been staged each May 26 since, the anniversary of the release of Bringing Them Home.
Viewing such events from this side of the Tasman highlights some of the major historical differences in race relations between New Zealand and Australia, two countries colonised by Britain in roughly the same era but in markedly different ways.
The Australian Aborigines were basically regarded as sub-human by the settlers and their governments and treated abominably. Their lands were seized with impunity and without payment, they were allowed few civil or political rights and they existed as outback-dwelling outcasts of society. Intermarriage was virtually nil. Generations of white Australians grew up in the cities rarely, if ever, seeing an Aborigine, or indeed anyone who was not white. From federation in 1901 until 1973, the country operated an openly racist immigration regime colloquially and semi-officially known as the White Australia Policy which allowed entry only to Europeans. In 1947, Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell infamously told Parliament that “two Wongs don’t make a white.” Aborigines were not even legally Australian citizens until 1967 and were not able to vote until the 1969 federal elections.
The contrast with New Zealand could hardly be greater. Pressure from the missionaries, among others, when Wakefield’s New Zealand Company settler convoys were being put together in 1839 saw the Colonial Office accept that the Maori must be treated substantially better than indigenous Australians. Captain Hobson was despatched to negotiate a formal treaty with Maori to allow British settlement to take place legally, in an orderly way and with Maori interests protected.
Though the Treaty of Waitangi’s protection of Maori land rights only lasted until the demands for land by the settlers exceeded iwi willingness to sell, much that happened in New Zealand was still far and away better than what happened in Australia. When constitutional government was established in 1852, Maori men were granted the vote on the same basis as settler men (votes for women did not come until 1893 but even this was the first in the world). As that was basically an individual property franchise, and most Maori land was owned communally, it effectively excluded most Maori men (but most settler men were also excluded), and so, in 1869, a century before Australian Aborigines first voted, the New Zealand Parliament extended the franchise to all Maori men, at a time many settler men remained excluded. To be sure, Maori had to cast their votes in the four special seats created for them, which severely limited their political influence at a time when their numbers were large compared with the settlers, but the fact they were allowed to vote has to be seen as an important and enlightened development for the time. Elsewhere, settler governments were highly reluctant to allow non-whites to vote. Beyond Australia, the Black majority population of South Africa was unable to vote until 1994. Despite the abolition of slavery in the US after the Civil War ended in 1865, most African Americans were unable to vote until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, a century later. Indeed, the former southern slave states in the “land of the free” operated an apartheid-style system known as “segregation” until it was outlawed by a series of landmark Supreme Court judgements in the 1950s and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
New Zealand was never blighted by laws overtly discriminating against Maori or preventing them from taking part in civil and political life. Intermarriage has been common and accepted here since Europeans started arriving, to the extent that most people of Maori ancestry now also have European ancestry. Since 1970 there has been a remarkable renaissance of Maori culture, language and participation in the political process. The creation of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975 led to the continuing, honorable settling of land and other grievances dating back to colonial times, a process Australia has barely begun.
Just how marginalised Aborigines are even today can be seen from their numbers. Of Australia’s total population of 21.2 million, just 517,000 (2.4 per cent) are of Aboriginal descent. Maori are more numerous – of New Zealand’s population of 4.3 million, 633,000 (14.9 per cent) are of Maori descent. Another 73,000 actually live in Australia.
But. But. There are always “buts.” Our race relations have not been as rosy as the legal history and a comparison with other countries might make them seem. For the first century after the signing of the Treaty, most Maori lived on or near their marae in rural areas. When they started moving to the cities after World War II in search of work in the factories then being established to industrialise what had been a mostly agriculture-based economy, they soon met outright racism from many Pakeha. Newspaper situations vacant and house-rental advertising often and blatantly added the line “No Maoris” right up to the passing of the Race Relations Act in 1971. Some businesses refused Maori custom, such as a notorious barber shop in Pukekohe that would not cut Maori hair. Some cinemas made Maori sit upstairs, separate from Pakeha audiences. And while Australia openly had its White Australia Policy until Gough Whitlam ended it, New Zealand had a covert White New Zealand immigration policy until 1990. We would not even allow in the Greeks and Italians who so enriched Australian culture in the post-war decades. We allowed a few Dutch families in the 1950s, but they were abused and criticised for working too hard, so the only migrants we encouraged were British, who did not even need passports to come here until 1974. We grudgingly brought Pacific Islanders here to work in the factories when there were not enough Maori willing to staff them, but as soon as the economy soured after 1973 we called them “overstayers” and rounded them up in dawn raids for expulsion. And when Bill Birch ended our whites-only “traditional source country” immigration rules after the 1990 election, many of us became apoplectic when thousands of highly educated people started arriving from China. It is far from being ancient history that Winston Peters built his political career first on attacking Maori Treaty claims, then on demonising Chinese immigrants, before turning more recently to Muslims.
Despite these buts, there is much to be proud of about New Zealand and much to give hope that our future will not be riven by the kind of ethnic discord and even violence that exists in many parts of the world. And it is of some comfort that when we look enviously at Australia’s booming economy and feel unease at the number of Kiwis moving there, there are still some very important things we do much better.
1 Comment
December 27, 2007 at 10:51 am
Some of the things that made it easy for us didn’t exist in Australia.
Oz was settled earlier, was a prison colony, a harsh country perforce settled along the coasts. The Aborigines were far from the European ideals of “handsome” and were quickly pushed away from the coastal areas by a relatively dense and well protected European population.
Our settlement was an almost guaranteed success in comparison, and by the time the settlers excess’s and Maori Wars rolled around, the two societies were already somewhat integrated.
In Fiji, the Brits learned a bit more, and held the chiefly structure in place and the land ownership virtually in trust for Fijians.. both a blessing in the early days, and more of a curse now.
In Hawaii, the Americans treated the Hawaiians poorly but created powerful Japanese and Chinese societies that proved so vital to the Islands.
And so it goes.. the racial policies and effects are a hotch potch owing more to the time of colonisation, the needs, attitudes and circumstances of the colonisers, and the attractiveness of the colonised than to a steady policy or any innate fairness.
Thus, to me, the present situations of the colonised rest on a combination of historic circumstances, rather than any modern actions which really are only mirrors of the earlier years.
And, in a sense that’s callous to the natives, the creation of the Anglosphere brought forward one of the world’s greatest and best integrated entities of a huge number of races and religions, the sum total of which is much greater than the sometime poor beginnings.
JC