Your search

  • In 2004 the appointment of a Coordinating Minister Race Relations, signalled a shift in elite Māori policy thinking from a long-standing cautious bipartisan acceptance of selfdetermination towards a re-emergent assimilationist ‘one law’ for all discourse. The question simplistically posed by the Leader of the Opposition was should welfare entitlements be granted on the basis of need or race (Brash 2004)? Beneath this question lies an ideological assumption which privileges assimilation over indigeneity as the basis of Māori participation in public affairs. This paper therefore asks: are Māori peoples with rights, or individuals with needs? Is there a deeper politics of indigeneity providing a legitimate foundation for rights which are not necessarily superior to the rights of citizenship, but are important and distinguishable adjuncts? These questions transcend the issue of welfare entitlements to wider questions about the nature and terms of Māori belonging to the liberal polity. The paper highlights the political tension between government attempts to remove indigeneity from the public agenda in response to populist pressure and a pragmatic acceptance that New Zealand ‘needs’ Māori to increase their contribution to the national economy and that the realisation of this goal may in fact depend on the fuller citizenship imagined by the politics of indigeneity.

  • Reforms of local government legislation in the United Kingdom (2000) and in New Zealand (2002) both introduced well-being powers. The UK reform gave local government a new power to promote social, economic and environmental well-being, but New Zealand added a fourth dimension - cultural well-being. This paper examines the background to New Zealand's 'quadruple bottom line' approach. It explains that it was the result of policymakers in New Zealand grappling for 25 years with the question of how to give effect to what the Town and Country Planning Act 1977 described as 'the relationship of the Maori people and their culture and traditions with their ancestral lands'. New Zealand's legislation requires a fully integrated approach by decision-makers using the well-being power, and the essay concludes with a discussion of how this has provided a forum for contests and compromises over cultural well-being to take place within a framework of democratic local decision-making by communities.

Last update from database: 8/17/26, 4:11 AM (UTC)