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In 1867 the New Zealand Parliament passed legislation to introduce four seats in the House of Representatives for the Māori people, the indigenous tribes of Aotearoa-New Zealand. This thesis investigates the history of how Māori Members of Parliament and Māori political movements have engaged with the Māori seats from 1867 to 2008. It asks a series of questions on the nature of Māori political engagement with the Māori seats: Why were the Māori seats established and what role did Māori communities play in their establishment? Why did Māori choose to engage with parliament and how did they regard the Māori seats? What types of leaders did Māori political movements send to represent them, according to what criteria were those leaders selected, and how did Māori attitudes towards leadership change over time? What did Māori hope to achieve by sending their leaders to parliament, and what ambitions did those leaders carry with them? What have Māori parliamentarians in the Māori seats achieved and what factors have helped or hindered their efforts? How effective have Māori MPs been in representing their constituents in Parliament and by what criteria should we judge their effectiveness? And how has Māori political engagement with the Māori seats changed over time? This thesis also looks to the cultural and social implications of political engagement, asking what impact Māori culture, customs, language and social organisation had on Māori political engagement, and in turn what impact did political engagement with the Māori seats have on Māori culture and society? To answer these questions this thesis discusses the establishment of the Māori seats and the Māori political movements that have engaged with these seats, covering the formation of the seats 1835-1867, the careers of Māori MPs whose efforts and achievements are well established in the existing historical literature 1887-1943, the era of Ngā mātāmua the first wave of Māori MPs 1868-1938, the Rātana-Labour era, 1932-1960, the political career of Matiu Rata 1963-1991, and the formation of the Māori Party 1996-2008. This thesis employs a mix of primary documents, oral interviews and secondary sources to pull together a picture of Māori political engagement with the Māori seats over the past 145 years. It argues that historians have underestimated the role of the Māori MPs and the agency of Māori communities in determining the direction of political engagement. The Māori MPs have been dealt with in a homogenous fashion and written off as ineffective and ill prepared for the rigours of parliament. A closer reading demonstrates that the Māori MPs have made a considerable contribution to New Zealand society in pursuing the ambitions of their constituents, and that the Māori seats play a significant role in the social, cultural and political landscape of the nation.
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To be Māori is to be political. Our history is filled with political struggles and victories. These struggles, originating from experiences of colonisation and assimilation, have greatly influenced what it is to be Māori today. This thesis explores the relationship between Māori ethnic identity, and political attitudes and outcomes. In this thesis, I present five studies (across four published papers and one full manuscript) which validate the Multidimensional Model of Māori Identity and Cultural Engagement (MMM-ICE2). I focus particular attention on the scale’s Socio- Political Consciousness dimension, and illustrate the links between identity and politics for Māori. The MMM-ICE2 is a seven-dimension scaled designed with Māori, by Māori, and for Māori to measure Māori ethnic identity (Houkamau & Sibley, 2010, 2015a). In the first two studies, I focus on using psychometric techniques to further validate the MMM-ICE2 as a measurement tool. Firstly, I use random intercept exploratory factor analysis to show that the scale is not vulnerable to acquiescent responding (yea-saying; Greaves, Houkamau, & Sibley, 2017). The second study uses multigroup confirmatory factor analysis to illustrate that the MMM-ICE2 shows reasonable measurement equivalence across diverse Māori groups (Greaves, Manuela et al., 2017). In the third study of the thesis, I demonstrate that Māori, broadly defined, are more likely to vote for the political left – the Labour, Green, and New Zealand First parties – over the centre-right National Party (Greaves, Robertson et al., 2017). The results lay the groundwork for two further studies, which demonstrate the construct validity of the Socio-Political Consciousness dimension of the scale by predicting a range of political attitudes and behaviours. Study Four shows that, above and beyond the effects of demographics, Māori enrolled to vote on the Māori electoral roll were higher on the Socio-Political Consciousness and Group Membership Evaluation dimensions (Greaves, Osborne, Houkamau, & Sibley, 2017). Additionally, in Study Five, I demonstrate that higher Socio-Political Consciousness for Māori is related to higher levels of support for Māori rights protests, the left-wing Green Party, and the Māori-issue focussed, Māori and Mana political parties (Greaves, Sengupta et al., 2017). Yet, lower levels of Socio-Political Consciousness were related to higher support for the right-wing National Party. Taken together, these studies show that the MMM-ICE2 scale and the Socio-Political Consciousness dimension can predict important, realworld political outcomes and attitudes for Māori. Finally, I discuss the contributions that the papers in this thesis have made to the literature, and the inevitable limitations of the research. I then provide future research directions for the study of quantitative Māori identity and for Māori political participation more generally. I finish with reflections on the process of writing this thesis and on being an emerging Māori quantitative researcher.
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Topic
- māori electorates
- colonisation (1)
- identity (1)
- kāwanatanga (1)
- māori seats (1)
- political movements (1)
- political participation (1)
- ratana (1)
- te pāti māori (1)