Census: Stats NZ’s approach to Māori data collection doesn’t make sense to me - Denis O’Reilly

OPINION

Getting the last 5% of Māori to contribute to Census 2023 and support gathering of data that improves lives today and for generations to come.

Statistics New Zealand has achieved the enrolment of 70 per cent of all Māori in Census 2023 and seems to be chuffed with the result.

If that’s all we get then it would be like ending up with Two Wise Men at the birth of Christ. In the name of Charles III I propose that on the basis of the King’s requirement of inclusivity and public service that the last 30 per cent of as yet non-counted Māoridom become a priority target.

Who might they be and why are they important?

Some are displaced whānau. This might be because of cyclones and a refugee-like reality where they shift from marae to motel to motel or short-term rental based on TAS deployment. Some might be ordinarily itinerant not really knowing their living circumstances from day to day. Some might appear intimidating and may indeed be intoxicated and thus scare off census workers.

All though have a story to tell and have unmet needs. If the government of the day is supplied with comprehensive and accurate Census data then policy makers and economists have a geographic, sociographic, and ethnographic basis on which to make fair and equitable resource deployment. The nub of my argument is that these marginalised whānau are exactly the people a government needs to hear from because investment in them produces high yields socially.

The effort to engage this last 30 per cent of Māoridom has been increased in 2023 due to the dislocation of communities because of Cyclone Gabrielle and the heightened distrust of government that arose from the Covid experience. So here is a chance for Statistics NZ to excel and to expunge its abysmal performance in the previous Census.

Stats NZ’s Māori staff are keen and effective, but the mischief of David Seymour and others means that innovative proposals raise the bar of apprehension amongst the mainly Pākehā executive of Stats NZ. The suburbs in which they live have high compliance. The challenge to engage those who dwell on the edges of society is always difficult.

Paula Ormsby leader of Mongrel Mob Wāhine Toa Kingdom. Photo / NZME

Bob Dylan once sang “You don’t have to be a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows”. I’m no meteorologist but my academic training in political activist ethnology enables me to spot instances of pushback and institutional or systemic racism.

My organisation set out to engage whānau Māori in Census NZ 2023. The Dictionary of Maori Law Terms says that whānau extends to a family, a multi generation group consisting of parents, children (including adopted children) and their spouses and grandchildren. In modern usage it includes various special interest groups whose members function as kin.

Of course, “various special interest groups” in Aotearoa include whānau-Māori who affiliate with indigenous groups described as gangs. These groups are generally “othered” by mainstream commentators in general, and in particular by politicians.

It is by proxy a racist paradigm.

American academic Loic Wacquant speaks of an ongoing reconstruction of an “imagined community” wherein there is a polar opposition between praiseworthy working families, who are implicitly white, suburban, and deserving, and “another” class an “underclass”.

Michael Laws’ vituperative description of these whānau-Māori spares no doubt of the underlying racist perspective.

“Despicable underclass of criminals, loafers, and leeches, a two headed antisocial hydra, which is personified by the dissolute teenage welfare mother on the female side, and the dangerous street gang banger on the male side — by definition dark skinned urban and undeserving.”

“The true timebomb that ticks in this country – our growing underclass, predominantly brown, transient, illiterate, dirty and diseased…so too the children with brains atrophied by their parents’ willing ignorance. And imbuing this warped view now with the next generation”

To avoid the “gang” labelling trap and the resistance that it produces (inter alia) various individuals and organisations have taken recourse to use of metaphors.

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James K Baxter used “the tribe of Nga Mokai”. Others have used “hard to reach” and “kahukura”. Shane Jones referred to “nefs on the couch”. A recent academic tome has introduced what might be a useful term “Te Hapai O”.

Essayist Garrick Cooper uses the term to refer to describe: “Māori people who have perhaps not had much access to so-called traditional Māori culture – language, tribal lore and customs – as a result of the urbanization process.”

Cooper makes a perceptive point. He correctly identifies that tribal and other Māori organisations also tend to hold Māori gang communities in disdain. Māori funding agencies are similarly hyper-sensitive to political risk and constrain themselves from funding otherwise excellent service provision programmes and innovations.

“Hidden beneath Treaty Justice, gangs are another subsection of the Māori community that tribal bureaucracies appear to want to create distance from. Te Hapai O are a highly racialized subsection of the Māori community and their interactions with government bureaucracy tend to be more antagonistic. They are more likely to form the larger chunk of Māori at the sharp end of the social indices – the so-called disconnected Māori; Māori who are pathologized by both the government and tribes”

My recent experience with Statistics New Zealand leads me to conclude that despite the excellence of its Māori staff it will not invest any authority in them even at the level of “Pouarahi Te Ao Māori Census 2023″.

Community advocate Dennis O'Reilly. Photo / File

I trusted that Statistics New Zealand would deal with whatever ways whānau present themselves, hapū, iwi, urban organisations, or kaupapa-based clusters. There is no labelling. Just whānau Māori. Not so. And ways to engage these whānau as suggested by staff should be implemented. Anything else is structural racism and I’m sad to say, this is what I am experiencing.

Denis O’Reilly, chairman, Consultancy Advocacy & Research Trust, M Soc P, is a life member of Black Power and a community advocate based in Hawke’s Bay.