Volunteer groups caught in election-year crossfire

Tariana Turia

A proposed national organisation for community and voluntary groups has been caught in pre-election crossfire between the Government and the Maori Party.

Groups ranging from social services to arts and sports have been working for five years on creating a new "peak organisation" that can represent the community and voluntary sector in the same way that Business NZ speaks for business or the Council of Trade Unions for workers.

But the taskforce working on the proposal was stunned when the Cabinet unexpectedly withdrew its support for the scheme on Monday.

Taskforce co-chair Peter Glensor said the decision came out of the blue.

"We are flummoxed," he said.

Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia said ministers were suspicious that she had stacked the new body with her supporters when she was Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector up to last year.

The Maori Party candidate standing against Maori Affairs Minister Parekura Horomia, Gisborne district councillor Atareta Poananga, is a member of the taskforce, which operated on a 50/50 Maori/non-Maori basis and proposed a structure that would have given equal power to both Treaty of Waitangi partners.

Mrs Turia said Social Development Minister Steve Maharey had made "uncomplimentary remarks about the Maori part of the taskforce and the fact that they agreed to operate in a treaty-like manner".

"He was saying that I was using the taskforce to facilitate the Maori Party, which of course is nonsense," she said.

"They are seeing bogeys under every bed where they think that I've been, where they think there's got to be something underhand going on."

But Hastings MP Rick Barker, who replaced Mrs Turia as Community and Voluntary Sector Minister, said the Cabinet was simply "unconvinced that the building of a new structure in this form, creating an additional layer of bureaucracy, was particularly going to enhance the relationship between Government and the sector".

"Also, Cabinet was yet to be convinced that a single entity would be able to represent the very diverse nature of the sector such as social services, environment, arts, culture and heritage, sport, disability, health, aged care and so on."

He said rejection of the new body did not affect the $3.4 million allocated over the next three years in last year's Budget for facilitating "engagement" of the community and voluntary sector with the Government.

The coordinator of the Association of Non-Governmental Organisations of Aotearoa (Angoa), Dave Henderson, said community groups had been lobbying for state funding for a peak organisation since the 1990s, when the former National Government axed funding for national welfare groups after they criticised "work-for-the-dole" schemes.

An Upper Hutt community worker who is one of three development managers working for the taskforce, Iris Pahau, said the proposed Community and Voluntary Sector Manaakitanga Trust would have focused on cross-sector projects such as a national research centre, perhaps associated with a university.

Mr Barker's office asked the director of the Problem Gambling Foundation, John Stansfield, to ring the Herald. Mr Stansfield was involved in early discussions on the proposed body, but said that co-operation should be built from the grassroots up, not from the top down like the trust.

"It's like trying to put another layer on from the top," he said. "If you really want that kind of structural cooperation, you invest in it at the bottom at a regional level and put some resource into making sure that the community organisations in, say, Waiheke, are talking to each other."