David Williams: TV vital to survival of te reo Maori

COMMENT

For many years, stories about the proposed Maori Television Service have focused on underpants, fraud, forced resignations and other distractions. In all the fuss it seems to have been overlooked that successive governments have been extraordinarily dilatory in attending to the desperate plight of te reo Maori as a living language.

There can be no doubt that a dedicated minority-language TV channel has immense potential to reverse the decline of a language and help its revitalisation.

Minority languages are often dismissed as irrelevant to the modern world of technology and global communications. Yet the cultures of peoples are intimately connected to the language they use.

Language extinctions usually are a sad indictment on the intolerance of majority communities and an immense loss to the diversity of human expression. But declining use need not lead to extinction, and can be reversed.

On a visit to Wales I met Welsh language broadcasters, writers and officials. Their story was that a drastic decline in Welsh language use had been arrested and the proportion of Welsh residents claiming fluency in the language had risen to more than 20 per cent of the population.

Strikingly, the rise is most significant in the southern cities and towns where Welsh medium schools are now the first choice of many parents who know little or no Welsh themselves.

This turnaround results from a number of factors, but overwhelmingly the most important was the British Government's introduction of a Welsh language television channel in 1982.

This initiative helped to assure the younger generations that learning the indigenous language was not a waste of time. It accorded Welsh an important political status and contributed to increasing the job prospects that now flow from fluency in the language.

From the early 1950s successive New Zealand Governments were made aware of the dramatic decline in te reo Maori fluency among Maori children - from about 90 per cent of school entrants in 1913, still about 85 per cent in 1932, but 55 per cent in 1950, 26 per cent by 1958 and down to 5 per cent in 1975.

Education ministers and officials were aware that the English-only policy in schools was contributing to this decline. They thought, as an official wrote in 1945, that "if the result has been to make the Maori lose his language, don't forget that in its place he has the finest language in the world and that the retention of Maori is after all largely a matter of sentiment".

They rejected Sir Apirana Ngata's plea, late in his life, that there is "something in the sentiment of preserving a culture which belonged to the country. With that goes the assertion that New Zealand would be all the richer for a bilingual and bicultural people".

Rather, they fostered urban migration and "pepperpot" housing, but supported no communal facilities in urban areas. The policy was known as integration, which meant that Maori were to be assimilated to Pakeha values (but Pakeha had no particular reason to learn anything of Maori values).

But from a 1967 petition of Patu Hohepa (now Maori Language Commissioner) and the Nga Tamatoa petition of more than 30,000 people presented to Parliament in September 1972, pressure grew for the Government to move away from integration and to take positive steps to promote te reo Maori.

When hearing the claim of Huirangi Waikerepuru in 1985, the Waitangi Tribunal was told by Education Department officials that greater prominence had been given to Maoritanga and Maori language, but that "the record to date is mixed".

The tribunal thought otherwise: "We think that the record to date is quite unmixed. It is a dismal failure and no amount of delicate phrasing can mask that fact."

More years passed. In the early 1990s Maori litigants in court cases that went all the way to the Privy Council achieved confirmation that the Crown owed a duty of active protection to promote and enhance te reo Maori.

The language is a taonga covered by Article 2 guarantees in the Treaty of Waitangi. So there is a legal obligation, a moral obligation and a treaty obligation for the Government to take significant steps to redress the drastic damage caused by so many decades of the Crown's assimilation and integration policies.

Radio stations throughout the country play their part; kohanga reo and other education initiatives are very important. But still we have yet to see a television channel on air explicitly devoted to Maori.

It may be hard for the Treasury to measure the immediate outcomes of Maori television. My acquaintances in Wales are in no doubt, however, that over the years to come the continuing revitalisation of te reo Maori will be greatly assisted if a television service is properly funded by a public service provider.

It is to be hoped that the histrionics of recent years can be forgotten when a Maori television channel begins broadcasting. That cannot happen quickly enough.

* David Williams is an associate professor of law, specialising in Treaty of Waitangi issues, at Auckland University.