Revealed: Prince Philip's 1954 letter - Māori treated like 'museum pieces and domestic pets'

Guide Rangi explains a hāngi to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh during their visit to Rotorua in 1953. Photo / NZ Herald

A newly unearthed letter from Prince Philip reveals that the senior royal thought that Māori were treated in New Zealand like "museum pieces and domestic pets".

The 1954 letter, written to Australian politician Sir Harold Hartley, also contains critiques of New Zealand as "the perfect welfare state" which was "over-governed with not much room for initiative", the Daily Mail reports.

The letter was written after the Duke of Edinburgh toured New Zealand with Queen Elizabeth in the year after her coronation.

It has now come up for sale at British auction house Dominic Winter, where it is expected to fetch around $580.

Prince Philip has a long history of being outspoken on race. Photo / Getty

Writing about Māori, Philip said: "The New Zealanders appear to regard them somewhere between museum pieces and domestic pets.

"There seems to be no official policy for them which is at all enlightened.

"... New Zealand on the whole struck me as over-governed with not much room for initiative - the perfect welfare state in fact!"

Philip does also offer some praise for New Zealand, saying: "The people were universally charming and on the whole most considerate."

Elsewhere in the letter, Philip reveals that he was impressed by a museum exhibition of Māori culture, saying that he had developed an interest in the subject after reading The Coming of the Māori by Sir Peter Buck / Te Rangi Hīroa (Ngāti Mutunga).

The book, written in 1949, covers the history of Māori in Aotearoa and was considered an essential text for many years.

Sir Peter Buck, seen here in 1949, was a prominent Māori leader and anthropologist. Photo / NZ Herald

It was published two years before Sir Peter died and, in the letter, Prince Philip bemoans what he says is a lack of Māori leadership since his death.

"New Zealand arranged their tour extremely well and we ended up having seen at least something of almost everything," Philip wrote.

"I had a look round the museum, which is very well arranged. I was particularly fascinated by the Māori bit having read Peter Buck's Coming of the Māori.

"There do not appear to be any Māori's [sic] of his calibre at the moment and the result is that the growing Māori population is growing up without proper leadership."

The Queen and Prince Philip were warmly welcomed during their visit. Photo / Getty

The comments on race relations from Philip are some of many he has made over his long career, many less than enlightened.

In 1986, he told a British student in China: "If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes" and in 1998 he asked a British student in Papua New Guinea: "You managed not to get eaten then?"

At a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986, he told the crowd: "If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it."

And in 2002 he shocked an Aboriginal leader is Australia by asking: "Do you still throw spears at each other?"