Features

“Its so racist against white people, wheres my free uni?” [sic] says Angus Anderson on the Facebook page “GETTING A UNI SCHOLARSHIP IS SOOOOO HARD lol jk I’m 1/64 Maori” (although Critic speculates that a scholarship might be necessary to improve grammar that bad). And how can we forget ACT’s ads earlier this month, asking “Fed up with pandering to Maori radicals?” Seeing as you asked, Don, no I’m not but it seems that based on Facebook pages, anecdotal evidence and a certain avian-themed column in Critic, a considerable number of people who would give a different answer (although it depends on your interpretation of ‘pandering’ and ‘radicals’ of course).

In a university context, discussion revolves around the following areas: scholarships, support centres and services, and admissions criteria to restricted courses directed at Maori and - to a lesser extent - Pacific Islanders. The University of Otago’s overall position can be found “in our University of Otago Charter and the Strategic Direction, which specifically do spell out Maori students and staff. Supporting recruitment and retention are usually the key words,” says Jacinta Ruru, a senior lecturer at Otago’s law faculty and an executive member of the University of Otago Maori Academic Staff Caucus. Major support initiatives are provided through the Maori Centre, such as tutorials and a mentoring program as well as hui, welfare advice and liaisons with iwi and other community networks. The Pacific Islands Centre provides a similar experience for Pacific students. Other organizations centered around Maori at Otago are Te Roopu, a parallel body to OUSA representing Maori students, and Te Roopu Whai Putake, the self-funded Maori law students’ association. Bianca Hewitson, its president, points out that these bodies “are not some exclusive club…no one’s going around testing for Maori blood. But if you want to tick the Maori box [on your university enrolment form] and you identify as Maori, or want to spend time in a Maori environment and maybe speak Te Reo, then you can [take part].”
 
Turning to scholarships, scholarships are available for Maori PhD and Masters students, both based on merit, as well as $3,000 study grants open to Maori and Pacific Island students in their fourth year of study. The University also awards about thirty $10 000 scholarships annually to Maori and Pacific Islanders entering the University, usually from high school. Bianca Hewitson describes these as scholarships as “competitive”, aimed at the top students in the country, and the unspoken rule is that they sit parallel to the $5,000 University of Otago Leaders of Tomorrow Scholarships, which are open to applicants from any cultural background. Any other financial support for Maori “is probably coming out of their own iwi,” says Jacinta Ruru, although only iwi that have been through the Treaty settlement process have the assets to fund this. “Telecom could do the same, or any other kind of business so there’s lots of kinds of organizations within New Zealand that give incredible support to different communities. A lot of them are in educational scholarships and it just happens to be that some iwi now have return settlement funds that they’re putting into education initiatives.”
 
For competitive courses, notably law and medicine, there are some special entrance policies for certain groups. In the law faculty, “we don’t have a quota system,” says Jacinta, “coming in from first year law there’s an admissions committee and a number of groups can apply to come through there.” Maori, Pacific Islanders and students with disabilities are the main examples, but anyone can apply through this route. “There’s a special committee who sit and occasionally there are some Maori students who get through that process, but usually only [if they are] a percentage or two below, so if the cut off one year is 78% there might be a Maori student who gets there on 77%. You don’t want to go much further than that because they don’t have a strong enough academic background to come through on.” For entrance to medicine, special consideration is given to applicants of Maori, Polynesian or Melanesian decent, as well as any students who come from a rural area, subject to a minimum academic standard. I was told anecdotally of a student who was considered on this basis and gained entry. Her marks were high, but noticeably not as high as other successful students. However, medicine is somewhat different from law, says Bianca, in that there are many Maori lawyers whereas “in the health sector, there is a real need for more doctors to work with Maori communities with an understanding of hauora Maori values.” Accordingly, there are certain bonding requirements for successful applicants by this route to work with the communities they come from.
 
So why take these measures and why offer them on the basis of race (or, arguably, culture)? The key word is ‘equality’. If you believe everyone has an equal start in society, then so-called ‘positive discrimination’ would no longer be so positive and the Pakeha student who gets 77% in LAWS101 would rightly feel wronged by missing out on a place in second year where a Maori student with the same mark succeeded. But as Professor Jim Flynn, the former head of Otago’s politics department, explains, positive discrimination (known in the US as affirmative action) is based on the premise that we don’t all get an equal start in life. “So one of the most important things you can do to equalise groups is to look at those most disadvantaged, and you’ll certainly find that the people represented in the most disadvantaged are not a random sample ethnically of society.” In New Zealand, Jacinta Ruru, points out, there’s “this idea of Maori having special rights, but if you stand back and look at it, Maori have the highest unemployment, poor health, poor housing, poor crime rates. There’s nothing ‘special’ about being Maori in any of those kind of categories.”
 
What people don’t realise, says Flynn, is that even if poverty is discounted, what he calls ‘racial profiling’, a subtly different concept from racism, comes into play in the opportunities we have in life. He gives this example: “What would you do if you had insufficient resources - and the police always do - are you going to go to Remuera and stop obviously middle class Pakeha for drugs or are you going to go to the inner city where there are a lot of guys who are Maori hanging around and looking idle, and frisk them for drugs?” It’s not a question of right or wrong, it’s about the associations created by one’s race, often based on statistically correct assumptions, that come into play in employment, housing and policing. None of this is will be much consolation to that Pakeha law student, but, says Flynn, “that’s the non-eliminatable price of affirmative action. All you can say to that person is that if we don’t make this up to Maori in the public sector, and these are public universities, well you’re benefiting from affirmative action [due to society’s racial profile of you].”
 
Even if we can all agree with the goal of giving people an equal chance, the next question is whether it works. Don Brash thinks it doesn’t, a view shaped by his time spent in Washington DC during the sixties and seventies. “When Afro-Americans were promoted, there was an assumption on the part of white Americans (and often among Afro-Americans also) that the promotion was ‘only because they're black’.  Sometimes of course, those promoted were actually not as well qualified as other Americans for the job, so they looked incompetent in the position - and white Americans tended to conclude they were incompetent because they were black, rather than recognising that they just weren't qualified for the position.  So prejudices were reinforced among the white community, and a feeling of inferiority was reinforced in the Afro-American community.”
 
On the other end of the political spectrum, Flynn agrees. But he doesn’t think affirmative action is doomed: “it’s a balancing act. The consequences can always be mitigated to some degree.” For example, in Otago’s law school, this act is balanced by keeping the threshold for Maori limited to cases where the difference in their mark to the cut-off mark is so slight as to be almost arbitrary.
 
No one is claiming affirmative action is the best or only way to close the equality gap. “It’s a top up,” says Flynn, “one of the best ways is to raise the threshold so that no one has inadequate housing, no one lives in poverty and no one has bad medical care.”
 
Rob McLeod, the chairman of the New Zealand Business Roundtable and of Ngati Porou descent, thinks affirmative action should be handed over to the private rather than public sector. “I would like to see private businesses and voluntary organizations giving more thought to ways of promoting Maori in employment and education, simply as part of good management practice. Such efforts should be voluntary and decentralised – what works best in the head office in Auckland might not be the right approach in Gisborne.”
 
In moving towards a more equal society, Jacinta Ruru is inspired by the Treaty of Waitangi, or at the very least our modern interpretation of it. “That Treaty is sort of premised on partnership type ideals.” In that spirit, Jacinta thinks what is needed is education, not just for Maori, but also for Pakeha, “to build respectable relationships that really thrive. There should be some real comfortableness around all New Zealanders going onto a marae and moving within a Maori world, as Maori have had to become comfortable moving in a Pakeha world. We’re starting to create some really strong relationships to move forward in this country, showing the maturity of this country.
That’s the wider picture and it’s important not to forget that.”