Linking people with their iwi

By ADAM GIFFORD

Maori trust boards and runanga will soon be plunged into a huge data checking and information management exercise as part of an initiative to connect people with their iwi.

The resulting "beneficiary rolls" will allow iwi to meet one of the conditions they need to collect their allocation under the Maori fisheries settlement, and should help with mandating for other treaty claims.

Working with Datamail, the Tuhono Trust contacted the 360,000 voters on the Maori and those on the general rolls who indicated they were of Maori descent.

More than 100,000 responses have been received already, with 87 per cent giving approval for their contact details to be passed on to iwi.

Tuhono chief executive Dan Te Kanawa said it would be up to iwi to contact those people and verify they belonged.

"We don't ask for or hold any genealogical information," Te Kanawa said.

Getting this far has been a massive political and logistical effort, building on the expertise Datamail and another New Zealand Post subsidiary, the Electoral Enrolment Centre, have built up working with electoral rolls.

The project required a special act of Parliament in 2002, creating an exception to the rule that electoral roll information can be used only for national and local elections.

Tuhono has been awarded $5 million over three years, the bulk of which will be spent this year.

Datamail document solutions general manager David Allen said the Tuhono forms were barcoded so electoral and iwi information could be separated and kept confidential.

"We sent the part with the electoral information to Electoral Enrolment Centre so they could validate the signatures and address details. They sent back a list of those who had been validated as electors and had consented to have their contact details sent on to iwi," Allen said.

When the first mail-out was done Datamail set up a call centre in its Petone offices with Maori-speaking operators to handle queries.

He said the exercise had helped the Electoral Enrolment Office clean up its rolls in advance of the local body elections, so postal ballots would not be sent to addresses where the voter was "gone, no address".

Allen said that while Datamail would be handing the information to iwi, it would also offer a service to host the data for them.

Te Kanawa has been developing and building up support for the Tuhono concept since the 1992 Maori fisheries settlement.

"I could see there were going to be mandate issues, particularly as resources started to flow, and we needed something like this to ensure people represented who they said they did," he said.

While iwi have been aware of Tuhono coming, few have geared up for the work required.

Moera Solomon, who manages the Waikato-Tainui beneficiary register, said there was a huge amount of work involved in creating and managing such a record.

Given that the Tainui roll had 40,400 names, she did not expect Tuhono to throw up many new ones.

"Tuhono applies to people of voting age.

"Our register goes from the minute you are born and includes people all round the world," Solomon said.

The confidential register has become an important planning tool, helping the tribe to understand its demographics - 69.7 per cent of members are under 35 - identify talent and distribute benefits such as education scholarships.

Solomon usually brings in half a dozen kaumatua to go through the names of people claiming to be from their marae.

Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Commission policy manager Craig Lawson said the commission was trying to identify software for iwi to create and manage rolls.

It could run regional workshops to explain to iwi ways to validate members.