Editorial: Kinship and the use of public funds

The Maori Party leader, Tariana Turia, has made a brave and important contribution to public debate with her defence of nepotism in the purchasing practices of Maori organisations. She was not well acquainted with the latest case, the tertiary training institution Te Wananga o Aotearoa, accused of buying courses from the chief executive's daughter and his fiancee and of giving a car-cleaning contract untendered to the deputy chief executive's partner. But nepotism is not a word Maori use, Mrs Turia said. "We see it more as whanaungatanga [kinship]." It was, she said, a matter of trust. Maori preferred to employ relatives because they knew and trusted them.

It is time this was explained, which does not mean it is excused. Hardly a year goes by without a Maori organisation coming under intense political criticism for the apparent use of public positions and public funds for the benefit of family and relatives. Mrs Turia herself was criticised a few years ago when, as an Associate Minister of Corrections, she wrote to officials seeking to have a child she had once fostered transferred out of a maximum security prison. Now she admits that earlier, when she was chief executive of a publicly funded iwi health authority, she worked with a lot of relatives.

Whanaungatanga, of course, does not make nepotism right. Organisations that are trusted with public money must be especially careful in the way they buy goods and services. Public money is taken from people compulsorily. It is not comparable to the earnings of a person or a company that sells goods or services to voluntary consumers. Organisations that depend on voluntary purchasers have an in-built check on nepotism - unless the organisation obtains services of the highest standards and at competitive costs it is liable to lose customers.

Without that risk, publicly funded organisations need to be careful to put all contracts out to tender and to evaluate them objectively. People pay taxes on the understanding that the money will be used honestly and will not be expropriated for private benefit. Maori organisations that favour family with employment and service contracts do not see themselves as acting fraudulently. They are acting, Mrs Turia attests, on a cultural impulse to trust those they know.

Their political critics probably suspect that different values are at work and for that reason they subject Maori organisations to closer scrutiny than others. It is time the Maori values were at least acknowledged so the country might begin to resolve this regular problem. One of the essential qualities that distinguishes a modern society from the tribal societies of long ago, and of many poor countries still, has to do precisely with Mrs Turia's notion of trust. When people put their trust predominantly in blood relatives they generally produce societies that are poor, corrupt and war-torn. When people put their trust instead in a system of common law they are able to work and trade confidently with strangers.

Most successful societies have made a transition from tribalism to a system of law that lets people deal with each other as citizens with equal rights regardless of blood or birth. Maori society, left alone, would probably have made that transition in its own interests. Colonialism arrested its development in many respects including, it seems, the employment and contracting practices of Maori social services. It is not in the interests of Maori that this whanaungatanga persists. Maori, as much as anybody else, should be able to have confidence that they will be treated equally by those organisations.

Their opportunities for employment or to provide services should not depend on a family connection. Mrs Turia and her party could advocate something better.