Mason Durie: Quality is yardstick for 2025

Mason Durie

While the decades 1984-1994 and 1995-2004 were witness to significant changes for Maori, the directions set in train then may not necessarily be the best options for a world which will be radically different by 2025.

The 1984 Hui Taumata ushered in a decade of development taking Maori in new and positive directions. Participation and access were important goals and there were spectacular increases in the levels of active educational participation.

Greatly improved rates of participation were also evident in healthcare, Maori language learning, business, sport, music, film and television and information technology. However, access by itself will not be a sufficient measure of quality for 2025. Increasingly, the emphasis will shift to quality and high achievement.

Another transformation that occurred over the past two decades was renewed confidence in iwi to undertake functions across a broad spectrum of activities including environmental management, tribal research, the delivery of social programmes, broadcasting and fisheries management.

Runanga demonstrated that in addition to reconfiguring tribal structures to meet modern needs and to operate within commercial and legal environments, they could also act as anchors for cultural revival and the transmission of customary knowledge.

However, although iwi development will likely continue as an important pathway for Maori advancement, it is also likely that there will be an increasing emphasis on building whanau.

Expectations that iwi gains might trickle down to whanau are probably unrealistic, given contemporary Maori affiliations and different priorities between small groups such as whanau and large groups such as iwi.

Iwi may well contribute to whanau aspirations but for the most part the tools necessary for building iwi capacities will not be the same tools required for developing whanau capacities, including the capacities for caring, for creating whanau wealth, for whanau planning, for the inter-generational transfer of knowledge and skills within whanau, and for the wise management of whanau estates.

The settlement of historic grievances against the Crown, though still in progress and far from complete, has nonetheless also been a salient feature of the past two decades, leading to several momentous settlements.

Most have been the result of individual tribal claims but at least in respect of the fisheries settlement, the Sealord agreement was ultimately for the benefit of all Maori.

However, the process of negotiation, coupled with a rehearsal of past events, tended to reinforce an adversarial colonial relationship between Maori and the Crown.

Beyond grievance there is a need to focus less on the past and more on the future. Settlements have very often diverted Maori energies into the past, sometimes at the expense of the present and often away from considerations of the future.

But the rapidly changing world, with new values, new technologies and global communication will require Maori to actively plan for the future so that generations to come will be able to stand tall as Maori and as global citizens.

Reference has already been made to the greatly increased number of Maori service providers, especially in health and education, greatly contributing to higher rates of Maori participation and improved access to services and facilities. But three aspects of provider development warrant closer comment.

First, within a framework of commercial contestability, provider organisations have prized their independence and have been correspondingly suspicious of their neighbours. The resulting proliferation of semi-autonomous Maori organisations has counted against collaboration, shared infrastructure, and economies of scale.

Second, for the most part providers, including some iwi, have got by on state contracts. Having contested the notion of state dependency and welfare benefits at the Hui Taumata in 1984, there would be an irony if provider development were to create another form of state dependency, albeit at another level.

It is a reminder that multiple revenue streams embracing the private sector, combined perhaps with a system of user co-payments, might create more sustainable provider arms than total dependence on state contracts.

A third aspect of provider proliferation is to be found in the steep learning curve that Maori community workers have experienced. The rapid growth of organisations in size and number has required workers to learn new skills and to straddle several positions often without formal training in any.

For many it meant fronting up in classrooms, offices, homes or communities with little more than raw talent and abundant enthusiasm. Sometimes there were additional expectations of senior leadership responsibilities.

Often those expectations have been unrealistic, highlighting the need for more dedicated training for both managerial and governance roles.

While 20 years ago there was an acute shortage of frontline workers who could bring a Maori perspective to service delivery, there is now a shortage of skilled people who can offer sound governance advice and provide effective leadership.

Transformational shifts will be necessary to navigate the next 20 years. The significant shift will be a refocusing from developmental mode to a mode of greater confidence and certainty.

Arising from experiences over the past two decades, and in anticipation of a rapidly changing world, a framework for considering Maori in 2025 can be constructed.

Reference has already been made to goals that might be important for Maori over the next 20 years. They include: extending the emphasis on access and participation to high achievement and quality outcomes; creating, alongside iwi and hapü development, a specific focus on enhanced whanau capacities; developing collaborations and clustered networks between Maori organisations so that economies of scale can be realised and the best use made of resources; and building a strong governance and leadership capacity.

Defining best outcomes for Maori requires that being Maori is adequately recognised as a determinant of well-being, alongside health status, educational achievement and economic well-being.

We need an outcome focus which contrasts with a focus on processes. During the past two decades considerable emphasis has been placed on processes with particular stress on tikanga, bicultural procedures, and the creation of opportunities for active Maori involvement.

While useful, and still worthy of pursuit, processes should not be confused with end points. The practice of cultural safety in health services, for example, is not justified simply as a celebration of culture but as a means of achieving better health outcomes. Similarly, the involvement of whanau in meetings about child and youth welfare is not simply intended to fulfil a cultural preference, but to ensure the best possible outcome for a child and the family.

Because most measurements are process measures, rather than measures of outcome, it has been impossible to judge the effectiveness of a number of interventions. Detailed records may document the number of home visits made by a community health worker but are unlikely at present to note whether the visits have contributed to gains in health.

Part of the difficulty lies in the complexities associated with outcome measurements; there is a time lag between intervention and result; many variables apart from a specific intervention may impact on the outcome; and a good outcome for one group may be regarded as an unsatisfactory outcome by another group.

Complexity, however, should not be used as a reason for avoiding a focus on outcomes. Promising Maori-centred measurement tools do exist. An outcome measure for mental health interventions for Maori, Hua Oranga, employs a Maori health framework as the basis for measuring impact.

Similarly a Maori development outcome framework, He Ngahuru, recognises cultural identity, participation in te ao Maori and access to cultural heritage as important indicators of outcome.

Typically, planning occurs in time frames of three to five years. This short-term approach encourages incremental change but runs the risk of being unable to respond to major societal or environmental changes and leans heavily on precedent, convention and crisis management as the drivers of change.

The planning process tends to perpetuate sameness. A futures orientation introduces longer time spans - 20 or 25 years - and the directions that Maori might take in order to be relevant to Maori society, New Zealand society and global society in 2025.

A future orientation means that urgent and pressing demands of the moment will not totally obscure those issues that will assume importance in five, 10, 15 or 20 years.

Predictably the Maori population will continue to expand; there will be proportionately more children, and more older people, and there will be greater ethnic diversity among Maori. The wider scene will also change.

Globalisation will make the world into a marketplace for Maori and all New Zealanders and will dictate fashion, music food preferences, scientific discoveries and new technologies.

National sovereignty will be balanced by international collegiality and inter-dependence and New Zealand will be reminded that it is a Pacific nation in close proximity to Asia.

Technological changes will lead to revolutions that cannot yet be conceived.

The Maori economy is particularly likely to change over the next two decades. Treaty settlements will provide iwi with capital to enter the commercial world. Household incomes are likely to increase, less and less transfers from the state to individuals will occur, and land-based and resource-based economies will be increasingly supplemented by the knowledge economy.

Change will also affect Maori parents. By 2025 they will be older than they were two decades ago and may not have children until they are in their 30s. They will show greater socio-economic diversity and may have a wider range of affiliations with other ethnic groups, especially Pacific and Asian.

Predictably they will have more disposable income; will be more likely to be competent Maori speakers than their parents and possibly their grandparents; will be expecting high levels of achievement from their children and will want an education system that can accommodate unique aspirations.

There is no single pathway that will lead Maori towards high capability by 2025. Instead multiple pathways must be considered. Using educational pathways to illustrate the options, it is possible to identify Maori centred pathways (kohanga reo, kura kaupapa, whare kura, wananga), bicultural pathways (bicultural units), and generic pathways (ostensibly neutral as to culture though usually based on conventional western educational models).

While those three broad options have allowed choice, the links between them have been relatively frozen. In the future, however, it is highly likely that parents will seek customised learning experiences and may wish to enrol their children in all three options at the same time. Or they may wish to access some programmes provided by one particular kura kaupapa while still enrolled in another kura.

Institutional loyalty and institutional autonomy will be of less interest than gaining access to particular programmes, regardless of where they are offered. When coupled with online learning opportunities, students will be keen to extend the principle of choice from choice of institution to choice of modules with flexibility in delivery options.

Similar principles will arise in the delivery of health services and other human development sectors.

Over the past two decades Maori and the Crown have formed relationships to advance a wide range of issues, including Treaty settlements, education and health policy, environmental protection, land and fisheries policy, and heritage preservation.

In working together, the Treaty of Waitangi has been an important touchstone that has allowed expressions of indigeneity to be realised within contemporary societies and within the context of a modern state. But a partnership with the Crown need not be the only partnership entertained by Maori.

Indeed state dependency, whether through policies of benign paternalism or as a consequence of state contracts or prolonged negotiations, is unlikely to encourage innovation or enterprise. Rather, there is room for a range of pathways and partners. The private sector, global partners and other indigenous peoples have the potential to open new doors and allow for diversification and increased sustainability.

Many of the goals and themes raised in this paper have already been embraced. However, there remains a place for a more dedicated commitment to longer term planning, both at local levels and nationally.

To that end, it would be prudent for Maori organisations, especially those charged with shaping tomorrow, to add a futures dimension into developmental plans. A futures plan might encompass a Maori workforce strategy, a Maori high-achievement strategy, a Maori governance and leadership strategy, a whanau capacity strategy.

At the same time, given the demands on Maori communities and an array of urgent short term matters, there is also a place for a national Maori futures group to provide leadership in futures planning by developing appropriate methodologies, creating a focus for futures thinking, and providing assistance to those groups who are keen to actively engage with 2025.

* Mason Durie is Massey University's Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Maori) and Professor of Maori Research Development.