Sir Robert Mahuta's life focused on service to his people. His campaigns grew from experience, as ADAM GIFFORD reports.
In December, I received a call from Sir Robert Mahuta inviting me to Hopuhopu to talk about Tainui's battles.
"Nobody wants to print our side of the story," he said.
Certainly from my experience of dealing with Sir Robert during more than a decade reporting Maori news, a lot of the reporting of Tainui's trials didn't ring true.
Since the collapse of Tainui's credit rating, it has suited some to blame Sir Robert, claiming that nothing was done without his say so. That doesn't square with my observations of Sir Robert as a delegator.
When I interviewed him at length in 1995, after he successfully negotiated the Tainui treaty claim settlement, Sir Robert said his strategy "for as long as I live now is to try and get the settlement bedded in and try to distance myself from the more mundane aspects of it and retire into the endowed colleges."
"That's really where I want to end up, in our colleges, and just read and write and do a bit of teaching. Become the kaumatua of the movement."
The 1995 settlement was the highlight of a life devoted to Waikato-Tainui, and, even after last year's fire sale, provides a substantial asset.
It took Sir Robert more than a quarter of a century to achieve, building on the lessons of campaigns such as rebuilding Turangawaewae Marae in Ngaruawahia and saving Waahi Marae in Huntly.
Journalists have tagged Sir Robert "the chosen one," implying that he was used to having things his own way. He was chosen, but nothing came easy after that.
Sir Robert said his adoption by King Koroki and his wife, Te Atairangikaahu, soon after his birth in 1939 was done because of a rift in the kahui ariki (royal line) between an anti-Ratana group, led by Princess Te Puea, and a pro-Ratana faction led by his grandmother Piupiu, daughter of King Mahuta.
"It caused some quite bitter division, as I understand it. And this was an attempt to try and heal that breach."
After three years at Mt Albert Grammar - at the instigation of Te Puea, who wanted him to understand Pakeha ways - Sir Robert left to work the coal mines with his uncles.
In 1959, he joined the Army for three years because "it was the only way you could get out of the country, to travel."
The Army taught him discipline, "doing repetitive, boring tasks, trying to get down to fine detail all the time. Getting rid of the netting in front of you before you do a big thing, and you just sort of carried it on into your ordinary life after that."
"And in a sense nothing was, to some extent, impossible. You weren't fazed by some of the immediate problems in front with you, you just had to clear it away bit by bit, keep digging away."
After his discharge Sir Robert and four Army mates went to Dunedin, where he worked for the railways.
It was there he met his wife, Raiha, whom he credited with getting him back to school to finish School Certificate. He then got provisional entry to Auckland University with the help of the late John Waititi.
In 1969, with a number of other promising young Maori educators, Sir Robert visited the United States on a Ford Foundation-organised trip, looking at American Indian reservations in the southwest.
While he picked up some encouraging ideas about how to create a Maori education system, the political organisations on the reservations didn't impress him.
"It reminded me too much of Maori Affairs and I certainly didn't want anything like Maori Affairs in Waikato; and they seemed very pompous about the whole thing.
"They were just sort of ... pale imitations of where the real power was ... For my own purposes the real sources of power were with education and wealth."
By now he was starting to feel the expectations of the people.
At the time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sir Robert could see that as the old people died off, a whole world was fading away.
"I really didn't know how we were going to retain some of the best parts, particularly the whole marae thing, the language - not in any grammatical sense, just the strength of kinship ... within the community, being able to look after each other."
While still in Auckland, Sir Robert was asked by his sister, the Maori Queen, Te Atairangikaahu, to head the fundraising for a new dining hall at Turangawaewae.
Planning had been started by Te Puea, but fundraising had been going on for years with no visible result.
"I said this is the way we're going to do it. We've got to find out how much it actually costs, and then start building. Start building. We've got to plan to get the money, build, go into debt and then pay it back. Get the people behind us."
Looking around for a formal structure to coordinate the effort, Sir Robert picked on the Tainui Maori Trust Board, which until then had played a minor role in King Movement affairs, managing the $12,000 annual grant secured by Te Puea in the 1946 Tainui settlement.
Serving on the board, Sir Robert got to thinking that the 1946 settlement was inadequate - a view older members of the board who participated in the settlement would not accept. "They said what I was doing was walking on Te Puea's grave because it was her settlement. I said, 'That's fine'."
Two other board members, Hori Forbes and Dave Manihera, supported him, and the trio set off for Wellington to put a case to then-Maori Affairs Minister Duncan MacIntyre.
Mr McIntyre responded to the trio with an offer of a two-for-one subsidy for blue chip investments, effectively tripling the grant. When they got home, the board rejected the offer.
"So I got on with the fundraising for Kimiora [the dining hall]. But I knew then that if [the Government] were prepared to open up on just one meeting, how much further would they open up if we had a well researched, well presented case?"
In 1975, Kimiora opened, the largest structure built in Maoridom at that time. It galvanised marae refurbishment efforts up and down the country, and marked Sir Robert as a force to be reckoned with.
Sir Robert resigned from the board to spend two years at Wolfson College in Oxford, studying towards his incomplete doctorate, until he was called back to head opposition to the Electricity Department's proposal to pull down Waahi Marae as part of the Huntly power station development.
Sir Robert's solution was to get the department to lift the village above the flood level, pumping sand on the site and replacing the topsoil.
The battle gave him an appreciation of the attitudes local authorities and the Government had towards Maori. "I guess that gave me the dummy run for dealing in a sense with the defensive wall they were putting up against us for the claim."
The biggest obstacle was ignorance. "They honestly didn't believe that these things happened. One of the few ways you would be able to educate them was to actually take them into your confidence and deal with them on a social level - drink and eat with them and take them to hui, and gradually wear their defences down until they were much more amenable to understanding there's another world that operates out there, apart from the one that they're in, with its own values and perceptions of history too.
"That it's not a threat to society at large to settle these particular claims, because if you settle these then you've improved the quality of life in the community everywhere and there's a downstream benefit."
While the return meant shelving the doctoral thesis, Sir Robert said much of the work, which tied in the sort of concepts presented in Maori whaikorero or speechmaking with theories of underdevelopment, was used when he helped Koro Wetere develop the devolution policies in the fourth Labour Government.
"And then the other part of it, of course, was the whole raupatu [confiscated land] negotiations. I knew I was on the right track because this stuff that we were dealing with was from whaikorero, Maori resources, manuscripts. The Crown didn't have any of that. They didn't know what the hell it meant."
Sir Robert's job as head of Waikato University's Centre for Maori Studies and Development gave him a base to test development theory and resource the claims.
Sir Robert said he got serious about the raupatu claim after coming back from an OECD conference in Alaska on rural development. Sir Robert and Australian consultant Ken Egan prepared a paper on the Waahi development, and then a broader survey of Tainui's needs. "We came to the conclusion that okay, here was a confederation of tribes who had suffered the classic symptoms of underdevelopment. So we'd go to the underdevelopment theory, and at the end of the day, you needed resources to do things.
"We had two choices for resources. Either you got your own or the state's. We had some reluctance to rely on the state for this type of development, so we said, 'What have we got that's our own?' And so we said, 'Well the only thing we've got that's our own was taken away - the land.'
So we said, 'Right. That's what we've got to reclaim. If we're going to establish an economic base that lies under tribal control, we've got to reclaim that raupatu estate'."
Negotiations with Labour started in 1988 but stalled almost immediately. An offer of $9 million, conveyed by Richard Prebble on the eve of the 1990 election, was rejected.
"I said, 'You can have your $9 million, that's what our people have said, and as far as any haste on this, you've got the elections, and I know I'm going to be here after the elections. I don't know about you'."
He said the incoming National Government was forced to the table because state-owned enterprises, particularly Coalcorp, were almost unsellable with claims pending.
Sir Robert said Treaty Negotiations Minister Sir Douglas Graham took some time to understand the claim.
"He was talking numbers. I said, 'You can talk any numbers you like [but] I really haven't got the authority to talk a money claim. This is about land.' And then we started going through what land, how much land and that, for quite some time.
"And I think they were testing their crown policy on us, about mandate and all that type of thing, and sure in the end it ended up that that's how they developed ... We were the guinea pigs for that."
In my talk with Sir Robert at Hopuhopu in December, he said land defined the nature of the Tainui settlement and constrained how it could be managed.
"The reason our people went to war was over land. If it takes 100 years, we've got to get that million acres back. That's the first priority.
"If we are to get it back, who is going to run it? We've got build up an educated base to run that land."
In the end Sir Robert ran out of time. He couldn't win every battle, but those he did win changed forever the face of Waikato-Tainui and NZ.
Sir Robert changed the face of NZ
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