Hundreds of young Maori men benefited, graduating with formal trade training and relevant qualifications.
Maori especially enjoy the trades, just as they do other areas of work. But the trades allowed them to apply "hands on practical knowledge" in skilled areas.
They have always thrived in this full-time work environment. Years ago with building, plumbing, mechanics, butchery and other training programmes available the men would live in hostels and learn collectively on the job.
They had pastoral care and support provided when living away from home and many went on in later years to own their own businesses. Some of these older businessmen were present at the recent launch in Rotorua.
Maori Trade Training programmes should never have disappeared. Maori leadership at the time let it happen without putting up a fight.
They accepted that the government would mainstream the programmes and local polytechnics and other providers would pick up where Maori Trade Training left off.
The leaders failed to realise the uniqueness of programmes that reinforced the inclusive learning style of Maori youth. They allowed the programmes to be shut down. No polytechnic could hope to replicate that training model.
The abandonment of the Maori Trade Training Programme was an abdication of leadership or put another way an example of bad leadership.
The iwi leaders failed to comprehend what was at stake.
It was then all down hill for young Maori men. The uptake at polytechnics has never, and never will, match that of the Maori Trade Training Programme. A generation of Maori men were left hanging.
Employers weren't encouraged to pick them up as apprentices, and soon after even the national apprenticeship schemes went into decline.
Today these men are in their 40s.
They have another 25 years at least of working life ahead of them. I have no objection to the targeting of youth for the new training initiatives but what about this large group of Maori men who were overlooked when the trade training opportunities went. Why shouldn't they be specifically targeted as well?
They have life experience and some work experience behind them and it's not too late to get them into trade training.
Not to give them the opportunity, when we know jobs will be plentiful, and with the projected 250,000 jobs required in the Australian mining industry, is to abandon them twice. They were betrayed once by bad leadership, they deserve some consideration now.
Leadership does require sticking your neck out from time to time and taking the required action. Come what may, the leaders should not have agreed to the shelving of programmes that they knew worked for Maori.
It wasn't only the Maori Trade Training Programme that went west; Matua Whangai and Maori Housing also went the same way.
Maori home ownership plummeted and has never recovered since.
Significant savings were made by the government of course when these schemes were abandoned.
I suspect the current crop of Maori leaders don't realise that the Treaty Settlements already concluded, and currently being negotiated, have been made possible because of the savings made by the government when iwi leaders packed up shop.
The current generation of low-skilled Maori men, mainly unemployed, have more than paid the price for negligent, inadequate leadership.
Current principled leadership would now want to put that right.
