Editorial: An apology we don't need to have

Pita Sharples, the Maori Affairs Minister, has led calls for an apology to the Maori players from the rugby union. Photo / Steven McNicholl

In the centenary year of the formation of the first Maori rugby team, the New Zealand Rugby Union wanted to put the emphasis on celebration. Not for it a traverse through murky waters of the past. It has not been given such luxury. Two controversies have erupted, both of which return the spotlight to a time when the New Zealand union was in thrall to South Africa, its greatest rival but also the home of apartheid.

This led to the union agreeing to exclude Maori players from All Black tours to the republic in 1928, 1949 and 1960 on racial grounds. It also, it now appears, led, quite extraordinarily, to a government minister telling the 1956 Maori team that it must lose its match against the touring Springboks.

The first shameful, long-running policy has led to calls, led by Pita Sharples, the Maori Affairs Minister, for an apology to the Maori players from the rugby union. He says it would be a small but appropriate gesture, and has called the union arrogant for refusing to see matters his way.

But it is reasonable to ask what would be achieved by an apology. Saying sorry has become very much a 21st century feel-good phenomenon. Rugby has not been immune. Individual players, notably Tana Umaga and Norm Hewitt, have offered public apologies, surely at the union's behest, for unacceptable off-field behaviour. In the way of modern practice, these, however, were more about damage control than anything else.

If an apology is to be appropriate, it should offer a step towards understanding and reconciliation. Those who feel they should be on the receiving end should find it a cathartic experience that enables them to put misfortune behind them. Neither pertains to the excluded Maori rugby players. Everybody already accepts this was a disgrace. The appeasing of the apartheid regime and its racist policies is a stain that will never be expunged from the union's history. But Maori rugby, for its part, has surely long consigned the injustice to history, and proceeded to fashion an impressive record in international encounters.

It has, however, a new grievance over now-corroborated revelations from former Maori fullback Muru Walters, now an Anglican bishop, that the Maori Affairs Minister, Ernest Corbett, told the 1956 Maori team before kick-off that they must not beat the Springboks. "What he said was you must not win this game or we will never be invited to South Africa," Bishop Walters has said. The Maori duly lost the Eden Park encounter 37-0.

Corbett's entreaty says much about how far New Zealand was prepared to kowtow to South Africa. It also suggests the importance that the Springboks placed on their racial identity. Even if they were to lose to the All Blacks for the first time in a test series, a defeat by the Maori could not happen. The message this would send to those subjugated by apartheid was, presumably, too unpalatable to conceive. So much so that South Africa might have nothing more to do with a country that had a radically different approach to race relations.

Yet the minister's message also says something about New Zealand society a half-century ago. Corbett is reckoned to have been an effective minister who worked closely with Apirana Ngata. But historians note he was also a conservative Taranaki farmer who was occasionally chided by Ngata for racial arrogance. His attitude towards Maori was highly paternalistic.

Putting what he perceived to be New Zealand's interest first must have seemed the right thing for such a figure. The rugby union was, similarly, blinkered. Together, they contributed to a wretched chapter in this country's sporting history. Revisiting it should, however, prompt a sense of incredulity, not a desire for ongoing reproach.