Twenty-five years is a long time between drinks in our history. Back in 1998, Te Tiriti o Waitangi wasn’t such a hot-button topic, but poverty was. Unemployment was running at more than 18% for Māori. Child poverty rates had trebled in the previous decade.
The Anglican Church decided to do something about that. Its 1998 General Synod/Te Hīnota Whānui resolved to march on Parliament with a hīkoi focused on poverty. It had become a co-governing body after adopting a tikanga-based power-sharing constitution six years earlier. The synod decision evolved out of a call for a general strike and was distilled into five simple demands: real jobs, affordable housing, a trustworthy health system, adequate wage and benefit levels and accessible education.
Te Hīkoi mō te Tūmanako mō te Rawakore, The Hīkoi of Hope began from the Far North and the Deep South early in September, gathering marchers and supporters along the road, involving some 38,000 of them by the time it reached Wellington and filling Parliament grounds on October 1. The outpouring of support en route was huge; food, hospitality and beds, marae and civic welcomes, bystanders joining the chant of “enough is enough”. A young boy in a roadside crowd offered Nick Mountfort, one of the marchers, a Marmite sandwich and a can of Sprite. Loaves and fishes all over again.
The hīkoi gathered personal stories of poverty as it progressed, 200 pages of them, packaged in kete that were presented to MPs on Parliament steps. Some accepted the loaded gift, some didn’t appear. Opposition leader Helen Clark did. Then-prime minister Jenny Shipley, a Presbyterian minister’s daughter, didn’t. But she did meet an ecumenical delegation of church leaders soon after and said their criticism was unkind.
What angered her more was a paper presented by Professor Whatarangi Winiata (Ngāti Raukawa) at the same time, calling for bicultural partnership giving Māori control over delivery of their resource needs. Shipley rebranded this as a call for a “separate Māori parliament”. The meeting with Winiata and church leaders ended unhappily. It lost its focus on poverty, which delegation leader Bishop John Paterson said was “the bottom line for the hīkoi”. Media gleefully pounced on the co-governance agenda as a shift from “sensible Anglican opinion”. Former MP Michael Laws labelled it the work of “fringe nutters”. But the co-governance proposal was hardly a surprise, given that Anglicans had been practising it for six years, working towards it for 50, and promoting it around the country as a model for the nation. The road out of poverty was a two-lane highway for Anglicans – three actually, including Pasifika in the tikanga-based model of governance.
The hīkoi won widespread praise – from Māori Queen Dame Te Atairangikaahu to Helen Clark, who acknowledged its influence on her Labour government and its first Budget. Māori rights activist and MP Dame Tariana Turia hailed it as a “moment in our history” along with the foreshore and seabed campaign. But media celebrities of the day hated it. Paul Holmes led the charge, dismissing the hīkoi as a “hiccup of hypocrisy … The Anglicans are a disgrace … and their (expensive) Auckland cathedral is a disgrace … the architecture monstrous.” A decade later, he was happy (hopefully) to be buried from there.
In retrospect, the Hīkoi of Hope was a remarkable event, led by a church not accustomed to street marches before, and never more visible since. And the co-governance agenda entwined in the protest was especially prophetic.
But did that walking for change make any difference? Child poverty rates have fallen, though the wealth gap has climbed. And hīkoi to address that are harder to find than ever.
John Bluck is a retired Anglican bishop and the author of Becoming Pākehā: A journey between two cultures.
