'Ngāti Toa will take its land back and bring its people home', iwi leader says

Sunday, 30 August 2020

Helmut Modlik – the self-described “boy from the pa with the flash name” – has come home to Takapūwāhia to become Ngāti Toa’s new chief executive.

Helmut Modlik once got the strap every day for four months.

He wasn’t a bad child, just easily bored and always managing to find himself in trouble, especially when life was moving too slowly for his liking – something it did much of the time.

It was curiosity that kept the strapping going – one little Pākehā lady would leap from her chair, brandishing the cane downward as she went – as Modlik began to wonder who would give up first, him or the teachers.

It wasn’t him.

Matiu Rei has retired after 30 years of leadership. (File photo)

* An iwi blossoms - Ngāti Hinerangi take back their mana after signing a Deed of Settlement

* Iwi could become landlords - then owners - of 900 Porirua state homes

Some of the first state houses constructed at Titahi Bay in the late 1940s. Photo: Pataka Museum of Arts and Cultures.

Modlik has come home to Takapūwāhia on the shores of Te Awarua-o-Porirua Harbour, to be the chief executive of Ngāti Toa, an iwi on the cusp of monumental change.

“You can write this down,” he says. “Before I finish, this will be the place Ngāti Toa people want to live because of the quality of life from cradle to paepae. Our people are going to come home.”

He has taken up the torch following Tā Matiu Rei’s retirement after 30 years of leadership. Rei led a 20-year battle for Treaty justice that ended in 2014 with a $70 million settlement and first right of refusal over Crown-owned properties and land in their area.

In 2019, the iwi became the landlord of more than 900 state homes in Porirua City’s western suburbs in a Crown partnership made possible by that Treaty settlement. The houses will be upgraded to provide healthy homes for the predominantly Māori and Pasifika tenants, work that will also provide jobs for iwi.

There is a serendipity in these houses, even if this is the first time Modlik has considered it.

In 1953, his father left Germany and joined the teams of Europeans building pre-cut Austrian state houses in Porirua’s Titahi Bay. He fell in love with Haneta [Becky] Arthur, a Ngāti Toa woman, and the pair married and had five children.

All these years later, it is those houses the iwi have taken control of.

Helmut Modlik says Ngāti Toa will row its own waka while still holding officials with statutory obligations to account.

“It is a full circle, 60 years later we need to tear them down and go again.”

It was after his dad left in 1967 that a 6-year-old Modlik was told he was the man of the house, a pivotal moment in his memory.

“All my life I have always had an inflated sense of the importance of looking after the whānau and I put it down to that.”

Modlik has moved back to Takapūwāhia to lead the iwi into its next period of ascendency. The past 200 years have seen his people stripped of so much but he says the 2014 settlement drew a line under that period of loss.

“For 30 years my predecessor did the hard yards of eyeballing all of those who have inherited the obligations the Crown entered into with Ngāti Toa, and patiently negotiated something that, while not justice, not even close, does enable something that approximates to an acceptable starting point for the next 200 years.”

From his childhood in the sleepy Māori village to his background in corporate finance and business, he feels uniquely qualified to take up the position.

“Whether it is education, housing, health, or social services, we are going to row our own waka, we are going to make it happen. In saying that, while we are not going to rely on those who have got statutory obligations to do it, we are not going to let them off either.”

The little boy whose childhood was spent playing on the land once owned by his people now wants future Ngāti Toa generations to have more.

“We are a small iwi with less than 8000, and less than a third live anywhere within our region. Why don't they live here? Where the hell are they going to live? What are they going to do for a job?

“Our kāinga is surrounded by whenua that got taken by the Public Works Act – or this act or that act – and I have got people I can't house. I am telling you, by means fair or foul, we are getting that whenua back.”

While Modlik won’t rely on those officials with statutory obligations, he is going to be all over them and, a bit like the little boy who was strapped every day for four months, he won’t give up.

“I have the best job. All I think about is the mana, wellness, and prosperity of my people and, by the way, I have a rather large balance sheet to make it happen.

“We will get our land back, we will hold it and, you watch, it is going to be a great story.”