Groundhog day for government strategies focused on Māori

Thursday, 27 May 2021

OPINION: Some recent top of the mind data and news – Māori women make up 68 per cent of prisoners at Auckland Women’s prison, and while they are there, are subjected to degrading treatment.

They are now the most imprisoned population of women anywhere in the world. Corrections has had a Māori strategy Hōkai Rangi since 2019.

The strategy would purportedly underpin “transformative and intergenerational change” for those in the care of Corrections and their whānau.

Māori and Pacific people continue to lag behind Pākehā in educational achievement, with thought leaders, advocates and politicians agreeing that institutional racism and unconscious bias in the teaching profession continue to create an enduring pattern of underachievement for these groups.

**READ MORE:

* Māori youth key to ending high Māori prison population rates

* NZ history in schools could be confrontational, expert panel says

* Why will a new Māori Health Authority work, when mainstream systems don't?

* Self-determination at the heart of new Māori Health Authority**

The Ministry of Education has responded with Mana Ōrite mō te Mātauranga Māori, one more strategy to lift Māori education by bringing mātauranga Māori into the centre of learning for New Zealand students. The Teachers Council has a new online campaign to combat racism in schools.

And over in health, a pattern of persistently poor engagement by the health system with Māori has led the government to establish the new Māori health authority.

The patterns across these sectors are depressingly consistent. Poorly equipped workforces struggle to engage effectively with Māori as students, patients, clients and prisoners.

Teachers have low expectations of Māori learners, doctors believe Māori patients are sickly and non-compliant.

Latent attitudes in the workforce shape and determine the type of experience Māori can expect to have, and it’s clearly very different and more negative than other groups of New Zealanders.

This inter-personal dimension of racism is strangely absent from the public discussion and political posturing.

The focus is macro, the theory being that if we adjust the apparatus of government, try different Treaty-based decision-making models, bring more Māori into the policy design, Māori self-determination and wellbeing will increase. Never mind that we’ve been trying these approaches since the 1970s, with at best very patchy progress.

In some areas, we’ve gone backwards, in particular mental health and justice. Both of these sectors are still more likely than ever to restrain, isolate, taser and imprison Māori more than any other group in Aotearoa. These phenomena are as much about the skills and attitudes of the staff metering out the services and punishment, as the systems they are part of.

We need to educate the workers and change the system, one won’t work without the other.

The response to these workers tends to focus on training. By throwing the Treaty of Waitangi and kaupapa Māori at them, agencies believe that workers will understand the Māori world and miraculously transform. The racism we witness in the data will dissipate.

There has been a noticeable acceleration in these modes over the last 12-24 months as public and political sympathy towards Māori increases. But the definition of madness, as Albert Einstein posited, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Minister of Corrections Kelvin Davis is announcing kaupapa Māori interventions to prevent Māori women in prison from re-offending. How about we back up the bus, and look instead at the disproportionate arrest rates for Māori men and women? By the time they get to court they’re up to nine times more likely than other New Zealanders to be sent to prison.

The new Māori Health Authority is being welcomed enthusiastically by Māori health professionals, and hats off to the Māori leaders who’ve been advocating tirelessly for more Māori control in the health sector.

Early indications are however, that the locus of control will sit with the monolithic super ministry Health New Zealand. The Maori Health Authority will be allocated funding for kaupapa Māori health services, and attempt to influence New Zealand’s generic health policy and services from the side.

Teresa Wall was the voice of reason on One News the night of the budget, arguing that the new authority cannot take its gaze off generic health services, which is where most of the problems for Māori are located. Most of the time, most Māori won’t be accessing kaupapa Māori services, they’ll be lining up at their local GP and hospital to be seen by an increasingly diverse workforce. New migrant workforces bring more complexity to the dialogue and engagement with their Māori clients.

This micro focus – on what workers believe about Māori and how worker bias and racism influences their work – is the missing piece of the jigsaw. There’s some work being done but it’s not extensive enough, because most of the energy is being expended at the strategy.

But the reality is that we have workforces in education, health and justice who are not fit for purpose, because they can’t facilitate good outcomes for Māori, and they don’t know how to.

Most of the worker behaviour is automatic, they make decisions based on stereotypes about Māori that circulate in our collective consciousness. It’s only when they are aware of their biases and know how manage them, that they can apply new modes like mātauranga Māori effectively. Unless that psychic shift occurs, there will be no change.

Anton Blank (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu) is a child advocate, project manager, communications consultant and publisher based in Auckland, New Zealand.

* CORRECTION: Kelvin Davis is the minister of corrections. An earlier version of the story incorrectly referred to him as the justice minister (Amended May 28, 2021, 11am).