All posts by Putatara

Racism – A Personal Recollection

A few weeks ago I was in Waipawa visiting with my eldest daughter, my grandchildren and great grandchildren. I spent my final evening in town in the company of two daughters, one grandson, four granddaughters, two granddaughters-in-law, one grandniece, and nine great grandchildren. Apart from making you feel your age that context tends to give you a multi-generational long term view of life and its challenges. Racism is one of them.

During my stay in Waipawa I went uptown to the Central Hawke’s Bay Settlers Museum to look at their Gallipoli exhibition. It was interesting in a local sort of way. But their display of local history books caught my eye, particularly “Opening the Gate, The Story of the Te Aute District” published by the Te Aute and Pukehou Historic Book Trust in November 2006. In the acknowledgements I noticed immediately that I was one of the contributing writers, which was news to me!

They had filched a piece called “Te Aute, Te Aute, Te Aute” that I wrote in “Te Putatara” in 1997. However I long ago realised that in Tikanga Maori “copyright” means that any Maori has a right to copy your stuff without asking, and even without acknowledging that you wrote it. In this case I assume that one of my whanaunga gave permission, and they did attribute it to me. So that’s all right.

The book was about my home district and apparently I had contributed so I bought it. It was a goldmine.

The Maori history, the settler history, the geological history, Maori families, Pakeha families, schools, hotels, shops, farming and other businesses, community organisations, even a record of all those buried in the local urupa – it was all there. This was my home district and my home villages and my home people. It brought a rush of memories of my childhood and teenage years growing up in this rural paradise. Good memories, mostly.

It also brought back memories of growing up with racism.

Like almost all Maori I have spent the whole of my life living under the shadow of racism in the New Zealand I know. The other New Zealand has mostly officially and unofficially denied the existence of racism, but continued to practice it, overtly and covertly. Two different countries in the same land, wrapped in the same flag.

Which is not to say that I have become rabidly anti-Pakeha; just mildly anti-Pakeha from time to time. After all, half my relations are Pakeha and half my friends are Pakeha. In fact I was brought up in the two worlds of my family, Maori and Pakeha, and still have close relationships on both sides.

I grew up in the 1940s, through the 1950s, and left home to join the Army in 1962. We all knew and accepted that racism was just part of life for us. We were not really shocked when Dr Henry Bennett was refused service in a Papakura hotel in 1959 because he was Maori. It was much publicised and even condemned but it was the sort of thing we expected in the New Zealand of those times. I was 15 or 16 at the time and had already been personally exposed to racism. At that young age we were already veterans in the ongoing battle of the races.

My Pakeha mother taught me to read and write in 1946 when I was three. According to her it didn’t take much teaching and I got it straight away. I remember sitting in the sun outside the kitchen window of the farm cottage reading and reading, and reading. By the time I started school I’d read everything in the first two years’ curriculum, and much more. My first teacher didn’t know what to do with me and didn’t challenge me at all. I remember sitting around doing nothing for a whole year, and being regularly punished for being bored and distracted, and distracting others. At the end of that first year her two top pupils were Chinese and Maori. I’m told that she was somewhat offended that a Maori was top pupil although I didn’t know it at the time.

Six years later, having been academically challenged by two excellent teachers at two different schools, I was about to be made Dux of Pukehou Primary School. I had spent the final four years in the headmaster’s classroom being pushed to my academic limits by WW2 veteran Arthur Harold William Thompson. I was his star pupil. A few days before the final prize-giving he took me aside and told me that I was not going to be Dux. The school committee, all Pakeha, had decided to stop awarding medals for Dux because they could not agree to award it to a Maori. At the prize-giving I got a special Headmaster’s prize that he bought from his own pocket; a book called “The Pale Grey Men”. The book wasn’t up to much but the title said it all.

You might understand how this single incident has coloured my attitude to New Zealand society ever since. It was the first time that I consciously realized that to be an intelligent Maori brighter than many Pakeha was to be deeply resented. We were supposed to be dumb buggers. Happy, promiscuous, guitar playing, sheep shearing, lazy dumb buggers. That was our station in life. Pakeha were the ones with the brains. Get over it I hear you say. Well, we move on but I don’t think many of us get over it. It sits there in the unconscious mind forever, gets dredged up occasionally and now written down for the first time.

My path through secondary school was mostly smooth and still high achieving until towards the end. I ran up against a science and mathematics teacher who hated having a Maori at the top of his class. He was a small man in all respects [biased opinion] nicknamed Chook. His wife also taught; tall, stern and imposing. We used to say that his wife was the rooster in the family. Between us, me and Chook, we conspired to conduct a running battle of wits [well my wit and his cane] and to drop my academic performance several grades. I suppose he achieved his aim, albeit an unconscious aim [speculation]. I did have the satisfaction of threatening to break his cane over his bald head if ever he tried to use it again. He used to send me to the Principal to get caned after that. Thankfully an outstanding teacher the next year encouraged me to produce outstanding results in science and mathematics.

On the rugby field I was doing quite well, pushed hard by my father. In the local third grade I was without doubt the best player in my position in the competition and looking forward to selection to the Central Hawke’s Bay representative team. Then my father warned me not to get my hopes too high. The father of a Pakeha player in my position was connected to the Rugby Union and my dad thought he would probably get the nod. My dad’s Pakeha friend who was also connected to the Rugby Union thought the same. They were right. He who was not a very good rugby player [widely shared opinion] got the nod the next year as well.

I read later that All Black selection at the time wasn’t a colour blind process either.

I was by then about 16 or 17, or both, and had become as interested in girls as I was in rugby. She was Pakeha, blonde, beautiful and intelligent. We both excelled in the classroom and in sport and spent a lot of time together at school. Eventually we decided to go to a dance together. All our classmates were going. I stayed in town with a Pakeha classmate. On the morning of the dance his sister told me that my girlfriend-to-be was sorry but her mother had told her she was not going out with a Maori. So I went on my own and she wasn’t there of course. And that was the sad wistful end of that. That’s life. You move on.

About ten years ago she introduced herself to my eldest daughter and told her she once had a crush on her father. I thought that was nice.

I left that school moments before I got expelled by a racist [opinion] cane-wielding principal and went to Te Aute College into a Maori-friendly environment. The main event there was when I got six of the best across the arse with a plum stick wielded by the Maori chaplain after getting caught smoking. “This will hurt me more than it hurts you my son”, he intoned in the liturgical manner. “Bullshit”, I replied. He miscounted and the legal limit of six strokes became seven; the seventh an “Amen” to the prayerful Anglican practice of beating. Couldn’t accuse him of racism though.

By his actions and attitude my father taught by example how we should not ever accept racism.

At one time during the shearing season he was contacted by a local big time sheep farmer, racehorse breeder and knight of the realm. The said Knight was in a bind and didn’t have a gang booked to shear his sheep. So we went out to meet him, my Dad and I. They sorted out the business details then we went to inspect the shearers’ quarters. They were atrocious; filthy dirty. My Dad said we’re not living in those conditions, you’ll have to pay extra for us to travel every day. Sir objected strongly and said it was good enough for all his previous (i.e. Maori) gangs and it was good enough for us.

Here comes the brilliant bit.

So my Dad said I tell you what, you put your horses in the shearers’ quarters and we’ll live in those lovely clean stables. He paid us to travel.

At about that time my father brought home a highly controversial book by a despised visiting American academic, David Ausubel. We both read “The Fern and the Tiki” (Angus & Robertson, 1960) and discussed it at length. Ausubel had correctly pointed out that there was a widespread colour bar in New Zealand and that most Pakeha vehemently denied its existence. This was the first and only serious discussion my dad and I had about racism, virtually on the eve of my journey into adulthood. He told me of the barriers his professional cousins had encountered in their careers, and the advice one of them, Dr Manahi Nitama Paewai, had told him to pass on to me. A professional career as a Maori would be challenging to say the least.

So what did I learn in my early impressionable days from these and many similar incidents? Some hard lessons about being Maori; that’s what.

I decided to join the New Zealand Army. Well, I didn’t decide really because I was headhunted to become a commissioned officer and jumped at the opportunity to go to Australia for a few years to be trained. I was told by Staff Sergeant (later Major) Roly Manning who recruited me that army recruiters had been unofficially told to actively recruit high achieving Maori to become officers. The Army at that time had a lot of Maori soldiers and only a few Maori officers. Made sense to me. And the trip overseas was alluring. I had hardly been out of Hawke’s Bay, except to travel with my father to Athletic Park in Wellington for the odd test match.

When I was an occasional teenage larrikin occasionally let loose on the streets of Waipawa town the local cop, WW2 veteran Sergeant Stan Brown, would kick my arse and send me packing back to my Maori village. I reckon it could have been because his daughter was sweet on me [wishful thinking]. Just after I was commissioned as an officer in the NZ Army he saw me on the street and demanded in his usual stern voice to know what I was up to. When I told him I was a commissioned officer he saluted and called me Sir, genuinely pleased for me. Some cops, maybe a lot of cops, are good guys.

The level of racism I encountered in the NZ Army was a lot less than in everyday civilian life. There were a lot of Maori in the army but mostly in the enlisted ranks. There were about thirty Maori commissioned officers around my rank and seniority, dwindling to about 10 by the time I retired in 1982. In the main we were free from racism but I found that there were some officers who had no problem working with Maori so long as they weren’t their superiors, in either rank or intellect. As I became more senior and posed more of a potential threat in the promotion stakes I went head to head with a few of them.

I did have some wins in the racism battle though. I arrived back in New Zealand at the end of 1967 as a young war veteran after operational tours in Borneo and Vietnam. My British wife and I travelled around the North Island for about a month before I reported for work in Wellington. During our travels we noticed that hotels and motels often didn’t have rooms available when I went in to book, but always did when she went to the desk without me. When we arrived in Wellington we encountered another hotel with racist attitudes. She made the booking.

A week later I went back to that hotel in full uniform, introduced myself to the manager and told him that I was now the officer in charge of the staff that made all travel and accommodation bookings in Wellington. I knew that his hotel was a preferred supplier so I had come to meet him. We chatted amiably and I didn’t tell him about the booking incident. His hotel did not get a single booking from Army for the next two years. How cruel was that? Not cruel enough probably.

And some losses.

In the early 1970’s I was in Melbourne attached to the Australian Defence Department as an intelligence analyst. I used to enjoy working in Australia with Army or Defence. As soon as I landed in Australia, every time I went there, I was no longer Ross Himona, Maori and professional soldier. I became just Ross Himona, professional soldier, judged only on my ability to do my job. It was as though an invisible burden was lifted as I got off the plane.

My bosses in Intelligence in Australia were experienced WW2 veterans who had built the organization they now ran. They greatly appreciated my talents, trained me and gave me a variety of job experiences with the aim, they said, of keeping me in the business for the long term. They even approached New Zealand Defence to try to keep me in Intelligence. But that was not to be.

Near the end of my time in Melbourne we were visited by a senior naval officer from NZ Defence Intelligence. On the weekend a few of us NZ Defence people entertained him at a poolside BBQ. While I was chatting privately with him about my work he asked me out of the blue what I thought about Nga Tamatoa, the newly formed Maori protest group based mainly around Auckland University. I was honest and said I agreed with their aims but not necessarily with their methods. No more was said. A couple of weeks later a friend in Intelligence in Wellington told me that the conversation had been noted and that it was unlikely that I would have a career in Intelligence in New Zealand Defence. Another door closes.

And twenty years after I left Pukehou Primary School without my Dux my past looped back to confront me in the Army.

One day back then at Pukehou, about 1955, a classmate brought to school a photo of her older brother who was in Malaya with the army or about to deploy to Malaya. He had just been promoted to Lance Corporal, the first rank on the ladder. She was very proud. Twenty years later I was a Major at Waiouru in an executive role. That very same Lance Corporal from Pukehou had risen through the ranks to Warrant Officer Class 1, at the top of the ladder for enlisted men. He was experienced, competent and well respected, and he now worked directly to me. He was fairly autonomous in his role and I didn’t interfere at all. He didn’t realize exactly who I was but I knew his lineage. We got on quite well, I thought.

He marched into my office one day, stood to attention in front of my desk, saluted, and said he had something to discuss with me. I invited him to relax and take a seat but he remained standing. Then he told me straight up that he could not work for a Maori officer, was not going to another day longer, and how was I going to resolve the issue.

I knew he was eligible for retirement, and I knew that he was planning to build his retirement home back in Pukehou. So I told him that I wasn’t going anywhere, that the New Zealand Army could no longer provide a haven for people with his attitude to Maori, and to submit his retirement papers that very day. He did and was retired on a pension within the week. I preserved his dignity and respect (and his pension) and didn’t tell a soul the real reason for his sudden retirement.

He went back home to Pukehou and built his retirement home. Then he tried to put himself on all the committees in the village including my old Pukehou Primary School, and started behaving as though he had the authority of an army warrant officer. But things had changed in Pukehou since he and his family had left. My Maori relations ran all the committees and much of the business of the village, and they gave him short shrift. Eventually he sold up and moved away. A few years later he died.

I felt genuinely sad for the man who had a long and distinguished career in the army and was a respected senior soldier. But he was a product of his time and his village, a village that had imprinted itself upon both of us, on opposite sides of the racial divide.

In the Officer Corps at the time there was little in the way of racism, although it was always made known in subtle and sometimes no-so-subtle ways that a commissioned Maori officer should abide by the values and culture of the officer corps rather than being overtly Maori. So we were officers on and off the job, and Maori in private. Which was basically the advice given to me years before by my whanaunga Dr Paewai.

Alcohol could unhinge the façade of camaraderie though. I had a friend in the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment slightly senior to me who I knew to be racist. But as infantry officers and trout fishermen we got on just fine and he respected my feelings by keeping his racism under wraps. Professionally we worked well together as we should have. Occasionally in the Mess he would get a skin full and start ranting, at which stage I would discreetly withdraw. On one occasion however another Pakeha officer and friend took offence on my behalf and punched him out. Sadly that seriously impaired the working relationship.

You’re in the Army for a serious purpose and you have to trust each other and work together despite your differences.

In the last five years of my career in the army I started having a few problems with a few people; a small minority. At first I thought it was just me, being my usual smartarse self. However a Pakeha officer quite senior to me, wise and friendly, told me in the bar one night that I was too bright for my own good. I got the message. He meant as a Maori I was too bright for my own good. Another more senior officer told me that I was making enemies of some people who would soon have an influence on my career, and that the generals who were looking after me for the moment would soon retire. The way he put it was that I was backing the wrong horses. The reasons were the same; too bright and too Maori, and rightly or wrongly thought to be under the patronage of the senior Maori, Brigadier and soon to be Major General Brian Poananga, and others of that generation.

I respected both of those officers and had earned their respect in return. I took their observations seriously.

And as I always acknowledge – I was a bit of a smartarse. One of my mentors the late Sir John Mokonuiarangi Bennett was to tell me years later that one of my failings is my genetically programmed hard wired inability to suffer fools gladly. It suited me to regard that as a strength but he did have a point.

I was to find out over the next five years that they were right. There were just a few racists but they were becoming influential. And I was a target. And I didn’t react with passive equanimity. Although I enjoyed the soldiering aspects of the army I’d had enough of living within a rigid hierarchy anyway so in 1982 I retired, having completed twenty years loyal and faithful service to Queen and country, some of them as a spook.

In defence of the NZ Army I have to record that most of the officers I served with and under were top people without a racist bone in their bodies, and I have a deep and abiding respect for all the soldiers, non-commissioned officers and warrant officers who served under me and with me. Three friends who each later became Chief of Army (Tony Birks, Piers Reid and Maurice Dodson) radically changed the army which became a tribe known as Ngati Tumatauenga and actively embraced Maori culture at all levels. Some of my old retired adversaries in the officer corps didn’t react favourably to that.

As a Maori, life outside the army was a return to the full impact of New Zealand racism. By then it had been moderated by race relations legislation and by the appointment of a Race Relations Conciliator but it was and is ever present as background noise to almost every aspect of life.

An event that brought this home to me was on a trip home to Hawke’s Bay. I walked into a shop in Napier and stood in line to be served. I didn’t get served until the two Pakeha in line behind me were served. At which point I loudly and unprintably abused the shopkeeper and walked out.

I also applied for a job at an RSA in Hawke’s Bay, recorded in this bitter poem, written shortly after.

Yours sincerely

Situations Vacant.
Secretary / Manager.
Our RSA invites
applications
from suitable people.
Dear Sir,
Enclosed is my CV.
I believe I am
a suitable applicant.
Yours sincerely
Major R.N.Himona.
Dear Major,
We would be pleased
to interview you
for the position
of Secretary / Manager.
Yours sincerely,
Returned Services Association.
Dear Major,
We were impressed
but regret to advise
you were not
successful.
Yours sincerely,
Returned Services Association.
Dear Major,
I’m ashamed
of my RSA.
You were the best by far.
We didn’t select you
because you’re Maori.
Please accept
my personal apologies.
Yours sincerely.

That was the Taradale RSA. Nothing much had changed in 25 years in provincial New Zealand. I have to add that the Taradale RSA is now led by good friends from my Borneo and Vietnam days.

In business from 1982 to 2011, owning and running a Maori business, we found that almost without exception we were patronized and talked down to in our dealings with the Pakeha business community. Sometimes we played the game and watched and waited with delight as they slowly came to the realization that we were very smart and very capable, and sometimes knew more than they did. The good companies made the necessary adjustment in attitude very quickly. The slow learners got the flick and we took our business elsewhere.

In my writings in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s in my popular newsletter “Te Putatara” I often deliberately provoked racist responses from people who claimed not to be racist. After a few years I tired of the predictability of the response and let it go.

During that time I also used to take on the Maori elites as well and to poke fun at the then Minister of Maori Affairs, Hon Koro Wetere. Nothing too personal. One day Mr Wetere came to Te Hauke to open a community centre in a big old homestead we had bought, with a Maori Affairs loan, near our Kahuranaki Marae. He asked me why we had bought a tired old homestead and I told him we hadn’t. I was having him on, just a bit. He looked a bit confused because he was right; it was more than a bit tired. Then I asked him if he had bought back the hill overlooking his marae, the one the Pakeha had perched on for over 100 years, and he got it.

The whole tongue-in-cheek exchange was witnessed by our kaumatua the late Sir John Bennett and the late Eru Smith. They took me aside later that day and told me they totally supported me in my tussles and sparring with the Establishment through my newsletter “Te Putatara”. They were part of the Establishment themselves and I asked them why that support was private, not public. They were totally honest with me. It felt to me as though that was the first time they had been that honest with anyone. They told me something that astounded me but explained so many things.

They were afraid, those pillars of the Establishment; with an inbuilt, deep-seated fear. For the whole of their adult lives their livelihoods and the livelihoods of their whanau had depended on their getting on with the Pakeha who employed them and with the Pakeha amongst whom they lived and worked. The Pakeha had the power to destroy the lives of themselves and their families. Until that moment I had never realised that racism can breed so much fear. In my whanau we had been raised to resist it and I had assumed it was so for all Maori.

Racism is an attitude of superiority based on skin colour and culture. To maintain that belief the other, in this case Maori, are thought to be an inferior race in all respects, especially intellectually inferior. There is no scientific justification whatsoever for that belief.

The observable tip of the human mind is the conscious mind in which we are sometimes rational and logical, most often to justify irrational behaviours, and just occasionally to modify outdated attitudes and beliefs. By far the most influential part of the mind however is the unconscious mind, or the adaptive unconscious. Within this unconscious mind are all the memories and passed down attitudes of a lifetime, stored, adapted and shaped into a narrative that shapes and contains our beliefs and our self-image. The unconscious mind makes millions of decisions every day, based on that narrative, and the stored experiences, and determines our reactions to events from moment to moment, without our being in the slightest bit aware of what is going on.

Research psychologists have shown that we can believe one thing in our rational conscious minds while the more powerful unconscious mind still believes exactly the opposite.

That’s where racism is today. Many New Zealanders continue to display overt and antagonistic racist attitudes to Maori. Many New Zealanders have genuinely moved on and accept Maori as equals. And in the middle are those who have made a conscious shift in attitude and in rational moments display non-racist behaviours. But lurking in the depths below is the unmodified racism that will come to the surface in unguarded moments, or in safe environments with friends, or when deliberately provoked by (slightly reformed) shit stirrers like me.

These days I mostly ignore it, treating it as part of life without ever accepting it. Indignation and anger don’t change it and are a waste of precious time and energy at my age. Change only ever happens over the generations, very slowly.

You might ask why, in an essay on racism in Aotearoa New Zealand, I have related my very personal history of racism, or highlights of it. To be honest I didn’t intend to but it’s the only way I know to show what racism does. The experience of racism is a very personal experience, reinforced over time, that burrows its way into the very core of your being deep in the unconscious mind, like a poisonous maggot, and it never goes away. As I found out from my kaumatua that maggot has sometimes given birth to deep seated fear.

It just goes on and on and on. It is also a shared personal experience among nearly all Maori. Academics have written objective treatises on the subject, and legislation has objectively outlawed it, but racism is not an objective experience and I can’t be objective about it. I can only tell you some of my personal history, and assure you that it is not at all unique or remarkable in Maori New Zealand. It is part of the background to everything about the lives of Maori. Unfortunately it’s not fashionable these days to talk about it.

I actually wrote most of this essay about ten years ago and had it stashed on the hard disk waiting for the right time to publish it. A conversation with another retired Maori Army officer a few months ago, and a book in a local museum a few weeks ago stirred the memories again. But I enjoyed the book despite those memories.

Not all of the Pakeha I knew then were racist. I was convinced that the girls all liked me. Later, for about ten years 1991-2000 I served on the Board of Trustees of Te Aute College and noticed some big changes in attitude in the district. I was also heavily involved in the re-opening of Hukarere and during that time had a wonderful relationship with the Williams family, some of them descendants of Archdeacon Samuel Williams who founded Te Aute College and also a farming dynasty in the district.

My whanau, the one we called the shearing gang, had a long and mutually beneficial business relationship with that Williams farming dynasty and with other farming families in the district, including the White family. An old friend Adrian White was on the organising committee for the local history and wrote the foreword.

Despite the differences our lives in the Te Aute and Pukehou district, Maori and Pakeha, were intertwined to a certain degree, as the lives of Maori and Pakeha throughout Aotearoa New Zealand are increasingly intertwined. We just have to keep working at eliminating the racial discrimination. There is no quick fix. It takes generations to change the powerful narratives in our individual and collective unconscious minds.

I know that it will still be there but I hope that it will have improved in the times of those mokopuna in Waipawa, my great grandchildren.

Memoirs of an Outsider

MemoirsPutatara

These are the memoirs of an outsider; of a left hander in a right handed world, an introvert in an extroverted world, a Maori in a Pakeha world, an observer by inclination and a participant by necessity; a bystander.

I’ve been consciously aware of being an outsider, a bit different, from an early age. As a teenager my favourite author was Thomas Hardy. His Wessex novels of social criticism, often in rural settings I readily felt at home in, portrayed outsider characters; bystanders looking on at society. I empathised with them. In the 1970s I discovered Colin Wilson and his 1956 classic “The Outsider” in which he investigated the experience of the outsider; a sense of dislocation or being at odds with society. He explored his theme through literature and through the lives of great thinkers, writers, artists and men of action. His “Outsider” was a person on a quest, experiencing life at and between the extremes of the nothingness of non-being and the highs that came in moments of great insight. The book was an instant best-seller, was translated into thirty languages, and has never been out of print. It sits still within easy reach in my study.

In the early 1970s I was also fortunate to be given time out from a full on busy military career to spend four years in Melbourne on attachment to Australian Defence. Melbourne at the time was a hive of intellectual activity during a period when many perhaps all of the social and political conventions of post-WW2 conformity were being challenged. It was the time of Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch” and Dennis Altman’s “Homosexual”, two of the many books that directly challenged and upset the Establishment elites and their comfortable conservative worldview. I immersed myself in that intellectual environment; reading, attending lectures, talks and seminars, and following the performance and visual arts. I subscribed to “Nation Review”, an intellectually vibrant weekly newspaper of criticism and critique, and humour and satire, that later provided the model for my own modest effort “Te Putatara”.

The life of an outsider or a bystander is not a lonely life for it is still peopled by family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. And of course nowadays by all of those Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn digital friends, followers and contacts. The life of an outsider or bystander is however lived mostly in the inner world of reflection and contemplation. A good book whether fiction or non-fiction, a good movie, play or concert, a quiet dinner and conversation with friends, or a long walk in the countryside, is infinitely more satisfying than a night at the pub or a noisy party.

It is a life lived for all or most of the last thirty years as a vegetarian then vegan, and nicotine and alcohol free, free of both recreational and prescription drugs, enjoying only the natural highs of a well exercised body, an engaged mind and a settled spirit. Vegans and wowsers are outsiders by choice of course. But I’m a health nut vegan rather than a hard core animal rights political vegan. I’m not that much of an outsider.

My friend Wira Gardiner has described me as an iconoclast and as the Thomas Paine of Maoridom (displaying his knowledge of American & European history). Some in the Army called me an enigma which I thought said more about them than me. I always knew exactly who and what I was. One of my mentors the late Sir John Mokonuiarangi Bennett told me that my biggest weakness was my inability to suffer fools gladly and I told him he was right but that I always regarded it as a strength as well.

They are only partly autobiographical these revelations or memoirs of mine, keeping from you many aspects of myself and my life’s experience. I’m a private sort of person. Very private. So you should remember as you read that I am many things other than those I reveal. Much like the rest of you.

At this point though I should reveal that I was once a commissioned officer in the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment, a veteran of the Borneo and Vietnam campaigns. A twenty year soldier. That much you can obtain from the public record. I was once also a spook. Those two occupations will provide some of the material for the memoirs.

These are memoirs but memory is a notorious and scientifically proven liar.

Firstly our powers of observation are not as good as we think they are and we often miss or misinterpret what is happening around us. Eye witnesses in court cases, including policemen, are by definition unreliable, for the eye and the ear are easily deceived. Ask any stage magician, or cognitive psychologist, or my late grandmother who taught me at the age of 5 never to believe anything in the newspapers, or on the radio, and to believe only half of what I observed myself.

The brain simplifies what it observes. Then it focuses on that which we understand and expect from our own experience and stored memories. In doing so the brain leaps to conclusions that fit that experience and memory. And it all happens unbeknown to us behind the veil of consciousness.

As the Talmud (and Anais Nin) told us, “We see things not as they are but as we are”.

Secondly, we all reconstruct our memories all the time. We adjust the facts to accommodate them within the narratives we have created for ourselves to make sense of our lives. We are constantly engaged in giving meaning to our lives through our mental narratives, within which we usually view ourselves as good and worthy people, and sometimes not. We discard or conveniently forget those facts that don’t fit our narratives.

When our unconscious narratives are too much at variance with the facts of our lives we are declared deluded or at worst insane.

With that in mind I have carefully avoided the perils of delusion and insanity, I hope, by checking my recollections as much as I am able without spending years in research. I have checked newspaper accounts of events, various books that have described them, and of course multiple sources on the Internet. I have plumbed the memories of others who witnessed those events. I have consulted my own papers, diaries and journals which are comprehensive, detailed and recorded close to the events described.

Like everyone but I hope to a lesser degree than most I am inclined to judge people and happenings against my own experiences and beliefs, sometimes out of context, and to draw conclusions and make observations; sometimes in error. I shall try in this memoir of mine to differentiate between fact and observation, and to faithfully observe the context, like the accomplished intelligence analyst I once was.

These memoirs are then a record of a journey of some seventy years, or more accurately, about some moments on that journey. They venture outside my own experience to add historical, political and social context to the stories they tell.

Whilst those stories are as far as I can make them factual accounts they may at times read like works of fiction, with elements of both tragedy and comedy. Comedy is an essential element in a joyful life; to be able to see the humour in almost any situation. Tragedy and learning to react stoically to tragedy is the balance in the well lived life. As the cliché goes – it’s not what happens to us that matters, it’s how we deal with it. The tragedic elements in some of these stories stem almost entirely from three main characters; Ignorance, Racism, and Paranoia.

In the first essay I open with an account of a few instances of the racism I have encountered in my own life, to allow the reader to feel the actual experience of racism rather than trying to define it or describe it. In the life of a Maori in a Pakeha world racism is just part of the background noise, mostly soft noise but sometimes loud and jarring.

Regardless of personality type and inclination Maori are by definition outsiders. Which is probably why we continue to preserve our own Maori insider’s world. Because of it some accuse us of apartheid. Some Maori choose to live there almost permanently. Others like me move between the two worlds the one providing a retreat from the other. Some choose to live entirely in the outside Pakeha world.

In my childhood, sixty to seventy years ago, we “half caste” children were a species apart, outsiders by accident of parentage and birth. We were loved and accepted by both our Maori and Pakeha whanau but never fully part of either Maori or Pakeha society. We participated in both, distastefully labelled “half caste” by Pakeha, and if we excelled at school labelled “Pakeha” by those Maori who used cultural difference, however slight, as an excuse for their own learning deficiency.

Those were the days when there were few Maori university graduates. I was the first in our hapu to gain School Certificate, then University Entrance and Higher School Certificate. An oddity if not an outsider. Now we have dozens of university graduates. Education once valued mostly just in our whanau and especially by the aunties, is now prized by the whole hapu. I have seen that happen in my lifetime; the slow but gradual then increasingly rapid movement of Maori out of the shadows of the underclass into the educated middle class. There is still a long way to go but with the advancement I have witnessed in my own lifetime we can look forward to the time when we Maori outsiders are outsiders by genetic programming and choice alone rather than racial discrimination.

I myself like being an outsider and will continue to be an outsider, regardless. I’ve gotten comfortably used to it. It wasn’t always so.

Kei au te Mataika !

Hikoi ki Hawaiki, Matauranga MaoriPutatara

“The first fish is mine!”
– pepeha Maori

The first fish was the first enemy or the first unfortunate to cross the path of a war party. This first fish was then ritually slain and the heart roasted and eaten as an offering to Tumatauenga.

Taputapuatea Marae, an ancient stone marae on Ra’iatea in Eastern Polynesia is said to have been in times past the main marae for all of Polynesia. At Taputapuatea for a long time there was a practice of human sacrifice. When the marae was renovated 5000 human skulls were found in the main altar. Close to the main marae is a small stone structure or marae which is thought to be where the human sacrifice was enacted.

Sacrificial offerings were brought to the marae as part of the ceremonial ritual. They were both men and fish. At a great hui all the waka would arrive at Taputapuatea carrying their offerings laid out on the deck of the waka; first a man, then a big fish like a shark or tuna, then a man, then a fish, and so on. The offerings would then be hung in the trees at Taputapuatea, offered to the god of war, Oro.

There is also a story of a chief and his son who went fishing, and as was required they were meant to offer the largest fish of their catch at the marae. But the son convinced his father to keep the largest and offer another, which they did. But the priest at the marae saw through their deception and questioned them. When they continued to lie he decreed that they would become the offering and they were hung in the trees. The offerings were called “long-limbed fish”.

It is interesting to speculate that perhaps this practice at Taputapuatea, and at other marae throughout Eastern Polynesia, might have been the source of the pepeha “Kei au te mataika”.

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Operation 8: Epilogue – a Question in Parliament

Operation 8, Spooks & MaoriPutatara

Read the complete analysis of alleged Maori terrorism in the Urewera

Sandra Goudie MP

This question in Parliament by Sandra Goudie MP on 10 April 2008 might have been an attempt to link me into Operation 8. Ms Goudie might have known that my office was raided. On the other hand it could have simply been a friendly inquiry, but it doesn’t read as though it was. She seemed to be fishing for something. I then monitored Ms Goudie’s parliamentary pronouncements in case she breached my suppression order under parliamentary privilege.

3045 (2008). Sandra Goudie to the Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector (10 Apr 2008):

“Has Ross Himona or Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara had any involvement with the Department of Internal Affairs during the establishment of the CommunityNet website or Flaxroots technology conferences; if so, what did that involvment entail?”

Hon Ruth Dyson (Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector) replied:

“I am advised that as is recorded on the Flaxroots website, www.flaxroots.net.nz that Ross Himona provided papers to the 2000 and 2002 conferences and was on the Steering Committee for the 2002 conference. The Department also advises that neither Ross Himona nor Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara has been an employee or contractor of the Department”.

The answer was incomplete as I was also a community representative on the committee that designed the CommunityNet website with the Department of Internal Affairs. In fact I also worked closely with but not for the Department in relation to the Global Networking Movement.

Interestingly on 11th May 2009 this appeared on the Whaleoil blogsite sun by Cameron Slater:

“Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara is allegedly the ‘master at arms’ of the Uruwera 17. He faces arms charges. His image (photos of him) are suppressed although a Google search can find his image. To date no-one can officially link the name and his alias’.

He is the IT Manager for Kingston Strategic. Kingston Strategic has had contracts with MED on digital strategy and Internal Affairs to establish the CommunityNet website and the Flaxroots technology conferences. At this stage it is unknown how many other Government Contracts his firm has worked on – or if he has ever worked for Axon under an other name apart from Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara. Axon have categorically denied he has worked for them when known as Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara.

“Note about Kingston Strategic: The Chief executive is Ross Himona, who once wrote of Don Brash: ‘I’ve seen and experienced a lot of racism in my 62 years, but never such a full-on poll driven cynical assault. And I realised just yesterday that my own overwhelming response is fear as well. I realised that I’m frightened about the consequences of that policy, and of the choices I might have to make that I don’t want to make, if they try to implement it.’”

Given slater’s known close links to National Party MPs it is quite probable that he provided the information prompting Sandra Goudie’s question.

So just to put the record straight I would have added to Ruth Dyson’s answer for Ms Goudie’s edification:

“Major Himona is a retired military officer who served his country on active service in Borneo and Vietnam, and who also served as an intelligence analyst. He was awarded the Armed Forces Award for exemplary service. He has since been a businessman and community worker, and has worked with many community organisations. In that capacity he worked with the Community Development section of the Department of Internal Affairs on the CommunityNet, Flaxroots and Global Networking projects. He has also been an adviser to Ministry of Education on an IT Advisory Panel, and was consulted by Ministry of Economic Development on Digital Strategy for Maori.

His contributions have been much appreciated. He is a valued member of the establishment and a pillar of society”.

So there’s your answer Sandra Goudie, whatever it was you were fishing for. You could have found that information without the question in Parliament, unless you were just doing a bit of parliamentary shit stirring.

Six months earlier it was obvious the police hadn’t done their homework either.

Film Review: The Price of Peace, Taame Iti & Operation 8

In the News, Operation 8, ReviewsPutatara

Read the complete analysis of alleged Maori terrorism in the Urewera

Director Kim Webby

The NZ Film Festival billed this film as an in-depth profile of Taame Iti and that it is not. But it is nevertheless a powerful and moving film about a defining chapter in his life and I do highly recommend it.

It is the story of Taame’s arrest on 15^th October 2007 accused of terrorism, his subsequent trial in 2012 along with three others, and of events surrounding and subsequent to the arrest and trial. The film does traverse some of his life from his infancy and schooling in the Urewera, leaving home to become an apprenticed tradesman in Christchurch, and on into later life as an activist and Ngai Tuhoe nationalist.

Taame himself told me after he had viewed the film that it did not capture the essence of who he is; nor have any of the tens of thousands of words written about him over the years, or the many documentaries and TV news items made about him. That in-depth profile, one that does show who he really is, is yet to be made. He has plans afoot to ensure that it will be made.

As well as Taame’s story it also recounts the history of the blighted relationship between Ngai Tuhoe and the Crown, and documents the settlement Ngai Tuhoe has recently reached with the Crown. The two separate but closely related stories were unfolding in parallel as the film was made. Both stories are told in historical and contemporary contexts. On film Tamati Kruger relates that he and Taame agreed at the time that the events of the long drawn out court process would not be allowed to affect the settlement negotiations with the Crown. In the film however the two strands are interwoven, the one a reflection of the other.

A personal aside. I found a comment by Taame in the film quite amusing. It was in relation to the activists, mainly Wellington based, who came to the Urewera in 2006/2007 to support the Ngai Tuhoe cause and to attend the weekend “Rama” or wananga he was running, called military training camps by the Police. When I interviewed Taame recently he spoke quite fondly of the activists and of the pleasure he obtained from exchanging ideas with them. In the film he referred to them as “anarchists, vegetarians and fundamentalists” which may not exactly please them but I’m sure was not meant to offend. The funny bit is that I’m a vegan myself and before I interviewed him Taame shouted me a delicious vegan salad for lunch. I wonder if he lumps me in with the fundamentalists! I suppose in his eyes I might be a hard core dietary fundamentalist.

I like Taame Iti. He has a unique way of looking at the world and at events. He has an interesting and creative mind and is never boring. He presents ideas through artistic or theatrical metaphor and symbolism although he can be verbally adroit as well. It is reminiscent of old time Maori use of metaphor and symbolism in everyday speech as well as in formal oratory, through voice, movement and gesture; a style now largely lost to antiquity. His style shines through in the film if you can move beyond the preconceptions almost everyone has about him.

Part of Tamati Kruger’s evidence during the trial was shown. I was in court in 2012 when Tamati was in the witness box and I remember it well. In his evidence for the defence he explained that Taame was a leader among many leaders in Tuhoe and that his role was to explain the Tuhoe viewpoint. In doing so he often made people uncomfortable. In fact he often made Tuhoe people uncomfortable and he often made Tamati Kruger uncomfortable as well. I thought it was a great moment in the film. Perhaps because I like the way Taame Iti makes people uncomfortable. In my own way I try to do the same I suppose, without the theatricality.

In 2006 and 2007 he obviously made the Police and Helen Clark uncomfortable too.

At the screening I saw at Sky City Theatre in Auckland on Wednesday 22^nd July 2015 the theatre was about three-quarters full. Kim Webby spoke briefly afterwards. She acknowledged her upbringing at Opotiki and her closeness to Ngai Tuhoe, and that her mentors in matters Tuhoe have been Tamati Kruger and Taame Iti. She also acknowledges that this film is intended to present a Tuhoe perspective. That does not detract at all from the quality of the film.

The earlier screening of the film on Sunday 19^th July attracted a sell-out audience including, I am reliably informed, the 2012 trial judge Justice Rodney Hansen and his wife. Taame Iti, Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara, Tamati Kruger and Taame’s trial lawyer Russell Fairbrother were also present.

In relation to Taame’s story there are other scenes from the trial in 2012 including the reading of the charges at the beginning, and at the end of the trial the haka led by Taame after Justice Hansen sentenced him and Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara to two and a half years in prison on various arms charges after the jury had not been able to reach a verdict on criminal group charges. Urs Signer and Emily Bailey were not sentenced at that time and later received nine months’ home detention. The criminal group charge that the jury could not agree on had been substituted for the terrorism charges that the Solicitor General would not allow in 2007. Justice Hansen in his summing up, partly shown in the film, clearly believed the evidence presented to support that main charge, and gave great weight to that evidence when sentencing on the lesser arms charges. He believed that the activity in the Urewera was evidence of an “armed militia” intended to be used as “Plan B” if “Plan A”, the Tuhoe settlement negotiations, failed.

The film crew followed Taame during the trial and captured his thoughts and feelings as the trial unfolded. There were many thoughtful moments and some quite humorous. Throughout it all, and afterwards, Taame steadfastly maintained his innocence. The film did not delve into the evidence at all, other than to show parts of it as it was presented to the court.

I have been analysing the police intelligence operation for over three years now, and based on information I have been able to unearth and on interviews with some of the participants in the wananga including Taame Iti, I believe that he was innocent. I will be writing more about that in future essays. The film however does not show any evidence to support Taame’s assertion of innocence.

Intertwined with Taame’s travails was the history behind the Ngai Tuhoe claim against the Crown and the progress of that claim. The film concluded with apologies made in both of those strands.

Firstly there were apologies made by Police Commissioner Bush to the whanau affected by the police paramilitary operation on 15^th October 2007, to the Ruatoki community and to Ngai Tuhoe. His welcome to Taame Iti’s home and his apology to Taame’s whanau was shown in full. The response of Maria Steen, Taame’s partner and a victim of the operation, was deeply moving. The Commissioner’s apology seemed to be heart felt and genuine. However it must be noted that no-one has yet been held to account for police behaviour on that day. During this scene in the Iti home Taame told Police Commissioner Mike Bush that if the Police had wanted to know what he was doing they could have simply knocked on his door.

Commissioner Bush later made it clear that he was not apologising for the arrests and that he believed the police were right to bring the charges against Taame and his co-accused.

The second apology was the official apology made by Treaty Minister Christopher Finlayson on behalf of the Crown as part of the settlement that was eventually reached. In that settlement Ngai Tuhoe effectively gained a measure of autonomy over Te Urewera after battling the Crown for generations. The denouement of the film came in the juxtaposition of those two separate apologies.

This was a powerful and moving telling of the two stories told as much through the feelings and emotions of the participants as through the facts of the events. It led us through the anger and the grief, through the prolonged physical and psychological resistance and the resilience of Ngai Tuhoe, to a touch of optimism after the settlement and a ray of hope for a different and perhaps a better future for Ngai Tuhoe people.

Taame seems content to focus now on his art and his art gallery in Taneatua as he contemplates life after the struggles. When I met with him he seemed at peace, accepting of the price he has personally paid.

“The Price of Peace”

Director: Kim Webby
Producers: Christina Milligan, Roger Grant & Kim Webby
Photography: Jos Wheeler
Editor: Cushla Dillon
Music: Joel Haines

“Price of Peace” on Facebook

Links: The Operation 8 Series

Government is Hiding the Truth Behind the Serco Debate

In the News, Operation 8, Other, TaipoPutatara

The State Operated Prisons are the Real Problem

The View from the Inside by Guest Blogger Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara

On 15^th October 2007 I was one of the eighteen political activists arrested in the Urewera Terrorism Raids, or Operation 8. While waiting for the laying of terrorism charges, we were detained in various remand prisons around the country. Some of us spent up to 28 days inside before being released on bail awaiting trial.

Four of us, the so called Urewera Four, eventually went to trial. Taame Iti and I were convicted and sentenced to 2 years and 6 months in prison, while Emily Bailey and Urs Signer were sentenced to 9 months home detention. On the grounds of exceptional behaviour Taame and I were both released after serving about ten months. I spent that ten months in the state run Spring Hill Corrections Facility while Taame was shifted to Waikeria Prison.

What I want to discuss here is my experience in Spring Hill and to some extent in the remand prisons in relation to the current public outcry about the standard of the Serco private run prison because the Serco debate is diverting attention from the atrocious standard of management in state run prisons.

Firstly some terminology

For the sake of this discussion, I will refer to the Mt Eden prison as Auckland Central Remand Centre (ACRP or A-Crap as it was known to us), and the privately operated Mt Eden Prison as Mount Eden Corrections Facility (MECF). I spent about three weeks in each of these prisons, not long, about six weeks in total, but long enough to see what was going on.

A Remand Prison is a prison where either people awaiting trial, or convicted and awaiting sentencing are held.

Sentenced Prison – once sentencing is completed, remand prisoners are sent off to any one of this country’s dozen or so prisons to begin their sentence. I spent ten months in one of these prisons called Spring Hill at the northern side of Waikato.

Prison Violence

Prior to my time in prison, I held a some views on the role of prisons, and on prison reform. Many of these views remain, but a few have changed – smashed and discarded due to my experience as a guest of the state.

Prisons are the way they are because the public is largely uninvolved, and is not actually interested in what goes on inside.
Most of the general public don’t actually care about what happens to prisoners – they get what they deserve … unless violence is put in the public face, as in the recent Serco revelations.
The Justice System is determined by politicians who are keener to get re-elected than fixing up a dysfunctional prison system.
Many of the groups that do engage with the Justice System to advocate for adjustments to the way prisons are run, are often self-serving and/or ideologically driven (i.e. Sensible Sentencing)

Prison violence has been around ever since there was a) violence, and b) prisons. These are the sources of violence that were observable during my time inside (from least to worst):

Gang recruitment and on-going training (UV)
Prison justice (UV)
Understaffing (AV)
Overcrowding (AV)

I also separate these into two categories in terms of what I believe prisons can do to stop violence – (AV) avoidable violence and (UV) unavoidable violence.

Unavoidable Violence. So for example, while there are ways for a society to mitigate the conditions that cause the proliferation of gangs and the black economy, for example through a fairer society and by undoing some of the prohibitions, these things cannot be solved by a prison system, so they constitute unavoidable violence (UV).

Gang Recruitment and on-going training (UV)

People might be surprised that I list this as the least of the sources of violence. Firstly it is unavoidable violence that comes part and parcel with the society that generated the disparities that lead to the emergence and propagation of gangs.

While societies continue to create the conditions for street gangs, prisons will only perpetuate their longevity and ongoing recruitment. I saw this with my own eyes, to some extent in ACRP/MECF and in full bloom in Spring Hill Corrections Facility (SHCF).

In order for gangs to survive the onslaught of targeted policing decimating their numbers at large, they use your prison system and your tax money to recruit and train the next intake of manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and security (foot soldiers). The gangs regenerate themselves inside the prisons.

Whether by organised fight clubs to train foot soldiers to do the muscle work, or the more common method of one on one mentoring, your tax dollar is being put to good use by gangs for their objectives. Corrections in its history in this country has never been able to prevent this from occurring, whether under National or Labour, in either private or state run prisons.

This type of daily violence is what I would call Jail.

In prison it is normal, and works in some totally fucked way to make prison very uncomfortable for many, discouraging them from ever wanting to be there again. While I am not advocating for it, this is certainly one of the residuals from this constant level of physical biffo that goes on daily.

In most instances though, gang violence via recruiting and training was isolated to potential gang members, and to hardening the psyche of their current members while awaiting their inevitable release.

Prison Justice

People joke about it all the time. Yunno, ‘ha ha ha don’t slip on the soap’, in reference to the general public’s view of what is prison justice, i.e how easy it is to get raped in prison. But prison justice is a real component of all prisons around the world. And prison justice is no laughing matter. Prison justice = violence.

In this country it shows itself in that almost all child molesters end up in the segregated wings (Segs). As soon as it becomes known that someone is incarcerated for child related crimes, they are summarily beaten and that gives them grounds to complain and therefore be reassigned to Segs.

The general public are in two groups on this issue: Group 1 – those who have no clue and don’t really care anyway, and Group 2 – those that know and think it’s acceptable. So to some extent society tolerates prison violence. I myself also tolerated this without question when I saw it in prison.

Other ways prison justice is meted out though are not so palatable.

Prisoners who rat out one another or take a deal in some form or other, are also given the same treatment. Prisons actively encourage narking, so this form of violence is very common.

There is a third type of prison justice, and it is not well known until you have seen it or experienced it with your own eyes, and that is if a prisoner is rich, they will be tapped in every way shape or form for their resources. For the rich this is of course not justice, but to poorer prisoners who have no financial support outside of prison this is their form of prison justice to get one back on rich pricks.

Under staffing

Contrary to the popular misconception prison guards, or ‘Screws’ as they are known inside, cannot be everywhere all the time. This easily allows for what people saw in the so called ‘fight club’ videos that made sensational headlines in recent news.

These mock and semi controlled fights are usually over and done in a matter of minutes, the time it takes for the screws to do their rounds and come back around again. Sure some of the screws turn a blind eye, but mostly it’s just vigilant prisoners who learn the routines of these under staffed prisons.

Spring Hill prison is chronically understaffed by comparison to ACRP & MECF at Mt Eden, by a country mile!

This is in part due to overcrowding of prisons intended to have x amount of staff per y amount of prisoners. Most of the under staffing related violence rears its head during school holiday periods when prison staffing run at a skeleton level.

The only way Spring Hill prison coped with this during my time there was to employ long lockdown hours when staffing levels were low. In many wings this meant 23 hours a day locked down, and one hour outside. For lower security units this meant 20 hours locked down and 4 hours outside. Adding to the stress of these long lockdowns are the number one cause of violence in Spring Hill, and that being the following…

Overcrowding

Spring Hill Corrections Facility was built by the Labour Government and completed in 2007 to house 650 sentenced prisoners. Its initial focus was on Pacific Island prisoners, hence it has a Pacific Island focus unit called Vaka, and a Pacific Island church.

With the change of the incoming National government in 2008, the government then embarked on putting more people in prison, 1000’s more than they had bed spaces for. The then Minister of Justice Judith Collins concocted this grand idea of replacing the single bed cells in Spring Hill (and other prisons to some extent) with bunk beds. I bet Collins thought this was a clever cost saving idea, but it however led to a massive and fatal rise in violence. Every prisoner I ever spoke to pointed without hesitation directly back to that one event as the principle catalyst – deliberate over crowding.

Spring Hill now has 1050 prisoners inside cells in facilities designed to be uncomfortable for 650 prisoners. This results directly in a new level of violence that is not isolated to the world of gangs and their training regime. Everyone is susceptible to the violence that ensues from Collins’ intentional overcrowding.

Whether waiting for the one unit telephone, or microwaves, or the two unit washing machines, the result is a daily high level of anxiety that is far above and beyond the intended stress levels prisoners were meant to be under while incarcerated. After weeks of these extended lockdowns, Spring Hill turns into a sort of war zone that makes those so called fight club videos look like child’s play.

In fact, for me, both Serco’s ACRP and MECF were holiday camps compared to the violence I saw daily in Spring Hill.

You have one hour outside, there are 88 of you in a unit, you have a pile of clothes that need washing, there’s two washing machines, which some of the time, at least one of them is broken. There are usually about 1 or 2 working microwaves if you want to cook some soup or porridge, and there is a single telephone for you to call loved ones. The 88 of you have one hour to bang your way to the front of the line to get your washing done.

Sound like fun?

Then once that one hour is over, you are back in your cell with another grown man for the next 23 hours, eating, showering and shitting together (the toilet is in your cell). This is the cause of the other overcrowding related violence where prisoners just get sick of seeing each other’s faces for 20-23 hours a day, and after a week or so of this even the best of mates are ready to scratch each other’s eyes out.

Further exacerbating this are weather conditions.

Spring Hill cells are not insulated and are mostly what you would call outside cells. So in winter temperatures drop to zero in cells overnight, and rise above 30 degrees during the day, over 40 degrees if the prison is on lockdown with 2 persons in a cell.

The air intake in each cell and air extraction were designed for a single prisoner in a cell where most of the daytime they would be outside. During summer’s long lockdowns we would be clawing at the air intake for fresh cooler air until temperatures dropped to a sleepable level at about 2am in the morning.

Winter was just as bad where the only place you could keep warm was on the floor in cells where the floor warmers actually worked. About half didn’t work so huddling under layers of clothes and blankets was the order of the day.

Overcrowding is also the cause of a lot of the medical mistreatment in Spring Hill. The medical centres are under staffed and struggling to cope with the extra 400 prisoners. Added to this is an attitude amongst some of the medical staff that providing crap medical is part of your punishment. This attitude extends to doctors as well who if they tried to pull that shit anywhere else would be had up for malpractice.

Medical do not attribute the stress they encounter in prisoners to overcrowding, but instead become immune to it, showing no concern for prisoners who sometimes have to wait for up to 3 months before receiving medical assistance. This leads to prisoners with preventable health issues ending up in hospitals with chronic health issues.

One such case was a young man in my unit who had breathing issues. His cell mate pressed the emergency button at about 2am to report this, and medical staff arrived at about 7am (as in, when they start in the morning) to find him in very bad shape. He was taken away, like the others, in an ambulance.

He spent a few weeks in hospital then back into high risk/admin then back to our unit. The prison knew there had been a fuck up with him, so to buy his silence they offered him a room in the prison’s self-care unit. He took the deal, not realising that this broke an unspoken prison rule about taking prison deals. Prison justice kicked in and he was summarily beaten black and blue in self-care.

This is how overcrowding turned a simple asthma attack into black eyes and broken ribs. This was not the only case like this.

Life in these double bunked prison cells was so shit that some preferred to spend as much time as they could in the prison’s solitary confinement unit, or ‘The Pound’ as it is called, not because the pound is an easy place to spend your time, but rather because at least there during the long lock downs around the prison, you could have your own room, and did not have to endure the shit soaked air of another person’s excrement.

Now consider the conditions for which a prisoner is sent to the pound, this usually entails committing a serious violent action. Bash up a prisoner, knock out a screw, any form of violence will get you a spot in the pound. Because of this, the pound was usually full, and some of these prisoners ended up doing their pound time in their own double bunked cells.

From my talks with the long term prisoners in my unit, it was their opinion that the murder of one of Spring Hills prison guards in 2010 came from the extreme stress caused by these conditions.

There is no real means for prisoners to get the message out to the general public. They are forbidden internally from talking to journalists. The internal process of escalating these issues is nothing short of a whitewash and cover-up, and prisoners WILL experience prejudice for putting in official complaints.

For this reason, some prisoners in units higher up the hill from where I was began planning in January 2013 what is now known as the Spring Hill Riot which took place later that year. There haven’t been many full blown riots in NZ prisons. A couple of riots in the 1960s, one in 2004, and the one at Spring Hill in 2013.

Typically the cover up system kicked in with the then minister immediately calling it gang related, and the final report whitewashed the riot as being frivolous. But let me be clear, the initial report that this was gang related, and the final report putting the riot down to home-made alcohol was a total, utter, whitewash.

The intention of that riot was to raise the issue of overcrowding I have detailed, and a recent UN report confirmed.

This is the number one issue prisoners have in Spring Hill, it is the only issue they want fixed (even though I will provide what I believe are fixes for all of the above except prison justice), and I promised them that when I had completed my parole period, I would get this message out to you all.

Preventing Violence in Spring Hill and Other Prisons via the Justice System

Some of the violence is an inevitable part of being in prison. Prison Justice for example is case and point. There is not much that I can think of that can be done to reduce this. That aside lets tackle the other 3 issues I listed.

Gang recruitment and on-going training

A gang or club needs new members, and current members need up-skilling. What is no use to these clubs are members who receive prison sentences that exceed the sentences of trainers. These prisoners are looked upon as potential trainers, but they themselves are ignored in the training and recruiting.

Clubs are interested in new prisoners and prisoners with short sentences. Simply put, cut off the supply of this category of prisoner and you will severely impact on the gang related violence and regeneration using your tax dollars.

You won’t end gangs, because society, financial/ racial disparities, capitalism … creates that.

How to cut off the supply?

Well, two ways come to mind. Firstly, many of those poor and working class prisoners who are sentenced to short terms, especially the Maori prisoners, would probably not be in prison if they had proper representation. The government needs to provide a service for free to these and all prisoners actually, to have their cases reviewed with real representation, I’m talking Queens Council or similar level representational reviews.

From my own observation of the cases of the 88 men in the unit, I estimated that about 25% of them were wrongly imprisoned. Cases like cannabis possession – growing, driving without a license and more. Frivolous shit that should have resulted in a non-custodial sentence. These people should not be in a prison that subjects them to the onslaught of violence caused by gang recruiting, understaffing and overcrowding.

In this measure alone, you would see a massive drop in numbers of Maori prisoners in prison as well.

Secondly, find a non-custodial method of sentencing people who have been sentenced to 3 years or less for their crimes. If you take these people away from prison and successfully rehabilitate them without incarceration, then you cut the supply. No supply equals the end of the gang training regime on your tax dollars.

Under staffing (AV)

Self-explanatory. Provide a staffing level that meets the requirements and expectations the general public have for prisoner security in prisons.

Simple – up the staffing levels (and reduce the prison population).

Over-crowding (AV)

With 25% of your prison population now back out on the street due to the earlier discussed measures, you can then undo what National did to prisons around the country without even having to build another fucking prison. In fact you could take a bulldozer to at least one of the prisons by my estimate, as well as the following:

Single cells for all prisoners (get rid of the bunks!)
One telephone per unit for every 10 prisoners (imagine living in a house with 88 people and one phone)
Employ real medical staff rather than prison guards that know how to hand out pills

A note on Private Prisons

My one issue with Serco is that it is profiteering from misery. This in my view is almost as morally corrupt as purposeful overcrowding by government as a means of cost saving.

Summary

The UN Committee Against Torture actually identified these three areas I addressed in its latest report to the New Zealand Government, which the current minister of Corrections has soundly rejected.

Among other things, the report identified overcrowding, inadequate health services and over-representation of Maori in prisons.

Now you all have a better idea that all of that is true and have some ideas of how to fix this without building any new prisons.

These measures only address what the Justice System and Corrections can do to fix this issue.

You will always have high levels of crime and gangs while your society is so unfair to the less fortunate.

Get over it or do something about it.

Your call…

Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara
Former political prisoner of Spring Hill Corrections Facility

My Analysis of the Rawshark Hack of Cameron Slater’s Communications

In the News, Other, Rawshark, TaipoPutatara

By Guest Blogger @Te_Taipo

What I want to discuss here is the attack on the WhaleOil communications network which resulted in a large cache of emails and attachments becoming the centrepiece of Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics.

I hope that you the readers, bloggers and users of online services will learn from the mistakes Cameron Slater made, and harden your web applications to minimise the chances of this happening to you.

I will also try to keep this as non-techie and non-geeky as possible …

Background

In January/February 2014 WhaleOil was hacked sometime after he posted a blog post with the headline “Feral dies in Greymouth, did world a favour”. We were later to find out that the hack was carried out by someone using the pseudonym Rawshark. What do we know about Rawshark from a technical perspective? He or she:

was very competent at secure, anonymous and private communications;
was very competent at protecting metadata that could lead to his or her identity being discovered;
understands the importance of good compartmentalisation of communications; and
does not show off, no hacking groups, no fanfare, just in and out.

The hack occurred around the same time that Slater’s website “Whale Oil Beef Hooked” was allegedly taken down by a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. It is not known if Rawshark carried out the alleged DoS attack, or if it was another group, or even if the attack took place, for it could well have been Slater taking his website down to fix it after being hacked by Rawshark. But for now we can only go by media reports that the site was indeed DoS attacked, and that Rawshark was somehow associated with it in some form.

According to Nicky Hager in his book Dirty Politics, some weeks after the hack Hager received an 8 gigabyte USB stick in the mail containing thousands of pages of emails hacked from Slater’s “website”. We have no clue about the extent of the data that came into Hager’s possession, but from all accounts, most of the leaked information was in the form of emails and file attachments, chat logs from GMAIL, and private chats from Facebook.

We do not know if there was other material in the leak, for example from Slater’s home or office computer, or to what extent his infrastructure was invaded. The only option then to form an analysis at any level is to go with what is publicly available and come to tentative conclusions by way of deduction.

“The Herald has seen email records which appear to cover 2009 through to 2014”

So if we start from the position that the bulk of the information was taken from Slater’s GMAIL account, and ‘possibly’ from his Facebook account, we can then start to discount a few of the possible attack vectors an attacker would use to pull off such an attack.

His Home or Office Computer as the Source of Documents

Firstly we should talk about the culture of bloggers to get a better idea about where potential repositories of private data might be stored. A good attacker would do this mental exercise before mounting any such attack.

Bloggers are not necessarily security experts when it comes to using the internet in a secure manner. Some security experts for all their talk are also crap at this. But what you will find with most bloggers are drafts of documents they might be working on. Drafts are stored on their home or office computers in Word docs, pdfs, and other formats; and drafts are on the website content management systems (CMS) they use, ready to go live (be published) at the appropriate time.

XSS Attack?

Well resourced attackers can take aim at their targets while they are surfing websites that do not enforce HTTPS. This can allow them to inject web browser exploits onto a user’s computer and essentially take over the computer by installing their stuff into hard drives and into the computer’s BIOS.

My guess is that Cameron Slater’s home or office computer at that time would have been a treasure trove of gathered dirt far beyond what was revealed in Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics.

However there do not appear to be any local hard drive sourced disclosures in the released material either from Nicky Hager in Dirty Politics or from Rawshark via the @whaledump and @whaledump2 Twitter accounts. The releases are all chat logs, emails and attachments, and drafts of press releases in emails and attachments etc.

For an example of this, check out the @hackingteam hack in which attackers appear to have snatched what appears to be ab entire cache of their network fileserver via a hack of their webserver.

An attacker would typically get their hands on hundreds of gigabytes of info, and not just emails, attachments and chats from online services.

So we can tentatively rule out a phishing attack or XSS attack on a home or office computer …

Smart Phone Hacked?

We also do not see in the released material any cellphone messages from a phone’s text repository. A lost or stolen smartphone is a treasure trove for an attacker because of the widespread habit of having GMAIL accounts, chats, Facebook, Twitter and more all logged in on smart phones purely for the convenience of it all.

Surely with all the text messaging between Slater, Collins and Key we would have seen those come to light. Yet the only text messages we see following the Rawshark disclosures are from non-Rawshark sources.

Now this could mean that Hager chose not to release this material, but of all the material released, there appears to be not one single document that originated from Slater’s home or office computer and not one cellphone text message. We will never know, but the conclusion I come to is that it is most likely that this attack was not aimed at his home or office computer or at his cellphone, but rather was restricted to wherever it was he stored his emails.

GMAIL Email Repository

GMAIL is a web based email service that used to actively encourage its users to never delete their emails …

A user can also forward a copy of their emails in their GMAIL account to any of a range of other email accounts. In fact a user could forward all emails and never store any in their actual GMAIL account.

So we should not just assume that an attacker broke into Slater’s GMAIL account, even though this appears to be the likely entry point.

So how does an attacker break into someone’s GMAIL account?

There are some really easy ways, and some really hard ways.

The easiest first, in which the target (in this case Slater) has left his GMAIL account logged in on someone else’s computer (we will call that person Attacker/Friend or AF). AF would then have access to that GMAIL account. Even if Slater had logged out of his GMAIL account on AF’s computer, if AF had had the ‘Save Passwords’ feature enabled in his or her web browser, AF could then re-log back into that GMAIL account and siphon off all the emails. And using the most extreme method, AF could use a keylogger to record the username and password as Slater typed them and then later gain access.

This would be a rookie mistake on the part of Slater. Even though I do not rate his security precautions at that time as being anything of substance, this attack method is also rather opportunistic and not at all common when an attacker has decided to directly target someone, as it appears was the case with Rawshark.

How about breaking into a GMAIL login, can that be done?

Password Cracking

Password cracking in GMAIL is difficult because of the flood controls GMAIL uses. Even if Slater used a rather easy to guess password, it would not be easy to break it using the GMAIL login form.

Slater would had to have used a really obvious password like Wh@l3oil for it to be possible for an attacker to guess a password without employing a password cracking rig … but of course this is quite a common type of password structure for most security unaware users of the internet.

After all, bloggers are often just average internet users who happen to be bloggers.

Often it takes an attack like this one before web administrators realise that it is not enough just to know how to administer a content management system, and that in fact you need to learn some security basics as well.

But I am going to tentatively rule out a super easy to guess password…for now, ’cause, well, that would just be too sad …

Password Reset ‘Feature’

Another possible way into a GMAIL account is through the password reset feature. Even if you enter fake information into this feature, GMAIL has on the odd occasion, emailed a password reset to an attacker’s designated email account, thus allowing them to take over a target’s GMAIL account.

Password reset attacks are not stealth attacks, are rather hit and miss, and this method does not fit the modus operandi of Rawshark who appears to be someone who knows how to research and take down her or his target without them seeing the attack coming.

Remote Exploits

Then there are these little devils called 0days. You can buy them on the so called {{{Darkweb}}}. They are exploits of vulnerabilities found in popular web services that have not been disclosed to the web service developers, and therefore remain unfixed. I do not get the sense that this was how this attack went down, but let’s look at an example. Let’s say someone discovered a way to circumvent GMAIL’s login CAPTCHA (those letters and numbers you have to enter when you get your password wrong), and instead of notifying Google, they could then go to one of these Darkweb sites and sell their knowledge to the highest buyer. An attacker could then use this 0day to password crack easy to break passwords because there would be no flood controls to prevent this.

But again, I do not see this as the approach that Rawshark took, with nothing more than a gut feeling more than any evidence pointing to this conclusion.

Jeremy Hammond Level Attacker

Lastly there is this being called an extremely talented IT exponent. The world is now gifted with a few of these individuals. In my books Jeremy Hammond is one of these people, there are more. Love him or hate him, Hammond was one of the more talented computer attackers I have ever read about – Rawshark could well be such a character.

It is possible although not probable that Rawshark, using her or his own pure talent, found a way in through GMAIL’s security into Slater’s email accounts without the assistance of social trickery or by tricking GMAIL’s password reset procedure. It is a rare thing, but it has happened before.

What other ways are there to get into the repository of emails?

Conveniently enough a GMAIL user can forward all their emails to another email account. I for example have my old GMAIL email forwarded to my Riseup email. So a successful attack on my Riseup email account would net an attacker both sets of emails.

In Slater’s case we do not know if he used any other emails but we do know that he owns a web space where his website was hosted. He also has a domain name and with that we can assume like so many other bloggers at that time, that he had his website hosted on a shared hosting platform that gave out free email accounts in his domain name. For example, if you own the domain name whaleoil.co.nz then it is a trivial matter to set up an email address like support@whaleoil.co.nz.

These shared webspace services also allow for emails to be held in an account on the webserver, so it is possible (but not probable) for Slater to forward a copy of his GMAILs to one of these email accounts as a backup or for whatever reason he deemed necessary.

Unlike breaking into GMAIL, it is much much easier for an attacker to break into a shared webspace.

On a number of occasions people that have dealt directly with Rawshark have referred to the attack as being an attack on Slater’s website although this could well be misdirection.

So this is one potential set of conditions where an attacker, aiming to break into a website for nefarious purposes, cracks the control panel login, and then has access to not only all the website files, but also to the email accounts which may have been preconfigured within the control panel. Then upon digging around , they find Solomon’s Mines of dirt in an email account.

This … is … possible, and happens thousands of times a day on the internet.

So how does an attacker break into a web space, or “website”?

Well the most common method is via insecure code within a website.

Bloggers like Slater use precompiled blog scripts like Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, phpBB or vBulletin. These content management systems (CMS) often have security weaknesses or vulnerabilities that an attacker can exploit between the time the weakness is made known and the time when a blogger/user updates their CMS.

All of the above allow users to add plugins/addons which some of whom have file upload ‘features’ that are incorrectly coded. Even the core CMS itself could also have a vulnerable file upload feature as has been the case.

The attacker using free tools like Joomscan, WPScan, etc, can poke around, find and exploit one of these weaknesses or vulnerabilities and upload a file called a shell which allows them to get full access not just to the website and other websites on a shared webserver, but also to the webserver itself.

An attacker can also get access to your website files via rather simple misconfigurations of webservers that allow them for example to view the contents of a backup directory which contains website database backups.

Slater himself is alleged to have made such an attack on the Labour Party website via a misconfiguration. In that case it was a missing default index file and a misconfigured Apache <Directory> directive setting causing the server to issue a directory listing and allowing the attacker to see all the files in the website directories, and download website and database backups.

By exploiting these vulnerabilities an attacker can get access to at least the database, and in some cases, the login credentials for the CMS.

But so what, that does not get us any emails.

Well yes and no.

We should return again to blogger culture, and common password culture or the lack of it, on the internet. As I said earlier, bloggers are often average internet users who just happen to also have a blog.

Most people know one really good password. And they use that password everywhere – their email accounts, Windows login, Twitter, Facebook, etc . There is a good chance that people reading this themselves use one hard password for everything. It is unbelievably common.

An attacker would assume this, so it would go without saying that if the attacker has been able to bypass security on a website she or he would get access to at least the database password. In the afore-mentioned CMSs the database password can be found unencrypted in the configuration files. The attacker would then try this password on everything, from the CPANEL control panel login, to the CMS admin login, and even to the target’s GMAIL and social media accounts.

It really would not surprise me if this is how the attack went down … attackers will poke around in your stuff using a wide variety of tools and a good nose for misconfigurations, and most of the time there are always misconfigurations, out of date applications, badly coded addons and more.

Then Things Just Get Worse.

Symlink Bypass Attack

Even with the best security in place, if a blogger or anyone else uses a shared webspace service to host a website that site will probably be vulnerable to what is called a Symlink Bypass Attack. This can be launched from any website hosted on a shared webserver onto any other website hosted on the same server. An attacker for example could register their own website on the same webserver as the target’s website, and thereby gain access.

As an aside, try to avoid shared web services for this reason alone. This attack is still viable even today. Use a dedicated server or at least a VPS … to increase your security.

Via a Symlink Bypass Attack Rawshark would have eventually gained access to the blog admin logins, passwords, database password, database content and even into any active email accounts in the control panel (especially if GMAILs had been redirected into one of these accounts). In fact successful Symlink Bypass Attacks often give the attacker access to even the entire webserver.

Passwords are often stored in databases in the form of a cryptographic hash of the password. If these are not correctly salted, then an attacker can brute force these hashes to find the original passwords. In many cases an administrators easy to guess, short password could be brute forced from the database hashes in a matter of minutes. Then the attacker would now have the raw database password, and an admin user’s password to try out against your other webservices.

If the lazy admin had used one or two passwords for everything Rawshark would have then also had access to Slater’s GMAIL account.

End of Game …

Now, originally I thought this web based attack was unlikely for the following reason. Most attackers that I have witnessed in the past, who had access to their target’s administration login, have defaced the websites homepage with some smart arsed, usually lowercase, uppercase jumbled message.

d3f@c3d bY k0mp3r5t0mp3r

This appears not to have happened in the WhaleOil hack, and that to me was a clue that perhaps the attack did not originate from the website, or there was something really peculiar about this attacker that was outside the norm, or both.

Then something weird happened during the @Whaledump2 disclosures on Twitter that changed my mind a little on that.

Rawshark, or some associate, was posting disclosures on Twitter following the release of Nicky Hager’s book. A court judge ruled that Rawshark should stop disclosing Slater’s private information, and to my utter amazement Rawshark complied. On the day of the ruling Rawshark’s Twitter account ceased posting, and that was that.

See the Radio New Zealand report here.

That was an infosec moment for me. For one thing, for my own amusement I had a list of possible suspects as to who Rawshark could be, but because of this reaction by Rawshark, that list got ripped up.

Why? Well because I do not know or know of ANYONE in that position, using the best methods of anonymity and privacy, who would not have told that judge where to stick the ruling! It occurred to me that who we were dealing with here was a serially good normally law abiding person.

But we are not here to discuss the potential identity of Rawshark, but rather to look at the potential methods used to capture the email and chat repositories of one Cameron Slater. But in those clues alone, my deductions lead me to believe that access to the emails may not have originated from a direct attack on Slater’s website.

So, if you have managed to make it this far, we have these three possibilities:

Attacker Friend (AF) who goes feral on Slater and hands Hager the cache;
Hit and miss, or gifted attack on GMAIL itself to get access to GMAIL emails; or
Attack on the website of a lazy admin where one password is used for both web stuff and emails.

What about the Facebook conversations?

Facebook like any other social media service, depends on the user owning the email account attached to the username. Unless the user has activated 2-factor authentication, an attacker who has control of the primary email account of the target can trigger a password reset on, for instance, a Facebook account and take over a target’s account for a brief time until Facebook is notified.

This is of course a very visible attack and Slater would have seen that coming and possibly stopped it from happening.

Facebook also allows for third party applications, many of which at that time were very insecure. It might have been possible for an attacker to exploit Slater’s Facebook account if he used one of the many vulnerable applications available to Facebook users.

But we need to also take into account the possibility that Slater used one password for all, so if an attacker had guessed the password to the GMAIL account, for example whal3oil or some other variant, then the attacker could have easily gotten into all of his stuff without being seen, and that to me is the clincher.

Summary

As it stands I am still not totally convinced about how Rawshark was able to gather Slater’s communications. What you see above are strong suspicions that do not pass the test in my view for me to form a solid conclusion without more information from either Rawshark or the journalists that interacted with him, or from Slater himself. None of those are likely to be forthcoming, nor should they be.

I said earlier “But I am going to tentatively rule out a super easy to guess password…for now, ’cause, well, that would just be too sad … “

But if Slater was using a master password for everything, then you now know with some certainty the various ways Rawshark could have obtained it. My best guess is that this is a master password issue and that Slater most likely used a really crappy password for his email, and social media, and that Rawshark simply guessed.

…and that really would just be too sad…

A word on Rawshark: Will the police catch Rawshark? Probably not. Most attackers do their attacks via another infected webspace, or VPS, and almost always over Tor.

Tips for Better Blog Security Check List

If you run a political service of any sort online, you may attract the ire of someone who disagrees with you. In Slater’s case he often offends people deliberately or otherwise. It would seem that he did not properly look after his security so that he could talk with impunity the big talk; and someone took offence and took his world apart.

Even if you are not a total prick online…it pays to use the best security methods available, that actually do not cost you the world, but do however take a little time to accomplish.

Memorise at least two 7 word pass phrases using Diceware
Use a password manager (KeePass/KeePassX, Encryptr) for all your passwords. Use one of these 7 word pass phrases to lock the manager.
Use the other as a pass phrase for your primary email account
Using the password manager, generate a unique password of at least a 128bit password for EVERY web service you use (social media sites, email accounts, web admin logins, banking logins etc). When you use a password manager you are then able to use passwords that are the maximum length allowed. For example, I have tested Twitter passwords as long as 165 characters long.
Host your website on a VPS or dedicated server and NEVER on shared web hosting.
Install an SSL/TLS certificate on your website!
Use 2-factor authentication on your web based services such as email and social media
If you use WordPress, add Pareto Security plugin (since I wrote it), Wordfence and (if you do not have an SSL/TSL certificate) Chap Secure Login
Keep all your web applications and plugins up to date
Make sure there are no publicly accessible backups of your website
Use as few plugins as necessary
Install HTTPS Everywhere and NoScript Security Suite on your web browsers
Encrypt and lock your cellphone.
Encrypt your computer hard drive or use Veracrypt to create encrypted containers to store your files in
Ditch GMAIL and go with secure email services such as Protonmail, Tutanota, and Openmailbox.
For the more security conscious/tech advanced, use TAILS, Whonix or at the very least TorBrowser, as your means of accessing the internet

Finally…

Kaati noa ra,

@te_taipo

Reflections on ANZAC Day

Memoirs, OtherPutatara

This essay was republished in “Tell You What: Great New Zealand Nonfiction 2016” (Ed Susanna Andrew & Jolisa Gracewood, Auckland University Press, 2015).

A lot of money has been spent on commemoration, a lot of hype generated, mythology recycled, and there’s been a lot of criticism of the expenditure, the hype and the mythology on the occasion of the 100^th anniversary of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign. There have been calls by Maori and others for the dead of the New Zealand Wars to be mourned as well as the dead of foreign wars.

What does ANZAC really mean?

Grandfather Whana of Ngati Kere (Porangahau) and Ngati Hikarara (South Wairarapa) didn’t enlist for World War I. At that time enlistment was not a popular option for Maori so he was not one of the approximately 2227 Maori who did enlist. By 1914 he was 35 years old, a dairy farmer, and the father of four of his eventual nine children. He had responsibilities at home. We don’t know what his views were about the British Empire but as staunch Mormons who regularly hosted Mormon missionaries in their home in South Wairarapa both he and my grandmother were members of a congregation that drew their attention and allegiance more towards the USA than towards England.

On the other hand as a dairy farmer he would have known that he relied on a buoyant New Zealand economy for his livelihood and that depended heavily on continuing sales of primary produce into a stable British market.

Grandfather Fred of East Clive in Hawkes Bay did enlist. He was about the same age as Grandfather Whana and he was a first generation New Zealander born at Waipureku a.k.a. East Clive. His father was born in Cornwall and his mother in Devon. They came to New Zealand in 1872 as economic migrants and they were steadfastly British with an abiding loyalty to Mother England. That loyalty was shared by their many children, most of them born in New Zealand. At the start of the war Fred was a single man working as a bushman. He tried to enlist but was rejected because at 37 he was too old. Over two years later when the NZEF needed more recruits he was accepted, joined the Third Battalion of the NZ Rifle Brigade on the Western Front, was badly wounded at Passchendaele in October 1917, was invalided to London and after he recovered was sent on light duties to the NZ Rifle Brigade rear echelon at Brocton Camp in Staffordshire. There he remained for the rest of the war, met and married Grandmother Gertrude and eventually came back to New Zealand with his wife and daughter towards the end of 1919.

Grandfather Whana died young just a few years before World War II a victim of metabolic diseases brought on by the too rapid adoption of the European lifestyle and the European diet, especially sugar, flour and milk. Ironically it was the European diet that did for far more of our people than the European wars, and continues to do so to this day. The 1918 European influenza epidemic brought home from the war also did for many more Maori than the war itself. Grandfather Whana was involved in local efforts to treat the disease and to contain the epidemic.

My father didn’t enlist for World War II. A few of his wider whanau did but not many. Most of his whanau did not get caught up in the fervour of Sir Apirana Ngata’s drive to recruit and reinforce the 28^th Maori Battalion. Our whanau was still not into other peoples’ wars. His best friend, my godfather, did enlist and served on Norfolk Island and then in Italy but in the Army Engineers not in the Maori Battalion. Twenty years on I broke the mould on my Maori side and served in the NZ Army for just over twenty years including active service in Borneo and in South Vietnam.

I march on ANZAC day. But I cringe at the myth making and hype surrounding ANZAC these days. I wonder about the tens of thousands who now turn out to dawn services across New Zealand and Australia. Are they there to mourn or are they there to bask in the hype and to celebrate the mythology fed to them by politicians and media. How many of them really know or fully understand why they are there. I march for simple and clear reasons.

I don’t march in remembrance of the dead of the New Zealand Wars for reasons I will explain later. However I do mourn the loss of land whether through war and confiscation or through questionable sale. But I’m not sure how we might memorialise that, or even if we should.

Grandfather Fred was like a great many men who went to war for New Zealand and Australia who were either born in Britain or were the children of British parents. He would have felt it his bounden duty to rise to the defence of the British Empire. His generation were becoming New Zealanders but still staunchly British. The evolutionary process of becoming New Zealanders actually took us a long time. We didn’t gain NZ citizenship until 1948, thirty years after World War I and three years after World War II. Up until then we were British subjects and from 1948 onwards until 1983 we were British subjects and NZ citizens. I remember as a child in the 1950s that most of my Pakeha schoolmates were still proud to be British subjects.

It is easy to look backwards 100 years after Gallipoli and decry the folly of going to the other side of the world to fight a war that in no way threatened New Zealand’s shores, in campaigns that senselessly slaughtered millions of young men; often badly conceived campaigns. But I see World War I through the perspective of Grandfather Fred and through the perspective of his times. He went out of duty and loyalty to England and to his British Empire. It was his war not someone else’s war. I honour him for that.

He may also have gone for the adventure and to visit the land of his forefathers. Having signed up for a bit of travel and adventure myself 45 years later I can understand that too.

Too many of today’s talking heads who comment about the relevance of ANZAC and the mythology of ANZAC are walking in their own comfortable shoes instead of in the boots of those World War I warriors. Not that I disagree with all of the commentary about ANZAC mythology but to be understood history has to be perceived through the eyes of its participants or observers, not just from the distance of 100 years and through the lens of modern ideology. I try to see World War I through the eyes of my grandfathers.

So in this second decade of the 21^st Century what do I think of ANZAC?

I grew up with ANZAC. As a school cadet in the 1950s and early 1960s I was proud to be a uniformed member of catafalque parties at country memorials on ANZAC Day. When I was a teenager in uniform World War II was just ten years gone, the Korean War had just ended and the Malayan Emergency was still going. Grandfather Fred, veteran of World War I, died about that time well into his eighties. ANZAC Day was a funeral, not a celebration of anything except perhaps the lives of those who died. It was a mourning of the dead including the very recent dead by families, comrades and communities.

All of those war memorials in cities, towns and villages were not erected to glorify war or to glorify sacrifice or to celebrate the defence of freedom and liberty, or to promote militarism. They were erected as substitute tombstones for the thousands of soldiers who lie buried in foreign lands, some in unmarked graves. Lacking graves and headstones and the ability to travel to where the dead lay they became the focus of mourning. ANZAC Day was not about celebrating a failed campaign in the Dardanelles, or the mythical founding of a nation or a celebration of democratic values or the gallantry of the ANZAC soldier. All of that is legend or mythology. ANZAC Day was a service for the dead. Its ritual was and is still the solemn ritual of a military funeral.

It was also and remains an annual reunion for those whose incredibly strong bonds of trust, brotherhood and comradeship were forged in war. Only the veteran knows the power and the strength of that bond. In that sense everyone else is an onlooker or a bystander.

That remains for me the meaning of ANZAC Day. I remember and honour the dead and the physically and psychologically wounded of all wars. I honour too all who fought in those wars especially those whanau and friends who have since faded away. Regardless of the strategic, political and economic necessity or futility of those wars I honour the casualties of the wars, both the dead and the living. I remember and honour Grandfather Fred.

I honour also Grandfather Whana’s and my father’s decisions not to fight other peoples’ wars. Their loyalties rightly lay elsewhere.

For me the debate about the necessity or futility of war, past, present and future is for every other week of the year. Raising that debate in ANZAC week even in response to the maddening hype and mythology is just as inappropriate as the hype and mythology itself. Like the tangihanga itself ANZAC week is a time for restraint and respect.

However in that larger debate I do decry the political and commercial appropriation of ANZAC for base motives that dishonour the dead. We should read the academic military historians to learn the unadorned facts about ANZAC. But their work does not seep into popular consciousness. Not many are interested. What does pass as fact is the work of popular historians who perpetuate and reinforce the propaganda and mythology of ANZAC and who along with politicians and the media distort reality and so shape false perceptions for the next generations.

So what about mourning say, the dead of the New Zealand Wars, as well as the dead of the more recent wars.

Well, down our way Grandfather Whana’s father and grandfather didn’t go to war to try to keep their lands. They didn’t have a strong enough military base. They lost their lands mostly but not always by reluctant sale. The New Zealand Wars like the later World Wars were other peoples’ wars. Indeed some of the tribes who did fight actually fought on the side of the settler government. And some of those were also the tribes who made the greatest contributions to the Maori Battalion of World War II. No doubt they had their reasons but it might not be profitable to mine that seam too deep.

Some forty years before the New Zealand Wars our rohe was infested by marauding hapu during the Musket Wars attempting to dispossess our many hapu of our lands. They initially succeeded but were eventually repulsed as we acquired muskets and as the missionaries intervened. No doubt some of my tipuna would not have been at all inclined to mourn the dead of those invading hapu in the New Zealand Wars. We don’t all share a common history.

So I’m a bit ambivalent about commemorating other tribes’ wars whatever side they fought on. But if those tribes want to set aside their own day of mourning that’s OK by me. Mourning the loss of land might be something we could have in common. It would be a bit like mourning the loss of lives in war I suppose. It sounds like a good idea but it’s a bit more complex than it sounds.

Should we really set aside a day to mourn what divided my two grandfathers, or seek instead to celebrate what joins us. Much modern day ANZAC belief lies in the myth that New Zealand came of age, or achieved nationhood on the World War I battlefields, especially Gallipoli. Of course it’s pure rubbish. Grandfather Whana’s people were here in this land for some 700 hundred years before Gallipoli. Grandfather Fred’s people were here for about 150 years before Gallipoli. We try to celebrate the joining of these two strands of migration on Waitangi Day, not very successfully because we are still divided over what Waitangi means to the nation as a whole. Grandfather Whana seems to be pulling in one direction and Grandfather Fred in another.

They never met but as men of the land I’m sure they would have found much in common. A shared love of the land perhaps; the farmer and the bushman. Neither of them was much interested in politics. Grandfather Fred like most of his generation didn’t much like Maori. He did change his attitude a bit after he acquired a Maori son-in-law and Maori mokopuna. Incidentally he didn’t much like Catholics either and didn’t ever approve of his Pakeha Catholic son-in-law. Those were his times. Grandfather Whana didn’t go to war but I’m sure he would have understood and honoured Grandfather Fred’s decision. He did after all name one of his daughters Lemnos Mudros after the island and its harbour from where the Gallipoli campaign was launched. It’s a mystery. I’ve no idea why but he did.

I’ve no idea either how we might celebrate the real birth of this nation formed primarily from twin strands of migration through a clash of cultures, a short period of armed conflict in some parts, a long period of inter-cultural political and economic turmoil in most parts, and an even longer aftermath through which we are still finding our way. Perhaps if we’re patient the answer will in time reveal itself. Perhaps it will be in finally cutting the ties to monarchy and all it represents and in the birth of a new republic. Our day of celebration of nationhood might lie not in the past but in the future.

In the meantime let ANZAC Day remain simply a mourning for our dead in the conflicts where a lot of us fought on the same side, for whatever reason.

Lest we forget.

Rawshark – Is She Maori or Pakeha?

In the News, RawsharkPutatara

The search for the elusive Rawshark

Five cops spent ten hours turning over Nicky Hager’s place looking for the identity of the person who gave him the emails that were published in “Dirty Politics“. They took away all of his paperwork and electronics. They won’t find Rawshark in amongst all of that. But they knew that anyway, before they turned his place over.

They were actually achieving three things:

Showing their political masters that they were doing something to try to track down the elusive Rawshark;
Using it as an excuse to gain a treasure trove of unrelated but interesting information for Police Intelligence to pour over, cross reference and store away in their database for future reference under the new Intelligence mantra “Collect Everything”; and
Making a very public and somewhat intimidating statement to all would-be investigative journalists and writers.

Given that Police Intelligence are into both criminal intelligence and political intelligence that must have wet themselves when they dreamed up the excuse to spend ten hours trawling through his stuff and to cart it all off. Be interesting to know the names and designations of the five police officers involved.

For the moment Nicky’s stuff is sealed by court order until the courts finally decide on the legality of the search and seizure.

In the meantime Cameron Slater has blamed someone for being behind the hacking of his emails. And we believe that he has named someone he thought was Rawshark.

And John Key says someone told him who Rawshark is but he ain’t telling who that someone was and who he thinks Rawshark is. Was that someone his mate Whaleoil?

This tweet might be pretty near the mark:

Alastair Thompson @althecat – “Reasons @johnkeypm isn’t ratting out rawshark to the feds. (1) He doesn’t really know, but wants Raw Shark to think [he] does”

So is John Key just trying to play mind games with Rawshark? Emphasis on the “trying”.

Others are speculating all over the Twitterverse – see some online speculation – and I hear that @patrickgowernz thinks he knows too.

They seek him here
They seek him there
Those DirtyPolitics seek him everywhere
Is he Maori
Or Pakeha
That damned elusive Rawshark.

Who has long gone, folded her tent and stolen away into the night.

None of them really has a clue about Rawshark‘s identity. Give you a hint fellas. She’s Pakeha.

UPDATE 2 November 2014:

Cameron Slater is now talking up a big conspiracy to take him down, a conspiracy that includes Nicky Hager, Rawshark and a cast of many others. He claims to know who they are. See here. He’s also asking for donations to fund his legal battle.

There are others who claim to know the name given to John Key. And many others in the Twitterverse who are speculating about the same person.

They’re all wrong. None of them has come close yet.

This is what Rawshark herself said:

“I’m not your run-of-the-mill hacker,” Rawshark insisted last week. “Which means there aren’t many like me out there. Which means that as soon as people understand my motivations, the list of suspects narrows down to one.”

Update 4 December 2014

It seems now that Matt McCarten has been accused of organising the hack, funded by Kim Dotcom, paid through an intermediary and friend of Rawshark known as @endarken, and Slater still claims to know the identity of Rawshark. It’s probably the same person that John Key thinks is Rawshark. I can categorically say they’ve got the wrong person and that the whole chain from Rawshark to McCarten is pure fantasy.

After the Kohanga Reo Scandal – Some Observations on Trust Law, Tikanga and Democracy

In the News, Maori Development, Te Kohanga ReoPutatara

Throughout the whole affair involving Te Kohanga Reo National Trust there have been a few things said about what TKRNT should and should not do that seemed to me to be a bit strange in relation to trust law for TKRNT is a very specific type of organisation; it is a trust governed by trust law.

A few examples. The collective of kohanga reo whanau from Mataatua and Tauranga-Moana held that the dismissal of Titoki Black as CEO of TKRNT was not done in accordance with tikanga and that was why they were aggrieved. Minister of Education Hekia Parata was reported in the NZ Herald saying the trust “was not democratic enough”. Hone Harawira was reported saying that the board should comprise two representatives, one male and one female, from each of the ten kohanga reo regions.

Each of those raises an issue in trust law, namely tikanga and trust law, democracy and trust law, and representation and trust law.

In this post I will look at trust law in some detail, at the tension between trust law and Tikanga Maori, and at the end examine the issue of Te Kohanga Reo National Trust, democracy and representation.

I’m not an expert in trust law but I have been a trustee and managed trusts for over four decades. In that time I have consulted with and been advised by several specialist trust lawyers and in the end bought and read the legal texts for myself. In my experience, with both Maori and non-Maori trusts, I have found that few trustees understand trust law and that many are ignorant of their legal powers (and the restrictions on those powers), their obligations, duties, responsibilities and liabilities. Given that there are thousands of trusts operating throughout Te Ao Maori the lack of knowledge of trust law is a major deficiency in the governance of the affairs of Maori.

I have often been dismayed by the appointment of trustees who had little or no understanding of their legal powers, obligations, duties, responsibilities and liabilities. And even more dismayed if and when they have shown no inclination whatsoever to acquaint themselves with trust law, or even to acknowledge that it exists.

And in some cases I have been appalled to witness the appointment of people wholly unsuited to the position of trustee. I have also known proven thieves to be appointed (even as treasurer) and when they have embezzled funds been exasperated that nothing was done about it.

The Attributes of a Trustee

In my opinion there are three important attributes of a trustee; namely integrity, competence and maturity. By maturity I do not mean age but experience and wisdom.

Integrity speaks for itself. Competence includes an understanding of trust law as well as understanding investment, financial governance and financial management among other things. In the case of TKRNT there is also a requirement for competence in Te Reo Maori because the Trust’s purpose is entirely about Te Reo. I have found that a modicum of wisdom is always important, the wisdom of maturity and experience. The appointment of trustees having regard for these attributes is a serious matter that should not be taken lightly yet too often trustees are appointed according to other criteria without any consideration of those three attributes.

In recent public discourse about Te Kohanga Reo National Trust there was much crticism of trustees being appointed for life and an assumption that elderly trustees might be too out of touch. Age however does not preclude the attributes of integrity, competence and maturity and should be no barrier to trusteeship provided that provision is made for smooth transitions of trusteeship in the event of the incapacity or demise of elderly trustees.

E hoa ma, as an elderly trustee myself I would think like that wouldn’t I.

There are estimated to be between 300,000 and 500,000 trusts in New Zealand and I would think that a surprisingly large number of those have trustees appointed for life.

Tikanga Equity – The Origins of Trust Law

Trust law is its own tikanga, a tikanga rooted in roughly 700 years of the development of an aspect of English law called Equity. Equity is that body of law developed by the English Court of Chancery before 1873 and it is a set of legal doctrines that reflect general notions of good conscience and fairness. A trust is one form of Equity in which the trustees have a legal interest in the trust and the beneficiaries have an equitable interest. That is that the trustees are the legal owners of the assets in trust but only insofar as those assets may only be used for the purposes of the trust and for the benefit of the “beneficiaries” and not for their own benefit.

Trusteeship over assets that benefit other people and not yourself requires a high level of integrity and over the centuries the law has developed doctrines or tikanga to codify that requirement.

I have read that this tikanga developed from the time of the Crusades when knights would leave their lands and families for years of crusading in the Holy Land from which they might never return. It developed to protect the lands and other property of the knights “in trust” for the benefit of their families or “beneficiaries” against the predation and dishonesty of some people who would take advantage of the absence or death of a crusader to acquire his lands for themselves. That is a much simplified explanation but it does convey the essence of trust law.

It is important to understand this simple concept and to understand that trust law is its own tikanga.

Common Law was developed in the English common law courts over many centuries. Equity was developed in the English Court of Chancery. They are two separate tikanga both part of the concept and codification of the law we all now live by in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Common law now forms the basis of much New Zealand statutory or parliament-made law but there is still a body of common law that has not been transformed into statutory law and common law is still relevant in the courts. Much of the tikanga of Equity has also been transformed into statutory law primarily in the Trustee Act 1956 and also in the case of Maori lands in Te Ture Whenua Maori Act 1993. However the tikanga of Equity still prevails and all statutory trust law is interpreted according to that tikanga and in consideration of case law. Case law is that law developed in the courts based on interpretation of Tikanga Equity. Case law sets precedents that influence future decisions in the courts.

Where the relevant statutory legislation is silent Tikanga Equity and case law prevail. The Rules of Equity are to be found in case law and in numerous authoritative legal texts which also explain that case law.

This may appear complicated and convoluted but an understanding of statutory trust law is not enough. To be competent a trustee must also understand Tikanga Equity. I will try to explain Tikanga Equity as simply as I can.

Powers of Trustees

The powers of trustees are established in Tikanga Equity and in statutory law. In Tikanga Equity “equitable relationships” are created. We must remember that equity is about good conscience and fairness. These equitable relationships include:

Fiduciary relationships;
Relationships of confidence; and
Relationships of influence.

A trust, established as a creature of Tikanga Equity is a fiduciary relationship subject to fiduciary rules and principles, or obligations. At the core of those obligations a trustee must:

Avoid personal profit or benefit;
Avoid conflict of interest; and
Avoid divided loyalties (the loyalty is to the trust and not to any external persons or organisations).

The avoidance of conflicts of interest is of particular relevance in Maori trusts and is a rule often breached. I think the main reason is that a conflict of interest in Tikanga Equity is generally not considered a conflict of interest in Tikanga Maori. In a later section I will discuss the relationship of Tikanga Maori to Tikanga Equity. A trustee must also:

Act in good faith;
Use his or her powers for their proper purpose; and
Exercise care (i.e. a duty of care). The duty of care requires a trustee to administer a trust in good faith, exercising its powers as a prudent person would with “reasonable care, skill and caution”. There is a whole body of law around this duty alone, including definitions and descriptions of a prudent person. In managing trusts I have sometimes needed to consult a trust lawyer to seek an expert opinion on whether a contemplated course of action would be prudent or not. It may seem a simple matter of judgement but it is not always so.

Other aspects of the law of fiduciary obligation under Tikanga Equity include:

Duty of loyalty;
Duty of impartiality;
Duty to act personally;
Duty to keep full and accurate accounts; and
Duty to preserve trust property.

Duties of Trustees

The first duty of a trustee is to be fully acquainted with the terms of the trust as specified in the trust instrument or instruments, such as deeds of trusts and constitutions. The trust instrument is paramount.

The second duty is to adhere totally to the trust’s terms regardless of any other considerations (including Tikanga Maori if Tikanga Maori is in conflict with Tikanga Equity). The trustee’s only duty and loyalty is to the trust and to the terms of the trust, and therefore to its beneficiaries.

In this sense the trustee represents only the trust, and not any other person or organisation even if the terms of the trust provide for the appointment of that trustee by an external person or organisation. A trustee acts alone in the service of the trust. A trustee is not a representative and a trust is not a democratic institution. It is a legal and equitable institution.

In relation to the beneficiaries trustees must:

Act in the beneficiaries’ best interests;
Maintain impartiality between beneficiaries;
Pay the correct beneficiaries (if they are to be paid under the terms of the trust).

The trustees themselves must:

Not profit from trusteeship;
Act gratuitously (i.e. without payment of sitting fees or other fees, wages or salaries unless payment is specifically authorised by the terms of the trust, but they may be paid actual and reasonable expenses such as for travel and accommodation);
Invest;
Not delegate their obligations, duties and responsibilities;
Be active in their trusteeship;
Act unanimously (unless the terms of the trust allow for voting and for majority decision making). Additionally a trustee, including a chairperson of a board of trustees, may not act alone for decisions may only be made by all trustees acting together unless the trustees have specifically authorised one of their number to act alone on a specific matter; and
Keep proper accounts and provide that information to those entitled to receive it.

Investment of trust assets is a huge and complex area of trust law. Every trustee of a trust that is required to invest assets must be or become knowlegable about investment. Similarly every trustee must be financially literate in order to perform his or her duties to a high standard. A lack of knowledge of trust law and a lack of financial literacy are the two major deficiencies in trusteeship that I have witnessed in my 40+ years of trusteeship.

These deficiencies often lead to breaches of trust.

Breach of Trust and the Removal of Trustees

Any trustee who breaches the terms of the trust, or the obligations of a trustee, or exceeds the powers of the trustee may be held in breach of trust by the courts and dismissed. A breach of trust is therefore any act which is in violation of the duties of a trustee or of the terms of a trust, or any act or omission on the part of a trustee which is inconsistent with the terms of the triust agreement or the law of trusts.

Such a breach need not be intentional or with malice, but can be due to negligence alone.

Additionally under Section 229 of the Crimes Act 1961 every one is guilty of a criminal breach of trust who, as a trustee of any trust, dishonestly and contrary to the terms of that trust, converts anything to any use not authorised by the trust. Anyone so doing is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding seven years.

I have seen instances of this in cases where trustees have given favourable consideration when disposing of some assets of a trust by selling them at a discount to themselves or to their own whanau or to another organisation in which they are involved. The duty of the trustee is to sell at the most favourable price and to do otherwise is an act of criminality.

Trusteeship is therefore a position requiring high levels of integrity and competence, and the wisdom and maturity to fulfil those requirements.

The law provides for the removal of trustees through breach of trust. Trustees may also be removed if they become physically or mentally incapacitated, or if a trustee is convicted of dishonest or criminal behaviour. That last reason was perhaps part of the intent of the leaking of financial information to Maori TV.

The law does not provide for the removal of trustees by government ministers, as a few people have advocated in the case of TKRNT.

The Burden of Trusteeship

Trusteeship is not to be taken lightly for it is an onerous responsibility and trustees are individually liable for any breach of trust or imprudent decision making by the trust.

It requires an even higher standard of prudence than one might exercise over one’s own affairs and trustees are held personally accountable to the higher standard. Most trustees do not understand that personal liability.

As I have come to understand trusteeship in greater depth over the years I have become more wary of accepting trusteeship. I now consider the integrity, competence and maturity of those who will be my fellow trustees and also those who may be employed by the trust as managers, for in accepting appointment one is to some extent placing one’s reputation in the hands and integrity of others.

Too often trustees are appointed and trusteeships acccepted as just another committee membership without any understanding of the obligations, duties, responsibilities and liabilities of trusteeship. In the present discussion and consultation over the structure of TKRNT I am sure that few who aspire to be trustees really understand all of that.

Tikanga Maori vs Tikanga Equity

I mentioned earlier that conflicts of interest often arise because of differences between the two tikanga. In my experience the tension between Tikanga Maori and Tikanga Eqjuity has been the cause of much misunderstanding about the powers, obligations, duties, responsibilities and liabilities of trustees.

In Maori trusts it is of course appropriate that trustees conduct themselves and their business in accordance with Tikanga Maori. However, and it is a big and often painful however, without exception and unless provided for in the trust’s terms, Tikanga Equity has precedence over Tikanga Maori in all mattters of trusteeship.

A trust is a creation in Tikanga Equity, not a creation in Tikanga Maori. And although trusteeship is defined as kaitiakitanga in its translation from one to the other the two are not always the same thing and in the case of legal and equitable trust they are not the same thing.

Koha is a case in point and an issue of common misunderstanding. Trustees will often feel obliged to give koha from the funds of the trust but unless the trust’s terms specifically authorise koha in specific instances, or in the promotion of the purpose of a purpose trust (see later), it is not lawful. From my personal experience I have known of trustees who give koha from trust funds at tangihanga of persons not directly involved in the trust, in the mistaken belief that they are representing the trust. I have always assumed that I represent only myself in those circumstances and have given koha from my own pocket. In Tikanga Equity it is the safest option.

In Tikanga Maori matters are often but not always decided in hui and by consensus of those with an interest in the matter. Many people assume that consensus decision making by those with an interest applies to trusts as well. It does not for trustees are required to act personally and only in the interests of the trust as stated in the trust’s terms, and not in anyone else’s interests. And trustees have the sole power to make those decisions.

This is a matter that causes much confused thinking in relation to Te Kohanga Reo National Trust for at least half of Te Ao Maori has an interest in the Kohanga Reo Movement. But the lead organisation in the Movement is a trust in Tikanga Equity.

That is the cross we bear if we are to establish ourselves in legal entities in order to receive public funding or to operate in the regulatory environment established by New Zealand law. The legal entities whether trusts, incorporated societies or limited liability companies are all established, defined and governed in the other tikanga. Even Maori Land Incorporations are established, defined and governed in the other tikanga.

Types of Trust

There are various types of trust such as family trusts and pension trusts, and the putea trusts, whanau trusts, ahuwhenua trusts, whenua topu trusts and kaitiaki trusts that are established through the Maori Land Court. Trusts that do not have specific or named beneficiaries are called purpose trusts and are often charitable trusts with either narrow or broadly defined purposes.

Purpose of Te Kohanga Reo National Triust

Te Kohanga Reo National Trust is a charitable trust. It does not have specific or named beneficiaries but does have a very clear purpose. It was incorporated in 1983 under the Charitable Trusts Act 1957. The Trust’s Deed sets out its objectives which are to promote, support and encourage:

The use and retention of Te Reo.
The Kaupapa of Te Kōhanga Reo, and in particular the goal of total immersion in Te Reo Māori.
The establishment and maintenance within New Zealand of Te Kōhanga Reo.
The provision of financial, advisory, and administrative assistance and support for the whānau of Te Kōhanga Reo.

Despite what many people may think about the role of TKRNT, or what the role should be, that is its purpose. And as readers will know by now that purpose as stated in the trust deed is paramount.

As laws change and as society and circumstances change there may be a need to update trust deeds. The method of changing a deed may be specified in the deed and in some cases it may require application to the High Court (or Maori Land Court), and even the assent of the Attorney General. Unless ordered by the court amendments to trust deeds are the responsibilty of its trustees.

Structure of the Trust Board

The number of trustees and their method and term of appointment are matters specified in the trust deed. A change in structure will require amendments to the deed.

At the national hui held at Turangawaewae in April four proposals for the structure of the Trust were put forward and the working party is presently seeking feedback about those proposals. Before the national hui Hone Harawira called for the resignation and replacement of the TKRNT trustees, to be replaced by a younger generation, and on 13 June he was reported calling for a board of 20 trustees, one female and one male from each of the ten kohanga reo regions.

For a start I think 20 trustees would be way over the top and would turn the trust into more of a parliamentary and political caucus than a trust established in Equity.

I said caucus not circus!

Then I think that the criteria of integrity, competence and maturity should be paramount regardless of region and the very best should be sought from whatever region.

At the moment according to the TKRNT website there are nine trustees and I personally think that is too many and that seven who meet the criteria of integrity, competence and maturity would be about right. Decisions such as this should be made in the best interests of the trust and the workings of the trust, not in the interests of representation which is not a concept in trust law.

However in deference to calls for greater input from kohanga whanau to the decision making of the trustees I would employ the mechanism of advisory trustees. Advisory trustees are provided for in the Trustee Act 1956 and are widely used by the Maori Trustee in the management of Maori lands. Advisory Trustees are not decision makers but are present and can participate in deliberations. The decision making power rests with the Responsible Trustees.

Ten advisory trustees could be appointed, one from each region, against the criteria of integrity, competence and maturity. They would also serve as a pool of potential Responsible Trustees where they would become acquainted with the Trust and be evaluated for suitability for appointment as Responsible Trustees in their turn.

That may be one of the proposals put to the national hui. I wasn’t there.

Whatever course the Trust decides upon I would employ the very best trust lawyer I could find, whether Maori or Pakeha. I would think the best place to look would be in the big legal partnerships. This is a tricky time for the Trust caught between disaffected and crusading whanau, the media, opinionated commentators, and the Minister and Ministry of Education. I have found that the best trust lawyers are worth their weight in gold in finding ways through such demanding situations.

And in the end trust law is all there is in defining the governance of trusts in Tikanga Equity. We need to abide by it and we need to be good at it.

Democracy and Te Kohanga Reo National Trust

I have already observed that there is nothing democratic about trust law. So moving on from trust law let’s look at democracy.

The Kohanga Reo Movement is not a democracy and never has been. The Kohanga Reo Movement is a kaupapa.

Within that kaupapa each kohanga is locally focused on its own mokopuna and is managed by the whanau within the funding provided by Ministry of Education through Te Kohanga Reo National Trust. With that funding comes the obligations and regulations that accompany all government funding. As providers for pre-school aged children each kohanga is also required to abide by a strict regulatory framework designed to ensure the care, health and safety of mokopuna.

There is not much room for deviation and nothing democratic about the funding, care, health and safety regime imposed by government. And just like the government the Trust imposes its own regulatory regime.

What is this talk about democracy and about representation?

If the Minister for Education and others insist on the Movement becoming more democratic the question needs to be asked whether the network of early childhood centres answering directly to the Ministry will be made more democratic as well. As the primary provider to that network will the Ministry itself become a more democratic organisation? I think not.

And if the Kohanga Reo Movement were to come under the direct jurisdiction of the Ministry would the Ministry make it more democratic? I think not. I think it would be less democratic.

So what is this talk about democracy and about representation?

If you look at schools and early childhood centres in the Ministry network they are all self governing and managing within the legislation and regulatory framework and within their allocated budgets but they have no say whatsoever in anything that happens beyond their own boundary fence. If you look at kohanga reo they are all self governing and managing within the legislation and regulatory framework and within their allocated budgets and they don’t have much say in what happens beyond their boundary fence.

In both cases what is important to them happens almost entirely inside the boundary fence and not in Wellington. The difference between them is that one is a mandatory government curriculum and the other is a kaupapa not designed, developed and dictated by government. The Kohanga Reo Movement is a kaupapa, and one that the Trust has fiercely defended and protected for 32 years.

So now some in the Movement and some outside the Movement think it should now be about democracy and representation. In whose interest would that be? In the interest of the kaupapa? In the interest of Te Reo? In the interests of the mokopuna? In the interests of the whanau? Whose interests?

I’m looking for the rationale here. Is this talk of democracy and representation about the kaupapa or is it about something else?

I think it would be a good thing for the Movement to move into a new phase in its evolution and to make provision for more formal input into Trust decision making and more transparency of that decision making. But we don’t need to tear the Trust apart to achieve that. Nor do we need to open trusteeship up to elections or something similar. There are other ways to achieve that.

In my time with the Movement I remember Dame Te Atairangikaahu and Dame Iritana being constantly on the move throughout the Movement meeting, talking and listening to the whanau, letting them know what was happening and listening to their concerns, coming back to Wellington and lighting fires under the staff to fix things that needed fixing. Well, it was just Iritana who lit the fires. And it was Iritana who did most of the talking and the Lady who did most of the listening. It was a great double act. That’s how it was achieved then. I was with them occasionally.

How times have changed.

The author is not an expert in trust law but has picked up a bit of knowledge here and there. This article is intended as a guide to trust law as it affects Te Kohanga Reo National Trust (and all trusts) as well as further commentary on the continuing debate about the Trust.

Postscript

I notice that Dame Iritana Tawhiwhirangi and Maori TV CEO Paora Maxwell have just (18 June) “Friended” each other on Facebook. Now isn’t THAT interesting.

Postscript 20th June 2014

Maori TVs Native Affairs team has won two international awards from the World Indigenous Television Broadcasters Network for their investigative journalism, one of them for the programme “Feathering the Nest” about Te Kohanga Reo National Trust and Te Pataka Ohanga Ltd. See “Anatomy of a Scandal” below for the alternative story to “Feathering the Nest”.

The Origins of Corporate Iwi
TKRNT and Credit Card Usage at Te Pataka Ohanga Ltd
Anatomy of a Scandal- Te Kohanga Reo National Trust

Minister Parata Interview

Native Affairs