Māori War Effort Organisation

Many Māori volunteered for the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force when war broke out, and in October 1939 the government agreed to form an all-Māori infantry battalion. Organised on a tribal basis in four companies, the 28th (Māori) Battalion departed overseas on 2 May 1940 (see The 28th (Māori) Battalion). Conscription was not enforced on Māori, however, and low enlistment from some districts, especially those affected by confiscations after the New Zealand wars, caused official concern. Officials also struggled to identify Māori who were eligible for war-related service, because there were no Māori electoral rolls and registration for social security covered only a quarter of the estimated Māori workforce. Paraire Paikea, the Rātana–Labour MP for Northern Māori, had helped the other Rātana members and Apirana Ngata set up informal organisations to assist the war effort, but it soon became clear that a formal organisation was needed.

The Native Department could not help to find Māori recruits, so it referred the problem to Paikea, who chaired the Māori parliamentary committee. With two other Rātana–Labour MPs, Eruera Tirikātene and H.T. Rātana, he drafted a scheme for an organisation to handle Māori recruitment and war-related work, and he won Māori support by stressing its political potential. The government approved the Māori War Effort Organisation (MWEO) on 3 June 1942. The country was divided into 21 zones and 315 tribal committees were formed, and one or two members of each committee sat on one of 41 executive committees. Committee work was voluntary and received no government funding. Colonel H.C. Hemphill led the organisation and dealt directly with Paikea, who was minister in charge of the Māori war effort. At the insistence of the Māori parliamentary committee, the MWEO followed Māori custom in choosing its 20 Māori recruiting officers, and in July 1942 Cabinet agreed to extend this principle of tribal leadership to territorial units in New Zealand and to the Home Guard.

As recruiting went on, the committees took on more work. They advised on education, vocational training and better land use, and encouraged local food production. They registered Māori aged between 18 and 59, and women aged between 20 and 30, for war-related service, could enforce registration, and recommended the type and place of a person's employment. By December 1942, according to Te Ara's biography of Paikea, tribal executives and committees were working across the country, collecting funds, contributing extra food and placing people in essential industries. By 1943 several hundred young Māori women working in hotels and restaurants in Auckland and Wellington were living in the poorest parts of those cities, and the MWEO recommended that Māori women welfare officers be appointed to the Native Department. The same biography says that Māori felt that for the first time they were being permitted to bear real responsibility for their own affairs. Staff of the Native Affairs department were among those who complained that the organisation was undercutting their own war efforts and taking credit for them.

The government had expected the MWEO to last six months at a cost of £7,000. In 1943 Paikea asked for more time, arguing that it had a key role in Māori development after the war, and early that year he and Tirikātene were working on plans to turn it into a peacetime organisation that would allow Māori to control their own affairs. The government agreed to extend the MWEO's life to the end of April 1944. Paikea died of acute gastro-enteritis on 6 April 1943. Tirikātene took on effective leadership of the MWEO, but NZHistory says he did not have Paikea's political influence. The army had enough Māori recruits and could no longer justify keeping its MWEO recruiting officers, and Treasury recommended that official support end from 31 January 1944. The Native Department, whose work the MWEO had steadily encroached on, agreed.

In 1944 the native minister, Rex Mason, drafted a bill to revive the Māori councils, which the MWEO's representatives and the Māori MPs rejected. In October 1944 Tirikātene and the Rātana MPs called a conference at the Ngāti Pōneke Māori Association club rooms, and he then drafted a bill for a national Māori welfare and reconstruction agency in which tribally elected and district councils would conduct Māori affairs. Prime Minister Peter Fraser, though sympathetic to Māori aspirations, wanted to avoid a rise of Māori nationalism and preferred a reformed Native Department, and Apirana Ngata also feared the MWEO's political potential. The Maori Social and Economic Advancement Act 1945, assented to on 7 December 1945 and in force from 1 April 1946, took in many aspects of Tirikātene's draft, but it left the Native Department intact and incorporated the tribal and executive committees into its structure, with no specific provision for Māori leadership. NZHistory calls it 'a compromise that satisfied no one'. Under the Act the committees worked only on local, subsidised projects under departmental control. In 1947, on Fraser's initiative, the department was renamed Māori Affairs. NZHistory concludes that once the MWEO had fulfilled its role, 'paternalistic patterns of government policy-making and decision-taking were reasserted'.