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This article considers the relevance of identity and history for Māori development policy. It explores community-based priorities for socioeconomic development in defining “gaps” and compares this with programmes initiated and implemented by government. This article argues that major gaps are historically based and provide clues for present gaps that are measured cross-culturally in, for example, education, health, housing, justice and employment, as well as for some gaps that are not represented in statistical analysis and are inadequately considered in officialdom. Moreover, cultural principles remain fundamental to individual and group identity and, therefore, socio-economic and political survival. Thus, some major gaps are measured internally within the group and are concerned with cultural vitality. However, in order for cultural principles to have proper legitimacy and development programmes to have rigour, it is necessary to consider carefully various shades of meaning and establish which dimensions are applicable to particular gapclosing policies. And while history and identity are essential features of community development policies, it is important that there is a clear relationship between analysis, policy and practice.

This paper considers the implications of the liberalization of the New Zealand economy for entrepreneurial development by indigenous New Zealand Maori tribal organizations. Since 1984 the economic objective of the State has been to create a modern market economy free of price distortions, bureaucratic management and government protectionism. One of the State’s responses to enabling tribal organizations to provide for increased self‐determination and to lessen Maori State dependency was to seriously address the issue of compensation to Maori of resources that had been expropriated or confiscated during the past 150 years. While there have been difficulties in reaching agreement on appropriate or adequate allocations of Crown‐owned resources or compensation, the transferal of resources to private (but collective) Maori ownership is now providing a substantial economic base to build corporate and other entrepreneurial activities. It is argued that such willingness and commitment to transfer resources from the State back to the original owners was a manifest outcome of government’s adoption of liberal economic policies.

This article investigates the 2005 pre-election print media coverage of the Maori Party and its candidates. It shows that while the reporters and journalists generally represented the Maori Party in a fair and unbiased manner, at times their reporting was undermined by unbalanced or biased editing or subediting.

In 2004 the appointment of a Coordinating Minister Race Relations, signalled a shift in elite Maori policy thinking from a long-standing cautious bipartisan acceptance of self-determination towards a re-emergent assimilationist 'one law' for all discourse. The question simplistically posed by the Leader of the Opposition was should welfare entitlements be granted on the basis of need or race? (Brash 2004). Beneath this question lies an ideological assumption which privileges assimilation over indigeneity as the basis of Maori participation in public affairs. This paper therefore asks: are Maori peoples with rights, or individuals with needs? Is there a deeper politics of indigeneity providing a legitimate foundation for rights which are not necessarily superior to the rights of citizenship, but are important and distinguishable adjuncts? These questions transcend the issue of welfare entitlements to wider questions about the nature and terms of Maori belonging to the liberal polity. The paper highlights the political tension between government attempts to remove indigeneity from the public agenda in response to populist pressure and a pragmatic acceptance that New Zealand 'needs' Maori to increase their contribution to the national economy and that the realisation of this goal may in fact depend on the fuller citizenship imagined by the politics of indigeneity.

This paper explores the implications of prevailing political thought for the extent to which Māori (native to New Zealand) are able to pursue self-determination, which, although theoretically legitimate, is constrained by elite political pragmatism. While the long-fashionable bicultural paradigm offers some opportunity for self-determination, its utility for meeting Māori aspiration was further limited by the change in political climate following the National Party Leader Don Brash's Nationhood speech in 2004 and by the Foreshore and Seabed Act of 2004. These events encouraged and legitimised a renewed public suspicion of Māori aspiration so that the political space available for the pursuit of self-determination was reduced.

This paper demonstrates that the philosophical premises underlying biculturalism and self-determination lead to different conclusions about where power properly resides with respect to Crown/Maori relations in New Zealand. It is argued that biculturalism is not the panacea for the realisation of legitimate Maori aspirations that has been assumed by both Maori and Pakeha policy elites over the past twenty years because it makes assumptions about power relationships which limit greater degrees of Maori autonomy ' one step towards self-determination is permitted, but the next prevented. Biculturalism can not realise greater autonomy because it is concerned primarily with relationships among people in institutional settings and within and among bureaucratic institutions. Therefore it is less likely to meet Maori aspirations than self-determination which is concerned with creating, to the greatest extent possible, independence and autonomy for groups, not necessarily in isolation from wider society, but certainly apart from controls and regulations imposed from outside the would be self-determining community. Self-determination locates power, at least to some extent, within traditional Maori social units, while biculturalism, although assuming a sharing of power, inevitably gives Maori the status of junior partner in a project designed to modify state institutions to make them more responsive to Maori interests. While in itself this is advantageous to Maori, biculturalism is not a substitute for the affirmation of traditional social structures as the central point in a Maori quest for greater independence from an historically intrusive state.

Recently, the Australian government apologised to the “stolen generation” for past abuses. The apology had been long awaited and when delivered was well received by the indigenous people of Australia and the world in general. The question was then raised in the New Zealand parliament as to why Māori had not yet received a similar apology from the New Zealand government. The abuse of Māori by past governments is well documented involving not only land theft and illegal confiscations but numerous human rights abuses including racial discrimination, murder, armed aggression, and illegal incarceration. If reconciliation between Māori and Pākehā is an important part of nation building then an apology would seem to be in order. The concept of trans-generational justice is as valid as trans-generational resource transfer and trans-generational obligations. The argument supporting trans-generational justice is based on the authority of government residing not with individuals but with the office of government itself. Without an apology the marginalization of Māori will be difficult to overcome. This essay examines reasons why Māori should or should not receive an apology from the New Zealand government.