The beginning: summer, a pint of beer, and the gift of a book
Just before the Christmas break, I was given a book, and a few days ago - in the holiday sun, and over a very decent Croucher beer - I pulled it out. It’s a BWB Text, Imagining decolonisation.
I’m not going to review it. A Pākehā woman paraphrasing Māori authors’ views on decolonisation would miss the mark spectacularly. But as I turned the pages, in the sun with my beer, later on tucked in bed, in the car on the way home, curled on my couch, I found myself shifting between reading and musing. That, I think, was the point.
I was born about the same time as the kohanga reo movement, and came of age as the first Treaty settlements began. I watched these landmark things, but did not live them. I could see the rightness and the justness of them, but maybe from one perspective only. Sometimes I get stuff with my head more than my heart or my spirit. That deeper understand is a bigger project: you’ll see I’m trying to figure out the tools I need for it.
Imagining decolonisation helped me knit together in my mind a bunch of ideas about the area I work in - social policy. Most of these ideas are not my own, and most have come from my PhD or my worklife, although I can’t claim to be an expert in them. But I got to thinking how they might be combined with the challenge of the little book in my hands. Perhaps they’ll be interesting to you too.
Imagining decolonisation says, ‘Very basically, decolonisation involves rethinking and then action’. I liked the words, straightforward and down to earth. I thought I’d have a crack.
I’ll explain what I mean by social policy, and why you should care
There are different ways you can cut it, but I’ve been thinking about social policy in two broad types.
Some social policy is about developing people, caring for them or building them up - especially health and education. That’s the theory, anyway. The welfare state, including universal(ish) public health and education, was one of Aotearoa’s most remarkable achievements, forged out of the desperation and injustice of the Great Depression. We were ahead of most of the world. You might have seen the 1937 photo of Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage, genteel but kind of badass, carrying the new tenants’ furniture into the first ever state house. Maybe, like me, you’ve admired his courage, personal and political.
But there’s no denying it. For all their laudable goals, these kinds of policies have been better for some people than others, underserving Māori for generations, and at worst, perpetuating racism. Think kids having their language beaten out of them, life expectancies for some drastically lower than others. The gap between the ideal and the real can be pretty damn sobering.
That was the first kind of social policy. I see the second kind as about ‘fixing’ people - people who are seen as unfortunate, as having fallen through the cracks, or having failed. Benefit conditions that push people into work, no matter the pay or conditions or consequences; procedures to take children away from families deemed unsafe; programmes to stop ‘at risk’ kids getting into trouble. It’s debated whether these policies do much fixing, or only further harming. You could argue - and some people do - that this type of social policy is fundamentally flawed. Stop worrying about ‘fixing’ people, they say, and focus on what’s hurting them in the first place.
Over my career, I’ve worked on both these broad types of social policy (I now do similar work, but outside the public sector, as a consultant). This has meant working for or with the major Ministries that look after health, education, benefits and social programmes. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’ve agreed with every policy I’ve worked on - far from it. But a public servant’s job is to be impartial. That’s important for democracy. You put your own views aside and serve whoever’s been elected.
Being a policy person mostly means working out how to put the Government’s ideas into action, and giving advice that will help Ministers make decisions. For example, the Government pledged to give schoolkids free lunches. Policy people figured out some options for how this could be done: which kids, what schools, who could make the kai, how much the Government might spend on it. Ministers looked at the options and made the choices that best fit their vision. Policy people don’t make the decisions, but because they give advice, they can be influential.
With that in mind, let’s continue.
A machine - but it’s hard to rage against
Social policy, like any profession, has its words, ideas, and ways of doing things.
Policy people talk about ‘levers’. Levers are things the government can do to influence people or systems: making a regulation, offering a service, running a campaign to change people’s behaviour, specifying what an organisation must deliver in return for a funding grant. Levers rely on the concept of incentives and disincentives - carrots and sticks - which is largely drawn from economics. As the thinking goes, people will rationally do things that are in their interest, and avoid things that aren’t. That means a policy-maker needs to work out how to adjust the ‘rules of the game’, so people and systems are encouraged to do the things the government is seeking.
Policy levers are a mechanical metaphor. Figure out the right levers to pull, and rationally, the person or system you’re trying to influence should pop out the right result. For example, keep raising the price of cigarettes, like you’re turning a dial, and more and more people will find them unaffordable, being forced to give up.
There’s some fascinating writing on how this kind of thinking came about, especially during the 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s. Machines emerged during the industrial revolution, and cheaper commodities flowed, making life a lot easier - but upping demands for natural resources, and changing people’s expectations and desires. Economics emerged too, with its idea that people think in a certain mode, making decisions for their own benefit in calculated, almost machine-like ways. At the same time, colonial rule was still very much in vogue, even if often-coercive treaties were becoming more fashionable than outright conquest or slavery. The means might have changed, but the ends didn’t: other countries’ resources were there for European economies’ taking. As colonisers grabbed them, imparting their ‘superior’ ideas and technologies to more ‘primitive’ people formed part of their justification.
The idea of rationality is important here. Rationality was thought of as a defining trait of ‘advanced’ people and societies. There was a hierarchy. European people were meant to be better at rationality than other people, and men better than women. You can see where this is going. ‘Rational’ activities like engineering machines and theorising economics were highly prized, but other ways of thinking and knowing, and other kinds of values, were deemed lesser. The opposite of rationality was emotion - for example, feeling a sense of connection or reverence for nature, instead of seeing it just as a resource. And because rationality was meant to reside in people, it was individualistic. From this perspective, collective values, decision-making, or guardianship of the land didn’t really compute.
Key thinkers - or European ones, anyway - started imagining their societies as having machine-like qualities. The concept of ‘the state’ developed, the idea of a population as a thing that could be administered and tinkered with by skilled people (bureaucrats) to make it run better. For example, policing kept society orderly, sanitation kept it healthy, education kept it productive. Statistics were gathered, meaning bureaucrats could ‘get the measure’ of society and economy - a new kind of knowledge that helped with the tinkering. There was now vast potential both to help people and control them.
Some people reckon these ideas about rationality fail on their owns terms. How rational is it to trash the planet for short-term and unequal economic growth? And it’s critical to note that rationality isn’t just something European cultures do or care about - a false view that’s been used to block other people from certain professions. But, awkwardly side-stepping those debates for a moment, the idea of rationality isn’t entirely bad, and today’s policy-makers don’t apply it as crudely as they have at certain times. Policy-making remains a mostly Pākeha profession, but that doesn’t mean it’s fatally close-minded, with everyone thinking like robots. And for some policy problems - maybe modelling carbon emissions or figuring out the tax take - traditionally ‘rational’ approaches, thinking about incentives and disincentives, will probably work just fine.
But rationality needs to know its limitations, including when it should share the stage with other kinds of knowledge. Let’s take a different policy area. Prisons are based on the idea that being locked up is unpleasant. Rational people calculate what’s in their interests, avoiding unpleasant things. Therefore, the threat of prison should deter people from committing crime. This is an idea that’s literally had centuries to prove itself, yet we’re still waiting. And that’s because humans are complex, not predictable like machines. This is especially true of people in prisons, who are way more likely to have been abused, had a bad education experience, been part of the child care and protection system, or had a head injury or mental health issue. They are way more likely to have experienced trauma, including the trauma of colonisation - more on this later.
Even though we were pioneers in creating a welfare state, Aotearoa got a bunch of our policy ideas, the good and the bad, from a different time and the other side of the world. Ideas, like people, have a lineage - and they’re better off for knowing it.
Machines are emotionless, but the people who work in them aren’t
OK, we’ve talked about how rationality has been prized in European ways of thinking - and how this has translated into social policy. Remember how I said there’s a gap between the ideal and the real? Let’s take a detour into a whole other area of thought.
Social policy is made up of a bunch of people with a bunch of functions. I was a policy-maker, one of the people who came up with ways to carry out the government’s ideas. But I didn’t do the actual carrying out. That job belongs to people at the coalface, including nurses, teachers and social workers. A lot of these jobs are dominated by women. Pākehā women, mostly. This takes us to a tricky place.
In colonial societies, women have never had the same economic opportunities as (white) men. The ‘coalface’ professions above gave white women a foot in the door - better than being forced to depend on marriage for financial support, but not as good as men got. They weren’t at the top of the pile, but as they carried out government policy, you could say they were higher up than some of the people they worked with. Feminism was making gains for white women, but fewer gains - and maybe steps backwards - for others. Of course, you can’t generalise across all women workers, their intentions, their professionalism. But it’s fair to say that when government social policies have been repressive of Māori, white women have had a significant role in carrying them out. Within a particular economic and colonial system, white women have experienced this weird mix of power and lack of power at the same time.
I want to make a couple of points here, drawing on more contemporary ideas. The first is the concept of the ‘white saviour’. You’ll see it in any number of movies: white people depicted as ‘fixing’ problems for people of colour. It might make for a feel-good cinema experience, but has yucky effects: downplaying the role of white people in perpetuating racism, and the role of people of colour in fighting it. You’ll find writing about the way some ‘coalface’ workers, especially social workers, have sometimes fallen into a white saviour mentality - with all the power relations it entails. This is not a thing that professions are unaware of: they work hard to create ethical codes that discourage this mindset.
The second point relates to ‘white women’s tears’. This is the argument that when the kōrero about racism or colonialism gets uncomfortable, and Pākehā women feel we’re threatened or our good intentions aren’t recognised, we become emotional - and that can shut down an important conversation. It’s a great observation, although I don’t think our emotion should be dismissed as only a negative force. Emotion can be misused, absolutely; but it can also help us be more thoughtful and grow, sending us in positive directions. Regardless, it’s maybe an odd point to be making, when I’ve just talked about the way social policy has prized rationality, devaluing feelings. Those things shouldn’t co-exist, but I feel like they do. To simplify, at the (male) policy-makers’ level, rationality has been used to disregard the concerns of Māori - and at the (female) coalface level, where policies are carried out, it’s possible emotions have been used for deflection, not reflection.
We’ve got a paradox here, but I think it’s part of what I’ll say next.
Too many machines, not enough tools
We’ve now reached the ideas I know the least about. So far, my brain has been doing most of the work: now I need to hitch my heart and my spirit to the wagon. I’m learning. You’ll forgive me if I make missteps.
You’ll often hear policy people, or people who work at the coalface, say, ‘What works for Māori works for everyone’. Sometimes, they’re referring to specific kaupapa Māori programmes that are shown to be better than ‘mainstream’ options - an important area, beyond my knowledge. More generally, I think they’re naming an uneasy wider sense that a bunch of social policy in Aotearoa isn’t getting it quite right. There’s something about its main ideas, its core values, that doesn’t entirely fit our aspirations or meet our challenges. In my view, the history of social policy in Aotearoa, for all that it is sometimes extraordinary, is also a story of trauma - the failure to serve people, the attempts to ‘fix’ them, I’ve alluded to above. It is also the attempt, successful or not, to heal that trauma. There’s some very insightful writing on this, mostly by Māori and other indigenous scholars, and I won’t try to add to it.
The thing I want to talk about - and it feels a little vulnerable, like going out on a limb - is my own cultural experience of trauma, what its taught me, and above all, what it hasn’t. It’s not the experience of every Pākehā, but it’s mine.
I know only a little about the Scottish side of my family, and almost nothing about the Irish side. My mum’s been doing some research. She searches the web, emails people in other countries, digs up names and snippets of stories. She uncovered that some of my ancestors were forced to leave Ireland in haste, because they had the ‘wrong’ politics (I’ll admit I’m a little proud of this). That’s about all I know.
I wonder what it’s like, leaving your home like that. Did they scrape together money, feel trepidation as they boarded the boat with whatever they could carry; did they know much about whatever place they were going? Did they get to say goodbye to elderly parents, whispering assurances they’d meet again someday, knowing that they never would? Did they arrive on the shore of someone else’s land, their odd-sounding names misspelt by the bureaucrat at the head of the immigrants’ queue; did they struggle to find work because of how they talked or looked, illiterate, dirty and poor? Did they lose a child, more than one, to the squalor and sickness of a tenement someplace? And did pain explode into anger, into a fist or a belt, a pile of empty bottles, a father who didn’t come home one day, a mother who unravelled as hungry children cried?
Like I said, I don’t know. I have literally no idea. I can’t conjure an image of them; don’t know enough about where they, where I, come from to even try. But I know that their trauma - whatever it may have been, and every family has it - didn’t disappear because no one wrote it down. It would have been passed on, maybe is still, even as land and language could not be.
Trauma is collective, even when individuals bear it. Healing is collective too. It takes connection, to people past and present, to the earth, to our stories and beliefs; the precious things that help us make sense of ourselves, our worlds, our hurt and our hope. These are things I simply don’t have. My ancestors made good over time: crossed the world as part of colonialism’s grand project, found jobs and homes, built lives. Whatever they might have gained, no matter how, I am their benefactor. But the healing tools that I might have sought from them are lost.
That means today, when I open my toolkit to do my policy work, I will find some pretty useful tools. I’ll find some that aren’t up to the job: they need to get chucked. I’ll also see some empty spaces where important tools I don’t yet have should be. I need to look to others, their knowledge and wisdom, for those tools; do an apprenticeship in how to use them. I will wield them ineptly at first, feel the self-consciousness of the beginner. But no matter how good my intentions are, I will not be much use in the healing of others if I can’t figure out my own self.
The next beginning
Maybe I shouldn’t, but there are some conversations I’ll shy away from. Debates about privilege can feel like a dead end. Privileged people berating other privileged people for expressing their privilege in the wrong way. It’s a way of thinking, of speaking, that doesn’t nurture in me the things I want to grow. Perhaps these folks make fair points, but they leave me feeling empty-handed.
Imagining decolonisation spoke to me differently. It didn’t promise I wouldn’t get uncomfortable, reminding me that’s something I shouldn’t ask for or expect. But it assured me, like an awkward apprentice, that I can help build good things if I’m willing to learn; it offered me the tools to try. It was an open door, a wholehearted invitation to walk through.
Take this lovely book out in the sun, with a beer if you like, or a cup of tea. Don’t move through it too fast: good ideas need turning over slowly, because good things are built with care. Read with your brain and with your heart and your spirit.
Fantastic writing and so useful too. I’m a 60 year old tauiwi woman who spends a lot of time studying and thinking about my identity as a non-Māori ally. There is, on the face of it, a simplicity to that identity and yet it is incredibly complex and nuanced.
I work in a DHB and am anticipating the birth of the Māori Health Authority with a mix of optimism and cynicism founded in my understanding of the history you’ve so eloquently sketched in your writing. Institutional and individual racism is alive and kicking in healthcare and my DHB has tokenism down to a fine art. I feel invigorated after this read, thank you. I wish I could surround myself with people like you.
Ngā mihi
Beautiful and heartfelt, as always. I have been meaning to re-read this and you've just provided the catalyst. Thank you!!