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The Spinoff
5 days ago
- Business
- The Spinoff
We keep measuring the Māori economy – but what are we actually counting?
New report after new report declares the growth and potential of the Māori economy. But what even is it, and why do we keep measuring it? Last week, yet another report was released outlining the prowess and potential of the Māori economy. 'The 'Māori economy' is thriving and diversifying,' the report from WEAll Aotearoa begins, following with many impressive figures and statistics: 'contribution of $32 billion… asset base of $126bn'. So what are these numbers, how are they measured, and what purpose does dissecting and analysing the Māori economy as a standalone sector of our capitalist system serve? What even is the Māori economy? Honestly, I couldn't tell you. In its most recent report on the Māori economy released earlier this year, Te Ōhanga Māori 2023 – The Māori Economy Report 2023, the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment states: 'Te Ōhanga Māori is not always a separate, distinct, and clearly identifiable segment of the Aotearoa New Zealand economy.' From what I gather, what we now call the 'Māori economy' was born not from Māori, but from a colonial lens – one that separated Māori economic activity from the broader economy of Aotearoa. Before colonisation, however, the Māori economy was the entire economy of Aotearoa. We cultivated and traded internationally, maintained thriving markets with our Pacific neighbours, and by the 1800s, were actively bartering with European and American markets. There's a quote from Mānuka Henare that often gets missed in these debates. He reminded us that the artistic flourishing of the 16th-18th centuries – the carving, weaving and tattooing – didn't come from scarcity. It came from a dynamic, thriving Māori economy. A creative economy rooted in relationships, surplus, and time to think, carve and dream. And then came colonisation… Bingo. Mass disruption and dispossession completely changed the face of the Māori economy. Christ came alongside capitalism – monocultural capitalism, to be exact. For the most part, Māori were excluded from participating in the settler economy, except as low-paid labour. The wealth of the British Crown in New Zealand was essentially built on the back of stolen resources and slave labour. This depleted the Māori economy of its capitalistic wealth. The cultural wealth of Māori was also severely depleted through tools of colonisation. Laws encouraging assimilation and prohibiting Māori from speaking our language and carrying out cultural practices amounted to cultural genocide. A majority of the Māori population was forced to shift to urban areas during the 1950s to the 1970s, taking wage labour jobs and being disconnected from whenua or collective models. During this time, Māori economic power was deliberately undermined. The Crown's policy was to assimilate Māori socially, politically and economically – not to support indigenous enterprise. Clearly things have changed. In the 1970s, we witnessed what's known as the 'Māori renaissance'. A key part of this was the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal and the treaty claims process. The first claim to be settled was the Māori Fisheries claim, also known as the Sealord Deal. This provided an economic basis for iwi authorities to begin rebuilding their economic wealth, albeit under a Crown-controlled capitalist model. Other large-scale settlements such as Ngāi Tahu and Waikato-Tainui provided iwi with capital and assets, although this was a comparatively minuscule amount compared to the total value of loss. However, this led to many iwi creating commercial entities like Ngāi Tahu Holdings and Tainui Group Holdings, which reinvested in property, farming, tourism, infrastructure and finance. These entities are often what gets counted in Māori economy stats today, via Māori authorities. So the Māori economy is just measuring how well settled entities are doing? Seems a bit narrow. Yes, for the most part. In 2002, the IRD introduced a tax rate specific to Māori authorities, aiming to modernise the tax rules for organisations managing Maori assets held in communal ownership. In 2012, Stats NZ began defining and measuring 'Māori authorities' – the entities that form the core of the so-called 'Māori economy'. This legally recognises post-settlement governance entities – not pakihi Māori. This is one reason the data often skews toward iwi corporations and not the thousands of small Māori-owned businesses or social enterprises. What was the point of measuring this data in the first place, especially with such a narrow scope? A friend half-jokingly said to me it's to illustrate how Māori are leeching from the Crown – as crude as it might sound, there is some truth in this statement. The state wanted to understand how the capital being returned to Māori via the settlement process was being used, how it might contribute to national GDP and how Māori entities could be integrated into broader economic policy and investment. Arguably, the Crown began tracking these measures to make Māori legible to the state – easier to understand, manage, and control – first through tax and compliance, then through economic policy, and now through investment lenses. It began as a state-driven interest in managing, taxing and tracking Māori collectives post-settlement. However, it has since evolved into a strategic economic conversation, which Māori are increasingly reframing to reflect kaupapa Māori values, collective aspirations and indigenous economic thinking. And what is it actually telling us? That we're outside the general economy? There is an argument that by measuring the Māori economy, we're saying we need to be tracked separately because we're not good enough to stand on equal footing. Personally, I don't buy the warm fuzzy intent. As mentioned above, I suspect it started as a way to quantify what Māori were 'costing' the nation – to calculate the burden, not the benefit. Even now, those numbers get weaponised: 'Look how wealthy Māori are. Why do they still need support?' It's a setup and it flattens the story. Success in a few iwi boardrooms does not always trickle down to every whānau struggling with rent in Māngere or Moerewa. Worse still, when handled carelessly, these metrics can reinforce the ceiling. They frame success as: 'That's a great Māori business,' instead of just, 'that's a great business.' As stated in the WEAll Aotearoa report released this week, 'too often the success of Māori businesses is conflated with the Māori economy, when it is more appropriately conceptualised as Māori businesses operating within a global capitalist economy.' But there are economic benefits to measuring this data, right? Progressive procurement policies, legislative support for indigenous businesses, etc. Yes – there are some real benefits, but they depend on how we measure. To truly deliver, data must be disaggregated – by region, by business type, and by iwi lineage – so we understand the diversity within Māori enterprise. Māori must be empowered to define what counts as success – both profit and wellbeing, GDP and cultural strength. To drive real change, we need public/private partnerships to fund business support, procurement pathways, and legislation shaped by Māori data. Measuring the Māori economy enables DEI strategies, justifies indigenous business support, fosters inclusive economic development, strengthens infrastructure, and reveals systemic gaps. But it only works when Māori are designing and owning the data narrative. The data has helped some of us unlock capital, attract co-investment, and push for equity in government policy. Measurement, if wielded wisely, can be a tool for mana motuhake.
RNZ News
16-07-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
'Thriving' Māori economies revealed in new report
Māwhera Pā is divided into five 'whare' Photo: Supplied / Atawhai Creative The Māori economy is "thriving", recent statistics have revealed, but a new report shows Māori businesses do not always measure their success monetarily. According to the prior Te Ōhanga Māori 2023 report, Māori entities grew from contributing $17 billion to New Zealand's GDP in 2018 to $32 billion in 2023, turning a 6.5 percent contribution to GDP into 8.9 percent. The Māori economy asset base has grown from $69 billion in 2018 to $126 billion in 2023 - an increase of 83 percent. Released on Wednesday, the Amplifying Māori approaches: The transformative potential of Māori economies report from lead author Matthew Scobie (Kāi Tahu) and co-author Tayla Forward (Ngāpuhi), suggests Māori economies revolved around "taonga with labour organised through mahi and reciprocal exchanges based on utu", or repayment. Forward, a researcher in economics and political economy based in Tāmaki Makaurau, said the Māori economy was "big, thriving and active". "But what that captures is sort of different. Are we thinking about Māori businesses that are operating in the usual dominant economic system, or are we talking about something that takes place according to Māori logic? "Considering there's parts of the economy that are taking place on a different logic in the dominant system, that's the Māori economy that we're most interested in unleashing, that's the part that is an expression of mana motuhake Māori." Tayla Forward said the case studies form an important part of the new report and they are all defying the dominant system to pursue pakihi Māori (Māori businesses) Photo: supplied There was not much that separated the Māori economy from the contemporary setting; it was just an umbrella-term used for authorities, businesses, and employers who self-identified as Māori. But it was more than that. While an economy revolved around the production and consumption of goods and services and the supply of money, Māori businesses often built off tikanga, or Māori lore, to help their communities - such as iwi and hapū, and beyond. "We talk a lot in this report about the ways that those pursuing pakihi Māori (Māori business) have to take on these hybrid strategies to strategically navigate the dominant system," Forward said. "Instead of just aiming to increase our share in the dominant system, we take up a demand to change the shape of the dominant system, and those things that currently sit beneath the surface of the dominant system can be unleashed." There were four case studies prominent in the report - each an example of "Māori logic" combined with old and new ways of business, providing perspectives on housing, food sovereignty, trading and iwi authority, respectively. "They strike up against the system, they strike up against pūtea, and the need to sort of go between worlds all the time." A case study by Danielle Webb focused on Kelly Francis' Whenua Warrior charitable trust. In 2017, Francis left her corporate job to grow an edible garden accessible to every New Zealander and feed the community. The not-for-profit organisation used hua parakore (kaupapa Māori framework) and matauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) for mahinga kai, community engagement, environmental conservation and preservation. Within two days of Francis' first project under Whenua Warrior, 132 gardens cropped up across South Auckland. Building a garden at the back of a home in Manurewa, South Auckland in NOV 2022 - as a part of the #projectSouthSide600 Photo: Facebook/Whenua Warrior "The world is our oyster anyway, so we can do what we should be able to do," Forward said. The report stated Francis viewed waged labour as something that can potentially rob people of time that could be spent nurturing te taiao (the natural world), fundamental to food sovereignty. "We should be able to have particularly Māori responses to decisions about what we're creating together and how we resource each other and the things that we create together, and if that keeps having to be mediated by pūtea, that's not in our control," Forward said. "We have to make all these strategic allowances to navigate towards whatever ends we're trying to pursue with our economic activity. If we want to have this very whenua-oriented and whakapapa-oriented economic ends being served by our economic practices, then we need to engage with the system that generates the constraints." The report broke the Māori economy into subsections - economies of mana, tribal economies, and diverse and community economies. "These have created necessary interventions to assert Māori perspectives as valid to national and international audiences," the report said. In simple terms, economic decisions were influenced by "mana-enhancing" interactions between people and the environment. Furthermore, there were two sides to this conversation. How did Māori organise their economies, and what framings of the economy did not align with Māori values? It stemmed from the perspective of measuring wealth by how much passes through one person's hands, rather than how much accumulated, and it allocated resources and undertook activities to generate adequate profits, Forward said. "It doesn't have to be profit-maximising, but you know, you need profits in order to survive otherwise you'll fall apart." History was deeply rooted in this topic and specific to iwi and hapū organisations. "Tribal economies move from how things were organised to the institutions that enable or constrain these ways of organising today," the report said. "This includes not just direct breaches of Te Tiriti, or the failure to honour purchase deeds, but the systematic exclusion of Māori from decision-making around how the economy is designed." An example of a tribal economy was Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, which was established under the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998 and the Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu Act 1996. "Collective settlement assets are managed by Ngāi Tahu Holdings, separately from the bodies that spend and distribute the income earned from those assets, The Office," the lead author wrote. A Ngāi Tahu forestry block. Photo: Ngai Tahu The Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement of $170 million had grown into net assets valued at NZ$1.66 billion. Assets included businesses like Queenstown's Shotover Jet and Fiordland's Hollyford Wilderness Experience. "Typically, any surplus generated by activities from settlement resources is appropriated by the Ngāi Tahu Charitable Trust and distributed to the wider iwi. But these resources only exist because of the intergenerational struggle for the Ngāi Tahu claim and are intended for future generations." In 2024, each of the 18 papatipu rūnanga (authoritative tribal council of a specific tribal area) in Te Wai Pounamu received $574,334 with a total direct distribution since settlement of $17.2 million. Today, the wealthiest iwi contributed to improving the wellbeing of 80,000 tribal members. Diverse and community economies used economic activities, both paid and unpaid, beyond formal market transactions. They included gifting, sharing, volunteering, and caring as legitimate economic actions. Although some challenges had been identified - such as resourcing rangatiratanga, financialisation, no time for kaitiakitanga (guardianship), and balancing obligations. The report also stated it also required pushing beyond limited Crown recognition, and exploring diverse forms of labour, enterprise, transactions, property and finance to achieve diverse and community economies. Forward explained it in terms of the "Matike Mai sphere" - the sphere of influence. "Of course [Māori] are a firm, at large, and empower the rangatiratanga sphere, but I think we see in our in our case studies what the kāwanatanga is doing does strike us, though we resist and though we're in defiance of their idea that they have a sole claim to authority sometimes. "We have to navigate strategically and that's what we take up - a new strategic navigation in which the kāwanatanga diverts us and say no more. That there are things that we can do in the relational sphere between those two spheres to demand a different shape rather than just a greater share." 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