Tahu Potiki

Speaker Notes

Creating an enterprise culture within Maori society is not going to be the issue. The issue will be creating a good and successful enterprise culture. In 1838 Polack observed that:

Few nations delight more in trading and bargaining than this people; a native fair or festival best illustrates this fact. To such an excess are the feelings of the people carried in bartering with each other, that during war, though the belligerent parties seek for the annihilation of each other, yet at intervals a system of trade, as we have already stated, is carried on, that can scarcely be credited by strangers to their customs...Any person having had dealings with them, are aware of their passion for commercial pursuits. (Polack 1838)

Maori were innovative and entrepreneurial during the early contact period. Firth in his Economics of the Maori noted:
and so we find that he [the Maori] began to engage in trade with avidity not many years after the coming of the white man. After his first unpleasant experiences with adulterated goods, he became a careful judge of materials, a keen bargainer with an eye to his profit, and would spend long hours in chaffering over the price to be received in return for his pigs and potatoes...the native people of New Zealand would soon convince anyone that the various concepts embodied in the notion of trade did not have to be laboriously implanted by the white man in the native, but, once given the stimulus of novel economic and social conditions, sprang up and flowered from a soil which had long contained their seed. (Firth 1959:431 - 432)
Early Maori economic activity was industrious with agricultural and fishing exploits leading to the successful export of crop and fish produce to particularly Australia. This didn't last too long. Maori success was bolstered by a superiority of numbers and unfettered access to the major resources. Time was to show that once numbers changed, land was lost and the tribal mana was defeated, Maori were disadvantaged and their early economic initiatives have never since been so successfully repeated.

But now some of this old order is being restored. Modern recognition of the Treaty right and the subsequent Settlement has offered Ngai Tahu opportunity and advantage in a manner similar to those of the early years.

• In Property - we have a Treaty "first right of refusal" to purchase properties
  
• In Seafood - another commercial fisheries Treaty right and we are hopeful that the Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Commission will allocate the resources in a timely and principled manner to iwi. It is, at present likely that the Commission will move to retain a healthy share of these iwi property rights in a kind of forced Maori nationalisation of the asset. This will destroy South Island opportunities and the potential for the multiples of wealth that local industry provides.
• Tourism - not so much a Treaty right but a unique opportunity to apply a cultural and intellectual property that no-one else may legitimately apply.

We have, as much as possible, taken the knowledge principle and applied it to those assets that opportunity has afforded us. Be that with land in Queenstown becoming the new Medical Centre or Ngai Tahu mussels becoming Mussel Chowder up for a new product innovation award at the Boston Seafood Show this month.

Ngai Tahu are presently developing a research strategy that will span our major areas of investment, applying focus to the areas that we already have an advantage and ensuring that the macro iwi parent body is prepared for the future.

The enterprise spirit, as it manifests itself within the individual, is also alive and well within Ngai Tahu.

Be it someone such as Ivan Donaldson, neurologist and wine writer who founded the Pegasus Bay Winery or Craig Soper, co-founder of Compudigm, who has already spoken here at the conference. Both of whom share a Ngai Tahu ancestry but who have their own individual spirit of success and achievement.

Then there are those of Ngai Tahu with similar spirit who may not be included in our list of purely business entrepreneurs. Sir Tipene O’Regan, a unique leader of people who drove the Ngai Tahu Claim to settlement; or Tony Brown, the Highlander's number 10 hard man who can drive Otago across the line time and time again. But once again Ngai Tahu can do little to claim a role in their individual success.

Extraordinary individuals will continue to emerge from within the ranks of Ngai Tahu but the real challenge that we are posed with is creating an enterprise culture within in the community collective.

The success of Kaikoura Whale Watch during the early 1990s incited a healthy dose of Whale Watch fever across Ngai Tahu. Every runanga in the South Island all of a sudden started hunting furiously for things to "watch". We had potential seal watching, dolphin watching, albatross watching, even muttonbird watching, we were intending to watch everything. And in fact a couple of these watching enterprises did get off the ground, but not for very long.

Ngai Tahu were not suffering from the lack of an entrepreneurial spirit, in fact quite the opposite. We were suffering from a healthy dose of it. But enterprise and risk do not, alone, make a great recipe for success. They must be balanced with planning, support and research.

The same opportunities that have been afforded Ngai Tahu the tribe must also find a way to benefit our constituent parts. Over the next 12 months Ngai Tahu will be launching a Commercial Development Unit. It is designed to introduce local runanga, or Maori councils, and their communities into business. We want to provide the balance between enthusiasm, enterprise, and risk.

In the first instance we need to avoid the blanket 'greenfields' approach to development as enterprise does not simply mean new and unexplored. Venture capital will be made available and access will be given to selected tribal resources. A managed process of up to five years in duration will see the local community prepared and strengthened to take on total responsibility of each asset. Then we may see the long promised multiples of wealth within each community.

We intend to balance this entrepreneurial spirit with the introduction of a new culture of consideration and risk management.