Bicultural Practice: Beyond Mere tokenism ● 105of the state would run by one cultural perspective, one value base, and one
language. This consciously and subconsciously created a hierarchy whereby
one culture (British) determined whose values and language were used in
the development of policy, the implementation of law, and the distribution
of services such as health, welfare, education, and justice. It also ensured the
marginalization of the Treaty of Waitangi, allowing the settler government to
ignore the guarantees inherently and specifically promised to Māori within
the document. The settlers were in charge of the legislative and judicial pro-
cesses and were not prepared to share any form of power.
This situation persisted for over 100 years. It was not until the mid-1970s
that the nation finally started taking seriously its responsibilities under the
Treaty of Waitangi. A crucial development came in 1975, when the Waitangi
Tribunal was set up to investigate current violations of the treaty. (Initially,
the tribunal was not permitted to investigate historical violations such as the
historical misappropriation of land.) The road toward biculturalism emerged
both from this new acknowledgment of the Treaty of Waitangi and as a result
of the 1981 protests that challenged the three-month visit to New Zealand by
a South African rugby team representing an apartheid regime. The protests,
though divisive, were huge, bringing together a broad coalition of groups
and individuals. Māori activists challenged those involved in the protests as
to why they were prepared to object to racism in a foreign country but were
ignoring the endemic racism faced by Māori within New Zealand (Walker
2004). Many Pākehā began to feel uncomfortable with the country’s dealing
with its indigenous people (Graham 2001) and rallied behind the efforts for
greater recognition of the treaty as a way to rethink how the nation was to
progress into the future. A 1985 law change meant that the Waitangi Tri-
bunal could now investigate past actions of the British Crown, and a long-
standing desire to resolve the grievances of the past began to be addressed.
Biculturalism became de facto government policy with the introduction of
the State-Owned Enterprises Act in 1986, with its requirement for all gov-
ernment departments to report on their responsiveness to Māori and to the
Treaty of Waitangi (Fleras and Spoonley 1999). The implementation of the
treaty in government policies and procedures was beginning to be seen as
the “basic tenet” (Levine 2001, 163) of biculturalism.
A leading legal expert on the Waitangi Tribunal, elaborating on the
concept of biculturalism, defined it by its objectives. These include, first,
“to acknowledge and respect those things that are distinctly Maori owned
and operated, like Maori language, custom and lands, Maori schools...
and Maori governance institutions... [and second] to make state oper-
ated facilities more culturally amenable to Maori as with the recogni-
tion of Maori preferences and practices in schools, hospitals and prisons”