Opposition to ‘Hand-outs’

Te Ao Hou, September 1965, Page 6

Opposition to ‘Hand-outs’ ‘Hand-outs’ are anathema to Dr Paewai. Advancement through work and thrift is what he advocates. Paradoxically, because he once sought nomination as a Labour Parliamentary candidate, he is the personification of rugged individualism and is on record with some stinging criticisms of the welfare state. It was his opposition to what he conceived to be a ‘hand-out’ which led him to become an outspoken critic of the Maori Education Foundation. He saw the foundation as something which cut across his concept of reward and success based on effort and determination. ‘The Maori must be taught as the Pakeha has already learnt, that he has to work for what he gets,’ he told me when I asked him why he was rocking the Education Foundation boat. It is a measure of the man's essential fairness and honesty that later, after a closer look at the foundation's aims and methods, he modified some of his views and said so very handsomely. Looking at the controversy after three years, it seems clear to me that his bluntness did much good, if no more than to make the architects of the foundation examine their structure with critical eyes. ‘What I am trying to do is to provoke people who may have misgivings to speak up so that those who are going to administer the foundation will jolly well look carefully at it,’ he said. And that is exactly what happened. More recently Dr Paewai has taken a more active part in purely Maori organizations, for instance, he was chairman of the Kaikohe Maori Welfare Committee and secretary of the Taitokerau District Maori Council. So in the practical field of help to the Maori

people Dr Paewai could if he chose—and he would probably not choose, being too busy with present needs to worry about past achievements—point to families out of debt, to homes built, to children educated, to bodies healed, to sports administered, to a community served with energy and selflessness in a hundred ways.