Māori Status in New Zealand Law · Part 06 · 1867
When does “Māori” become an express statutory class?
The Māori Representation Act 1867 shows colonial law using “Māori” as a defined legal category for electoral purposes while simultaneously describing Māori as subjects of the Crown.
A statute does not create a people merely because it defines them. It does, however, create a legal classification for the purposes of that statute.
The Māori Representation Act 1867 is a clear example. Its preamble refers to the Native Aboriginal inhabitants of the colony and to the interests of Her Majesty's subjects of the Native race. It then defines “Maori”, for the Act, as a male aboriginal native inhabitant aged 21 or over and includes half-castes.
The Act created four Māori electoral districts and four members of the House of Representatives to represent inhabitants of the colony of the Māori race.
The preamble also records why special representation was considered necessary: the nature of Māori land tenure had prevented most Māori men from qualifying under the ordinary property-based electoral rules.
People and political communities
Whakapapa, iwi, hapū and rangatira existed independently of the statutory definition.
Statutory class
For the purposes of the 1867 Act, Parliament defined which persons counted as “Maori” and attached a specific electoral regime to that category.
That gives the series a more defensible formulation than saying “the colony invented Māori”. Colonial legislation increasingly standardised and operationalised Māori as a legal population category across specific statutory schemes.
The next question is how the explicitly Māori-specific “natural-born subject” rule survived, disappeared and was replaced by general nationality and New Zealand citizenship law.
Primary statuteMāori Representation Act 1867.