The Māori Party and the National Māori Authority are backing calls for the establishment of an iwi bank to finance building on Māori land.
Te Pāti Māori Co-Leaders Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngawera-Packer speaking to media at Parliament. Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
It comes after Māori housing advocates told RNZ red tape and barriers at the bank were preventing whānau building on their own land.
The Māori Party proposed an iwi-led bank in their 2017 election policy, under the leadership of Marama Fox. Almost five years later, co-leader, Rawiri Waititi said the party still backed the idea.
"An iwi-led bank would work because it would allow our people to have a lot more access to capital," he said.
"Māori don't have access to capital, but everybody else does. We've got to start looking at how we can start to build that capital and have access for whānau to be able to build homes. I think that it's something we need to seriously consider."
Under the Te Ture Whenua Act 1993, Māori freehold land is protected from being removed from Māori ownership and can't be sold. That means banks can't use the land as security.
The Kāinga Whenua loan scheme, implemented by Kāinga Ora, Kiwibank and the Māori Land Court, gets around this by requiring applicants to build on removable piles. They can also only be one storey high and no smaller than 50 square metres - again to make them easy to remove.
But National Māori Authority chairperson Matthew Tukaki said the Kāinga Whenua loan scheme hadn't fixed all the finance barriers and he thought an iwi bank would.
He said Māori had faced barriers obtaining finance to build for many years because of the perceived risk around lending to applicants for multiply-owned land.
"Banks rule us out and, to be frank, they're more inclined to lend to South Africans and immigrants who have just landed on our shores versus the indigenous people of the land."
For him the issue is simple; the banks are racist towards Māori.
"It's interesting that they take all of our culture, our reo, and say they're doing all these amazing things, and they can brown themselves up as much as they want, but at the end of the day, money is still not flowing out the door."
As to what it might look like, Tukaki suggested a co-operative bank model.
"There are co-operative banking models for indigenous and first nations right across the world, including over in Australia. We could also have a look at a co-operative bank that is able to not only to lend in terms of personal finance, but also lend to business and industry," Tukaki said.
Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei trust chairperson Marama Royal also supported the idea of an iwi-bank.
She said the way in which the current financial institutions were working with Māori was similar to trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
"I think if iwi came together and put an iwi bank together, it would not be set up like how the current financial institutions are, it would be based on aroha, manaaki, and tiaki and it would be whānau first."
But Māori economic advisor Joshua Hitchcock said, although it was an attractive proposition, it was too risky for Māori.
"I think actually this is a market failure that the government needs to address, and should be addressing, through it's policy and Treaty settlement processes. Rather than [Māori] assuming that risk and taking on that risk when it's not our risk to bear. It's the government's responsibility to ensure that the system works for everyone."
After a $780 million injection in the 2021 Budget, this year's budget saw very little new money for Māori housing.
The Māori Party's Rawiri Waititi said, along with the establishment of an iwi bank, the Māori Party wanted to see more funding for Māori housing.
"We're talking about years and years of displacement, we're talking about years and years of underinvestment into Māori housing. We can't be going backwards so we must continue to push for this government to ensure it's not band-aiding policies.
"They've got to start taking down the red-tape and bureaucracy to allow our whānau to build homes," Waititi said.
Māori are disproportionately impacted by the housing crisis and make up just over half of the almost 27,000 applicants on the Ministry of Social Developments public housing waitlist.