February 10, 2014
Leader defends corporate face to iwi
A member of the Iwi Leaders Forum is defending it from charges that it is turning into a brown business round table.
The criticism came from unionist Matt McCarten, who in a weekend newspaper column said the gathering of iwi leaders in Waitangi last week reflected a corporatist culture no different from their pakeha capitalist counterparts.
Haami Piripi from Te Rarawa says iwi leaders need to operate within the political and economic situations they find themselves in.
"The mainstream economic infrastructure that Matt McCarten talks about is obviously not doing it for us so we’re better off charging off, establishing a Maori economy in our own right and doing our own thing for our own constituency. In order to do that you need to have all the tools and equipment you need to survive in a corporate world, but that doesn’t make us any less Maori. In fact it probably makes us more Maori, more able to contribute to our individual constituency needs rather than less," he says.
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