Kei nga waewae kaikapua, kei nga waewae kaipakiaka o te motu. Rarau mai ra ki Te Hui. Ko Mihingarangi tenei e mihi atu nei ki a koutou katoa. Welcome to The Hui, Maori current affairs for all New Zealanders. E taro ake nei. The government's on a mission to rejuvenate the teaching to te reo Maori. We hope to have a million people using te reo by 2040. But is it more dream than reality when there's not enough teachers... I think they would be having pipe dreams, quite frankly, if they're going to use that number. ...and when the pay's so low? My family lived on chicken frames and mince for a year. Has the government bitten off more than it can chew? And they were sent into a war zone without weapons and helped broker a lasting peace. At the time, we didn't understand the enormity of the situation there. Yeah, it was a pretty scary time. Now a new doco looks at their remarkable deployment. Two former Navy officers share their memories of their time in Bougainville. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2019 Kara huihui mai. It's said that teachers change the world one child at a time. But many teachers here say they're being short-changed for their efforts. Rates of pay is a key factor in New Zealand's current teacher shortage, with many schools struggling to recruit and retrain staff. And te reo Maori teachers are even harder to come by. So what does this mean for the government's policy to ensure te reo Maori is available in all secondary schools by 2025? Anei te purongo a John Boynton. Tena koi, Nanaia. (SPEAKS MAORI) Kia ora, Sonny. (SPEAKS MAORI) The government plan to boost te reo Maori in the classroom was launched with a pukana. Ka pai. We hope to have a million speakers of te reo. Not everyone's going to be totally fluent, but a million people using to Reo by 2040. But is it more dream than reality when teachers of te reo are in decline? There certainly has been a drop off in attendance of Maori students who want to be kura kaupapa Maori teachers. 18-year-old Manukura Karauti is on her own language journey. She's training to become a teacher in te reo Maori. I really love my reo, and I really want to learn every aspect of it. And each day she travels from Massey to central Auckland. I want to learn my dialect of my iwi so I can go back and give back to them. If I could speak it everywhere and anywhere to anyone and they would understand me, I would. It means so much to me. Manukura is in her first year at Wananga Takiura, a tertiary institute which specialises in training te reo Maori teachers. She's been in the class for more than a month. Before coming here, I wasn't confident in speaking the reo openly to my friends or family. But I'm more confident in speaking with my peers in te reo, having full-on conversations about our day our weekend. Tawhiri Williams is the kaitiaki huhua of Te Wananga Takiura. Everything here is in Maori, lectures in Maori, teaches in Maori, instruction in Maori, encourages in Maori. Everything in Maori. Tawhiri Williams has championed te reo Maori for 50 years. At a time when government's committed to boosting te reo in the classroom, he's worried how few students are coming through the doors. In the year-one class, we've got about 18 students. Whereas as I six years ago, we'd would probably have 30-odd students there. So there certainly has been a drop off. And why do you think there's been such a drop off in numbers? The students, perhaps, are now being more diversified in terms of the careers that they want to follow. Many of those students would normally come into the teaching profession have gone out to other professions. They choose other professions because the money's better. A first-year teacher is on a salary of $48,000, and that's hard to survive on in a city like Auckland. As you know, accommodation here is expensive for students. And unless these people can live with relations in Auckland, living with those relations for at least three years, then they're not really able to afford to come to Auckland to take advantage of this three-year teaching training degree. Despite the decline in the number of te reo Maori teachers graduating, only 44 bilingual teachers graduated last year. Labour is committed to dramatically increasing the number of te reo teachers from early childhood to secondary school education who can teach and speak in te reo Maori to 3000 within the next six years. That means a ten-fold increase in kaiako who can speak the language. How many teachers did you say? In their policy, it says 3000. 3000? Being able to teach te reo Maori. 3000, and that's in how many years' time ` about four or five years' time? Yeah. Um. It's good to have dreams. It's good to dream high. And... But I think they would be having pipe dreams quite frankly if they're going to achieve that number within such a short time or four of five years. Well, like I say, we need to be ambitious. We need to have courageous goals. We want to reo Maori to be just the natural, normal part of being a New Zealander. Tawhri Williams ` he's the head of Takiura up in Auckland ` he says that goal of having 3000 teachers being able to teach in te reo Maori by 2025, it's a good aim, but it's unrealistic. What's your reaction to that kind of comment? Again it comes down to ambition and aspiration and having the courage. I mean, why would you set goals that are really easy to achieve when you can actually extend yourself. If we don't reach the goal, at least with we should have gone beyond just some easy, sort of, goal that, you know` that might make the government look good, but it doesn't actually improve te reo Maori. Ka pai a te haere. Attracting more reo teachers is the challenge, but there's no doubting the commitment of kaiako like Tangihia Pouwhare. O te a koto tenei mahi. She's the new entry kaiako at Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Manurewa, and she has a deep love for her language. I want our culture to survive. If you want to get rid of a culture, you just stop talking their language. And te reo Maori is the vehicle for our culture. It means everything. It's who I am. So who I am as a Maori, and I could only wish that for other Maori in Aotearoa, that they know who they are. There's no shortage of passion, but school principal Daphne Mika says it's a daily problem to find enough teachers. There is a shortage that teach in te reo Maori. Not a lot of them around, and not a lot of them graduating, and that's where our dilemma is, is that we need a lot of Maori going in to learn how to teach at a kura kaupapa status as well as a wharekura. Surviving on a reo Maori teacher's salary in Auckland is a problem she also knows well. I'll let you in on a secret. When I first started, my family lived on chicken frames and mince for a year. But that's what how we struggled in Auckland when I first came here. Do you think that's something first-year teachers will be facing? Will be struggling if they've got a family. Tena koe, your prime` majesty. I mean, Optimus` Jacinda Ardern` Prime. Oh boy. Te Mangai Paho helped launch the strategy to revitalise Te Reo Maori at Te Matatini, as well as the prime minister, it featured former school principal and Maori Education minister Kelvin Davis. (SPEAKS MAORI) Ka pai ehua. It's $12 million over four years. It's for people who are already in education by supporting them. But we've put 40, 4-0, million dollars into 1500 new teacher places and training. And we've got scholarships to try and encourage Maori speaking teachers. There's voluntary bonding scheme, so there are incentives to encourage people into teaching and to Maori teaching and into staying there. Kelvin Davis is backing that target of 3000 extra reo teachers within the next six years. Is he risking another embarrassing backdown for the government? Is this the next KiwiBuild. Will you need to revise the numbers down if you don't meet those targets? Why would we revise numbers? Like, we're trying to get a million speakers by 2040. Why bother resetting targets? We're just aiming for those targets. If we don't get them, it's not like we've failed. We've still got more people than` speaking Maori and teaching in te reo Maori than we had before, and we'll just keep going. What's your message to doubters? I don't care about what the doubters say. Because we're on a mission to make a positive difference for te reo Maori. And, you know, all the doubters can have their opinions, and quite frankly they're not doing anything to actually assist us on this journey which is good for all of New Zealand. For first-year student Manukura, keeping the language alive is personal. It is important that we as rangatahi do rise up to these challenges and face them. Cos if we don't, te reo will die eventually. And when you walk out the door with your tohu, are you positive about moving into to become a teacher. Yes, I am very positive, and I'm very excited. But for those in the classroom working to keep te reo alive, there's a worrying gap between the government's dream and reality. I'm positive in terms of the importance of Maori language and of Maori culture and of Maori identity. What I'm not positive about is the people who are going to be able to carry on that dream of ensuring that the positivity that we have for the Maori language will be carried on with quality teachers, quality teaching, quality curriculum and quality philosophy, I suppose is the one that I'm really on about, so we're not just educating from the jaw up. We're educating from the heart inside out. Na John Boynton reporting. After the break, I speak to the minister of education Chris Hipkins. Auraki mai ano ki Te Hui. Earlier this year, the History Teachers Association said the number of students who learned New Zealand history was shameful and called on the government to make it compulsory in our schools. Earlier this week, I spoke to the Minister of Education, Chris Hipkins about this and the government's plan to increase the number of Maori teachers. Your government's goal is 3000 Maori teachers by 2025, around 300 a year. Would you say it's ambitious? It's definitely ambitious. We're training about 200 a year now. So that means we're gonna have to ramp that up significantly. We know that there are financial support available, for example through Teach NZ scholarships, specifically for te reo Maori teachers, which have been under subscribed in past years, and the goods news is that actually we're starting to see people expressing more of an interest. The big challenge, really, is getting young fluent te reo Maori teachers to want to be teachers. You know, that's where we've got to get to. When you consider that some of the Maori teachers that have been trained often go off to new vocations because the money's so much better, so, you know, you've got a financial incentive for them to train. What about when they're teaching? Yeah, look, there's no question that we can do a better job there, and it's one of the things, I guess, that are part of the negotiations we're doing at the moment is how we can better support beginning teachers. But actually we've got to get them trained in the first place. And we simply haven't had enough fluent speakers training to be teachers. And those numbers are going up. That's good, but we're gonna have to really push harder to get more people training. So, Tawhiri matua who's at Takirua, he reckons his classes have dropped in the last five years from around 30 to 18, he's got in his class this year. His question is where they're gonna come from. That's a trend across the board around teacher training. We've seen about a 40% reduction in the number of people completing teaching qualifications over the last decade, and so we're seeing that starting to turn around now, so last year, and again this year, we've seen reasonably healthy increases in enrolments for teacher training, but, of course, we're gonna have to keep doing better, cos we've got teaching shortages across the board. But it is starting to shift, and the different programmes that we're putting in place, the different scholarships, the different recruitment campaigns that we're doing, they're starting to bear fruit, but, of course, it takes a while. Looking ahead then, what provisions or preparations are you doing now with tertiary education to receive these bilingual kids? Well, tertiary education, of course, is a little bit different in that those institutions run quite autonomously of governments, so we give them funding, but how they structure themselves is quite different. What I think that they are gonna have to turn their attention to the fact that there's gonna be more people who have done all of their schooling education in te reo Maori and they're gonna want to continue their education in te reo Maori, and the tertiary institutions, our polytechs, our universities, they're gonna have to be able to adapt to that. A review of NZCA is on your calendar ` an opportunity perhaps, Minister, to include compulsory New Zealand history? Yeah, look, one of the things that's been discussed around New Zealand history is what elements of that should be compulsory? The New Zealand curriculum at the moment really isn't based on notions of compulsion, so it's a very flexible and enabling curriculum. We do have compulsory subjects, though ` maths, English, science. Our past is as equally important. Well, we have compulsory learning areas, and of course, the Treaty and New Zealand history is covered within those learning areas, but actually the feedback we've got is we need to be a bit more prescriptive than that. So what's` But the choice. You leave the choice to the school to create and choose what they want to do. And what we know from research is that they're not really choosing it. That's right, but actually, we do the same in English, maths, science. We let the schools choose what they teach and how they teach it, as we do with New Zealand history. And, actually, the feedback that we're getting is that's just a bit too loose and that there does need to be a bit more prescription. One of the things that we've got to be mindful here, though, is there's a difference between being able to regurgitate rote-learned facts and actually having an understanding, and, you know, we saw at the beginning of the year. So is being able to recite the articles of the Treaty word for word more important than understanding what the Treaty actually symbolises, what it represents and what it means. I would say that the second part is actually more important than being able to regurgitate it by memory. Yes, but some of the research that Graeme Ball, when he was at the select committee just recently, he said actually we're not learning those. Kids are saying, 'Yeah, yeah, we've learned about the Treaty,' and actually when he talks to them, they actually don't know much at all about how our two nations came together. Actually, I think one of the things that government hasn't done as well as it should is making sure that there are resources available to support schools in their teaching of New Zealand history and of the Treaty. So is that something that you might look at the ministry review? No question, absolutely, because it's not really fair to say to schools, 'You've got to go and teach this. Go off and figure out how to do it by yourselves.' How much is the government looking at putting towards that? Well, look, I don't have a dollar figure in front of mind right at the moment` Well, how important is it? I think it is very important. And actually, it is something that you'll see us, as a government, focusing on more. And you'll see us, sort of, reallocating some of the focus of what the Ministry of Education, for example, are doing now to actually look at what are the resources we've got available now, what are the resources that we're developing, and are we getting this right? Are we putting enough into this area. The idea that if we don't teach our students the consequences of colonisation, the consequences of language and land loss, how do we expect the future to think differently? I think we absolutely should be teaching them those things. It's certainly allowed for now. It's encouraged now, but the question that is being raised is whether that's enough, whether saying, 'Yes, you should` you can teach it, and you should teach it,' whether that's enough or whether we should be saying` whether there should be a greater degree of compulsion and a greater degree of prescription around what gets taught. I'm very open to that, because I agree that there are some schools that do it very, very well, but there are others who are not doing it as well as they should be doing it, so we can't` but it's more than simply saying to them, 'You must do this.' We've actually then got to make sure we've got the support available so that they can do it successfully. So that's, I guess, growing more Maori teachers, maybe Maori history teachers. It's about more Maori teachers. It's about more curriculum resources. It's about more books, videos ` all of the different things that go with, you know, successful teaching and learning. It's about making sure that we do all of those things. Lesson plans, for example, if you're a teacher and it's not your first area of familiarity, where can you go to access additional resources? We've got more work to do there. So is this a priority? There's no question it's a priority, and, in fact, it's something that New Zealanders increasingly have made clear is a priority for them. There is now a much greater both understanding of and desire for their children to learn about all of New Zealand's history, the good, the bad and the ugly. And I think that's a fantastic advance in New Zealand societal attitudes. And I think that our education system can continue to push to ensure that we are a more understanding, inclusive and tolerate country, with a better understanding of our history, including the bad stuff. Ko te Minita Take Matauranga tera ko Chris Hipkins. Next the story of how waiata replaced weapons in a warzone. Kei te matakitaki koutou i a Te Hui. Me tatau pounamu kia kore ai e pakaru ake ake. It was a horrific civil war that raged for 10 years, claiming the lives of 20,000, and it was right on our back doorstep. It was a New Zealand-led coalition army who devised an unorthodox strategy to end the bloody battle on the Papua New Guinean island of Bougainville, after numerous attempts had failed. The deployment is now the subject of a documentary 'Soldiers without Guns'. On the eve of its world premier, two former servicemen reunite to reflect on how Maori culture was instrumental in restoring peace. It was a war with seemingly no end. 10 ugly years of bloodshed marred what was once a Pacific paradise. A Kiwi contingent headed to Bougainville on a radical peacekeeping mission. Their training in armed combat would be of no use on this deployment. This is a story about how Maori culture brought lasting peace to a war zone. It's been 13 years since ex-Navy sailors Aaron Pau and Rata Wairama last saw each other. Oh, kia ora, bro. Kia ora, brother! but what they've experienced has bonded them for life. Good to see you, bro. It's good to see you, my brother. How have you been? Yeah, good, bro. Still alive? (CHUCKLES) Still alive, bro. They were just 16 when they joined the Navy in 1997, with little idea of where their first mission would take them. We found out we were going to a place called Bougainville. And I was like, 'Where the hell is Bougainville?' We always thought Bougainville was West Auckland. I had never been out of Flaxmere. I remember the first time going over the Auckland harbour bridge, I was buzzing out. we knew that it was a place in the Pacific Ocean, you know, somewhere around Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. What Rata and Aaron didn't realise was that since 1988 Bougainville had been in the grip of a brutal civil war. The operation of the Australian-run Panguna Copper Mine sparked conflict over exploitation, environmental damage, racism and national sovereignty. 20,000 were killed, and almost half of the island's 180,000 population were displaced. At the time, we didn't understand the enormity of the situation there. It just dawned on us, you know, once we got there, 'Wow, is this what happened here?' We arrived on the island when tensions were still quite high, so they were sort of unsure who we were. We were unsure of what to expect when we landed. Yeah, it was a pretty scary time. Yeah, I think we were quite naive at the time, being really young. Aaron was a radar plotter. Rata a gunner on the HMS frigate Canterbury. The two formed a close friendship being members of the kapa haka group. Rata here taking centre stage, with Aaron just behind him to his right. Although new to the Navy, they'd soon realise that they'd been training all their lives for this unique operation. Our military training didn't really come into use; we never used it. It was actually a different type of training that we already had, which was our culture, our upbringing. Traditional attempts at brokering peace tried and failed 14 times. And just when all hope was lost, the Commander of the Kiwi contingent, Brigadier Roger Mortlock decided to take a totally unorthodox approach ` sending his troops in unarmed, replacing weapons with waiata. He said, 'Right, using force hasn't worked, let's try a different approach. 'Let's bring our culture. Let's bring our people in.' Because NZ led this mission, you know, as part of the Truce Monitoring Group. I always take my hat off to Brigadier Mortlock. He was` I think he was ahead of his time. Back then, because it was unprecedented. (SPEAKS MAORI) Mortlock had a unique insight into the role Maori culture could play in this latest bid for peace. Just being pakeha himself and being able to speak like that made us all realise, 'Wow, this is a powerful moment we're involved in here.' And especially for him to be up and be our leader and speak for us was pretty amazing, yeah. The Bougainvillean locals had never seen anything like it before. What was their reaction to you? As soon as we did our kapa haka, the walls came down, straight away. They fell in love with us. And that was the first time they'd seen kapa haka. The first time they'd seen pukana, you know. And these kids were running around doing the pukana for days after that. An ugly history of colonial exploitation had left the Bougainvilleans mistrustful of outsiders. The Maori cultural strategy was the breakthrough they needed to negotiate a truce where the peace process had failed so many times before. They're a very spiritual people like us, so, you know` They felt the wairua, eh? They definitely did. The women are tied to the land, just as the Maori culture is. You know, we have Rangi and Papa. We have the Earth Mother and the Sky Father. They actually have the same thing. You know, we believe in the same deities. And that's why I think that approach worked quite well, because these people looked at us and said, 'Wow, we didn't know New Zealanders were like this. 'We thought they were white-looking people that do those other things that those last white people that came here done.' At the time this story went largely under the radar, but is now the subject of a documentary 'Soldiers Without Guns'. Who as a Commander would say we're taking guitars and not rifles. Fair to say felt a little bit naked. Having gained the confidence of the Bougainvilleans, a ceasefire was finally signed in 1998. Weapons were packed away, ending the decade-long civil war. This not only changed the lives of those in Bougainville, but also for the unsung heroes, like the Kiwi kapa haka contingent. The world wasn't this safe bubble that I thought it was as a child, so, yeah, it really did change me. I remember getting back home and going, 'Wow, you know, 'we've come from a land where there's been so much death and grief and whole lot of bad things happen, 'and we're back to our nice, peaceful land.' These former sailors' connection to their culture was instrumental in that reconciliation and the part they played has been a highlight in their careers. I think it's a story every New Zealander should be proud of. It should be the equivalent of winning a Rugby World Cup. It should be that kind of success story. To know that we saved thousands of peoples' lives, had this war had kept going on. Do you ever wonder what would have happened had you gone in armed? Yeah, it would have been a totally different outcome. I think using force should always be the last resort. Try every other avenue possible before you use force. Hei toki nga tu, hei toki nga rongo. We are instruments of war, but more importantly we were instruments of peace. Kei a Ruwani Perera tenei purongo. And 'Soldiers Without Guns' is due for nationwide release in selected cinemas on April 18. Kua hikina te hui mo tenei ra. Pai marire ki a tatou katoa. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2019 ALL: He mea tautoko na Te Mangai Paho.