LMT #138: Takaparawhau/Bastion Point, Auckland, New Zealand – Toby Boraman

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Toby Boraman
Stout Research Centre fellow, Victoria University of Wellington/Te Herenga Waka, Aotearoa New Zealand

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During the strike waves of the 1960s and 1970s, ‘black’ bans–in the unfortunate language of the time–were a frequent form of work stoppage. They involved workers ‘blacking’ or banning certain forms of work for various reasons. For example, in New Zealand (Aotearoa) during the 1970s, unions banned trade with Chile (to protest the Pinochet dictatorship) and France (to protest French nuclear testing in the South Pacific).

Green bans were an innovative progression from ‘black’ bans. They were ecological political stoppages pioneered in 1970 by Australian construction workers’ unions. The Builders’ Labourers’ Federation placed green bans on disputed land, natural habitats, buildings, and working-class neighbourhoods threatened by developers. They only did so after a genuine request from a community group. After a green ban had been placed, construction workers would then refuse to work on the site. Hence, green bans wereboth a form of workers’ control and ecological control. Their remarkable success in halting expensive construction projects led to repression.  However, many of the bans are still observed–for example they saved several historic Sydney neighbourhoods.

Many have championed green bans as examples of how unions can undertake successful direct action to support environmental concerns in this age of climate change, and to subvert the view that the labour movement fundamentally clashes with the environmental one. While the Australian green bans have gained some global recognition, the ones in New Zealand, are almost unknown internationally. In Aotearoa, greens bans were also trailblazing: they were indigenous adaptations of the Australian practice. They were placed to support Māori concerns over their alienated land and fishing grounds in the late 1970s. 

The most significant green ban in New Zealand was at Takaparawhau/Bastion Point Auckland in 1977–78.

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Takaparawhau was the site of a watershed Māori protest against the alienation of their land, and the green ban placed to support the land occupation at Takaparawhau represented the most significant workers’ stoppage in support of Māori in New Zealand history. It was also, perhaps, a globally important example of practical labour union support for indigenous land rights.

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A belligerent National government, led by the authoritarian Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, decided to develop Takaparawhau, which was then a large grassland area owned by the state above a headland, into a luxury private housing area. The land was prime real estate with an ocean view close to some of Auckland’s wealthiest abodes. The Ngāti Whātua iwi (tribe) and supporters then occupied or ‘repossessed’ their land, and unions placed a green ban in support.

In the 1840s, Ngāti Whātua had gifted much of its Auckland land to the British governor. They retained the Ōrākei land block (which included Takaparawhau so they could still live on their traditional lands. Yet despite an 1869 court ruling that the 700-acre Ōrākei block was inalienable, over successive years, the settler government either purchased or compulsorily took almost all of that land by 1951.

In 1951, the government insultingly evicted Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei from the tiny amount of land they had left, and burnt their communal meeting house and private houses to a cinder. Joe Hawke, a leader of the Ōrākei Māori Committee Action Group (ŌMCAG) which organised the occupation, was evicted as a youngster along with his family after his home was torched.

In 1977, Hawke wrote of the 700 acre Ōrākei block

‘only a quarter acre was left now–the urupa or burial ground…Today at Bastion Point the Ngati Whatua are fighting against the government sub-dividing what is rightfully their land…Our people will no longer submit to disgrace and humiliation. Bastion Point represents the struggle of the Ngati Whatua for the return of their mana [prestige or authority], honour, and ancestral land.’

The green ban was placed before the occupation began to stop bulldozers rolling in. It occurred after ŌMCAG requested that the Auckland Trades Council (ATC) ban any work on the site. The acting ATC\ President, Dave Clarke (of the Te Paatu tribe and the Seamen’s Union) agreed to it, and the green ban was later confirmed by the full ATC Executive after they returned from their summer vacation. The ATC was the Auckland region coordinating body of private-sector unions affiliated to the New Zealand Federation of Labour.

ŌMCAG representatives then hurriedly contacted the workplaces that would have been required to begin construction work on the land to give practical effect to the green ban. Union job meetings were arranged with such workers, including road metal suppliers and truck drivers, and they voted unanimously to support the ban and to contribute money to the occupation. The unions they contacted contained many Māori, including the labourers and drivers’ unions. Consequently, no development began at Takaparawhau such as bulldozing and infrastructure work like roading.

On 5 January 1977 the occupation began. A large ‘tent town’ (without electricity or water) was established to occupy the land. Thousands of supporters visited. Gardens were dug, buildings erected, and a large marae (communal meeting house) built. Some of the building materials were sourced by unionists. Many unionists participated in, or supported, the occupation.

Four months into the occupation, the government threatened to evict the occupiers. They considered the protesters ‘squatters’ and the tents a ‘shanty town’. Despite defying trespass law, the government ‘had to back off because of the widespread public support for our stand,’ according to ŌMCAG.

That committee continued to send its representatives to union meetings to gain support and reinforce the green ban. After meetings, teachers, wharfies/dockers, seafarers, railway workers, construction workers, nurses, meatworkers, and others donated money. Brewery workers gifted a weekly levy from their paychecks to the occupiers. However Syd Keepa, a truck driver union member, remembers that some union officials sold the green ban to unionists as an action opposing the efforts of Prime Minister Muldoon, who was a deeply polarising figure, ‘to build rich people’s houses on there’ to circumvent some union members ‘who were a bit iffy [uncertain] on Māori rights’.

In April 1978, an injunction was granted to stop protesters ‘trespassing on, using or occupying land’ at Takaparawhau. ŌMCAG, in a ‘special appeal to workers’, called for workers to ‘defend Bastion Point’ and ‘to show class solidarity with us in our struggle…An injury to one is an injury to all!’ The ATC called for a mass union picket if an eviction attempt was made. According to Syd Jackson, an ATC Executive member and major leader in the Māori sovereignty movement, several job sites struck to rush to the occupation when eviction threats were issued.

Despite these calls, on 25 May 1978, the state forcibly evicted the occupiers and arrested 222 people. Hundreds of supporters, including unionists, could not reach Takaparawhau as the police had sealed off all roads in the area. The occupation had lasted 17 months. Government workers, who were in a conservative public sector union outside the ATC, scabbed on the green ban by demolishing the buildings. The 1951 eviction had been repeated, despite mass non-violent resistance.

To ŌMCAG, the government had taken off its ‘mask of democracy’ and showed its ‘true face of state force violence in using 600 police, Army, Navy and Air-Force personnel…Bastion Point was to be subdivided for a rich elite. The spirit of Maori and Pakeha [European/white] people in the face of massive state force was tremendous’. Many unionists were among those arrested. The two hundred arrests were one of the largest mass arrests of protesters in the country’s history.

Unions locally and globally have generally neglected indigenous issues. The Takaparawhau green ban was an example of a successful practical alliance between indigenous people and unions, as well as being an environmental action. Its apparent defeat due to state repression turned later into a win when, after a Waitangi Tribunal hearing in 1987, the government eventually returned most of Takaparawhau to Ngāti Whātua (the land had remained undeveloped, and the green ban remained in force after the eviction). Today, much of that land is a public reserve, Takaparawhau Reserve, ‘for the benefit of all’ and managed jointly by Ngāti Whātua o Ōrākei and the Auckland City Council.

The occupation today is celebrated as a landmark event. It was a turning point in a major Māori renaissance. By the 1970s, Māori had lost around 95% of their land since colonisation through war, confiscations, and purchases. Takaparawhau was one of the first (albeit small) parcels of land to be returned to Māori under the state’s attempt to redress grievances, which began in the mid-1980s through the Waitangi Tribunal process. The occupation opened the eyes of many Pākehā New Zealanders to the systemic and ongoing nature of land alienation and racism.

The green ban was also a high point in workers’ direct action to support Māori land rights. Māori (including those in the ŌMCAG) were then overwhelmingly concentrated in the blue-collar working-class, and frequently played a central role in many ‘militant’ unions and strikes. The mutual connections and traditions of solidarity with fellow unionists that were developed during the 1970s, the largest period of strike and protest activity in the country’s history, laid the foundations for the green ban. Several other green bans were placed on traditional fishing grounds and alienated lands in the 1970s. But after unions were progressively defeated and then hollowed out in the 1980s and 1990s by de-industrialisation and neoliberalism, green bans were not placed again as far as is known.

^{Takaparawhau today. Takaparawhau reserve is the parkland in the bottom centre of the photo. Source: httpsbastionpointprotest.weebly.comimpact-on-new-zeland.html}

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To learn more:

• Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann, Green bans, Red union: Environmental activism and the New South Wales Builders’ Labourers’ Federation (1998)
• Rocking the Foundations(1985 documentary about the NSW BLF)
• Sharon Hawke, ed. Takaparawhau: The People’s Story (1988)
• Bastion Point: The Untold Story (1999 documentary)
• Cybele Locke, Comrade: Bill Andersen, A Communist Working-Class Life (2022)

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Cover image credit: Takaparawhau, Auckland, 1978. Photo credit: Robin Morrison Estate, Auckland Museum, Tāmaki Paenga Hira.

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