56 Maranga Mai! Island tribes created the Kiingitanga Movement in 1858. Kiingi Taawhiao and his successor, King Te Rata, led deputations to England protesting at continuing land loss and seeking self-government. In Parliament, Hone Heke Ngāpua pursued the aspirations of the Kotahitanga Parliament by promoting the 1894 Native Rights Bill seeking Māori autonomy only to have Pākehā MPs, in a display of open racism at the highest level, walk out of the House of Representatives at the first reading. The Bill lapsed for want of a quorum (Walker, 1989, pp. 272-274; Walker, 2004, pp. 163-170). Urbanisation Urbanisation and population recovery underpinned the rise of Māori protest. Disease, dispossession, disenfranchisement, disempowerment, and dismemberment of culture had decimated the Māori population by 70 percent since first European contact, reaching a nadir of 42,000 Māori in 1896 (Poole, 1991, pp. 59-103). Pākehā expected Māori to become extinct. However, inspirational leadership, and a cultural renaissance of sorts, improved medical and social conditions causing a dramatic decline in Māori mortality, coupled with a high birth rate, resulted in a doubling of the Māori population between 1901 and 1936 and a further 500 percent increase between 1936 and 1986. Sometime during World War II, numbers passed the 1840 population of 70,000 to 90,000 (Poole, 1991, pp. 161-189). By that time, tribes had lost 24.4 million hectares or 92.5 percent of their ancestral land. Pākehā leased two-thirds of the remaining two million hectares leaving just 2.5 percent of their lands to support the burgeoning Māori population. Māori-owned lands supported just one-quarter of the Māori population (Walker, 2004, pp. 139, 196). The tension between population and landlessness made Māori urbanisation inevitable. The catalyst would be World War II and a post-war economic boom. Māori had trickled into towns for some time. Sixteen percent of Māori lived in urban areas in 1926. The Depression of the 1930s checked further increase to just one more percent by 1936 (Poole, 1991, pp. 122123). This changed with a significant wave of Māori migrants urbanising during World War II when the wartime Manpower Act and the Māori War Effort Organisation mobilised 17,000 Māori into the armed services and 10,000 into essential industries from a population of just 95,000. Young Māori men and women left papakāinga to work in towns and cities. By 1945, 26 percent of Māori were urban (Poole, 1991, pp. 153-154; Walker, 1992, p. 500; Belich, 2011, pp. 475-478). Prolonged growth in the post-war global economy ensuring favourable markets for New Zealand agricultural exports, and the industrialisation of the domestic economy under protective barriers promoting import substitution, increased the demand for labour. This was met through greater paid work for women, immigration of skilled workers from Britain and Europe, and programmes recruiting unskilled workers from Pacific and Māori communities. New Zealand’s workforce doubled between 1945 and 1976 (Ongley, 1991, pp. 17-36, 16-20). Led by veterans not returning to rural homelands after the war, followed by young Māori women during the early 1950s, impoverished Māori abandoned homelands to pursue opportunity, work, and prosperity (Metge, 1964, p. 128; Belich, 2001, p. 472). By 1956, the trickle had become a torrent pushing urban Māori numbers to 35 percent (Poole, 1991, pp. 153-154). Government programmes relocated 884 Māori families during the early 1960s (Rose, 1967, p. 20; Walker, 1992, pp. 498-519). Other whānau followed into the towns at the rate of 10 percent per annum between 1961 and 1966. The urban Māori populous climbed to 62 percent. Māori were now an urban people; the rural population which had, and remained, a majority in 1961 declined to just 38 percent by 1966. Subsequent migration saw 76 percent of Māori become town and city dwellers by 1976 and 80 percent by 1986 (Poole, 1991, pp. 153-154; Meredith, 2006, p. 247).