The Tohunga Suppression Act was supported by all Māori MPs and received Royal Assent on 24 September 1907. It was followed in 1908 by The Quackery Prevention Act, which banned publication of untruthful claims about medicines.
In an opinion piece We must speak out against racism the Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon stated that “Measures such as the 1907 Tohunga Suppression Act were introduced, undermining Māori culture and wellbeing, and enabling disharmony and inequity to persist until now.” Does the evidence support this contention?
In pre-European times, tohunga were expert practitioners of rongoā Māori,the traditional Māori healing system encompassing herbal remedies, physical therapies and spiritual healing. However, European contact and migration brought new diseases and a need for new knowledge to treat them. Some tohunga continued with their traditional practices and wove European health knowledge into them. However, others did not adapt, and fraudulent “tohunga” emerged who lacked both traditional and European knowledge. As with Pākehā charlatans and “quacks”, they preyed on people’s superstitions and credulity and offered to “cure” all kinds of illnesses, often with disastrous results.
Key advocates for the Tohunga Suppression Act were…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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