The committee, which felt the downgrade of Manahi's proposed VC award to a DCM was due to him being a Māori, lobbied the New Zealand Government to make representations to Buckingham Palace. It was hoped that Queen Elizabeth II would reconsider the case and make a posthumous grant of the VC to Manahi. This was despite the Queen's father, King George VI, having ruled in 1949 that no further awards from the Second World War ought to be made. The New Zealand Government was reluctant to be officially involved, fearing an outright rejection if formal approaches were made. It favoured a more gradual and casual method to better assess the likely receptiveness of the Palace to the issue and so supported two informal applications made to the Queen in the early 1990s through former Governors-General of New Zealand; these were unsuccessful, with the passage of time since the events of Takrouna cited as a factor.