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David Round
For the last couple of weeks we have been expecting the appearance of the government’s draft foreshore and seabed bill. Usually reliable rumours told us that it would be going to the Cabinet in the last week or two, and would then be introduced to the House. For some reason there has been a delay, and rumour has it that it may be another couple of weeks at least before it is introduced. I know not what the reason may be. It would be nice to think that the government is actually coming to its senses, that the Prime Minister and Attorney-General are actually beginning to realise what a monstrous crime they are proposing to commit, and what the public reaction will be to this theft of our common heritage and solemn recognition that New Zealand is henceforward and increasingly an apartheid state[1].
There is, in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, one very surprising omission. Nowhere is there any definition of who or what exactly an indigenous person is. It would surely not be unreasonable to expect a definition. One is not needed in the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, because it deals with all human beings, and we know what they are. But who is indigenous?
Ah, the foreshore and seabed. Are we not thoroughly sick of it by now? And yet we will all have to ‘provide feedback’ on the government’s consultation document. The Attorney-General, Chris Finlayson, says that he is ‘very interested in hearing New Zealanders’ views. They matter.’ And seriously, it is really important that we do provide feedback.
You and I, gentle readers, can see all too clearly what is happening to our country. In despair we watch the whole colossal slow-motion train wreck, helpless to do anything about it. It is not that we are not trying to help. We warn, we write letters to newspapers, we support blogs such as this, we make our views plain to politicians, we spread the word in season and out of season. Yet nothing we say or do makes the slightest bit of difference. We are modern day Cassandras, gifted with prophecy yet cursed that our accurate predictions of doom will never be believed.
There was a poem which my mother had learnt off by heart as a girl and portions of which she could long remember and recite to us. It was, I later discovered, Whittier’s Barbara Frietchie, and it tells of a true episode in the American Civil War when Confederate forces, occupying a town in the north, decreed on pain of death that all Union flags in the town should be taken down.
‘White motherf*****s have been raping our lands and ripping us off for centuries….’ This is, it seems, the sincere personal view of Hone Harawira, a member of the New Zealand Parliament, and one, indeed, whose party forms part of our coalition government. He expressed it in a private e-mail to Buddy Mikaere, a former director of the Waitangi Tribunal who had ventured to inquire about who ~ Harawira himself or the taxpayer ~ was paying for a side-trip to Paris for sightseeing which Harawira and his wife had taken when in Europe on parliamentary business.
The arguments about the ‘h’ in Wanganui will clearly be around for some time to come. The citizens of Wanganui, led by their firm no-nonsense mayor Michael Laws, have no intention of giving up without a fight. The Geographic Board has recommended to the Land Information Minister, Mr Maurice Williamson, that an h be inserted, but the city and citizens of Wanganui intend to make an issue of the matter. Some commentators have argued ’Why don’t they just give in? After all, it’s just one tiny letter’. By the same token, one could argue that, if it is so tiny and unimportant an issue, the supporters of the h should give in. But the h’s supporters clearly think that the issue is bigger than one tiny letter, and so the h’s opponents can hardly be blamed for thinking the same way.
There is a difference of opinion between the Prime Minister and the Minister of Maori Affairs, Mr Peter Sharples, over New Zealand’s possible endorsement of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Mr Sharples believes that we have agreed to sign the document; the Prime Minister, I am happy to say, says it is still too early to say that we will.
In 1998, when the Canterbury University Press published my book Truth or Treaty? Commonsense Questions about the Treaty of Waitangi, the public mood was somewhat different from today’s. I began my second chapter with a gloomy paragraph which, although it certainly contains much truth, nevertheless seems, in today’s climate, just a little over the top:
An old adage declares that nothing is as permanent as a temporary expedient. Four Maori seats were established within the New Zealand Parliament in 1867 as a very temporary expedient, originally for a mere five years while Maori communal title to land was converted by the Native Land Court into freehold title. (At that time, only adult males possessing sufficient landed property were entitled to vote, but legal opinion considered communally-owned property an inadequate qualification.) Those four seats remained an established part of the political landscape until the introduction of a proportional representation system (MMP) by the Electoral Act 1993. They were not abolished then, though, as the Royal Commission on the Electoral System had recommended in its 1986 report, but extended, so that the number of Maori seats reflects (by a strange and complicated formula) the Maori population, including the Maori population not even on the Maori electoral roll.
