Labour's Not Burning Crosses - It's Gathering Votes.

Double Act: Andrew Little and Willie Jackson have signalled that, as far as the Maori Party is concerned, the political gloves are off. If Jackson’s comments encourage other Maori to speak out in similarly blunt terms about the true agenda of the Maori Party and the Iwi Leadership Group, then the electoral dividend for Labour is likely to be substantial.

 

WHAT I HEARD from Willie Jackson and Sandra Lee this morning (22/2/17) didn’t sound at all like “cross burning”. What I heard on RNZ’s “Morning Report” was a discussion about Maori need and the most effective ways to address it. I also heard some pretty frank criticism of the Maori elite and its principal political mouthpiece.

 

Neither Lee nor Jackson were willing to repudiate Andrew Little’s blunt refusal to accept the Maori Party’s political credentials. What they did repudiate was the selective historical memory of Tariana Turia and her ilk.

 

If Jackson’s recruitment encourages other Maori to speak out in similarly blunt terms about the true agenda of the Maori Party and the Iwi Leadership Group, then the electoral dividend for Labour will be substantial.

 

Because no amount of social-liberal outrage can obscure the fact that the Maori Party long ago abandoned the cause of working-class Maori in favour of a neo-tribal capitalist system which is busy swelling the ranks of a new Maori professional and managerial class.

 

Not that such outrage isn’t extremely helpful. Without it, the crucial role which the Maori Party plays in blurring the edges of the National Party’s continuing assault upon the brown working-class might come into sharper focus.

 

By interposing themselves between National’s neoliberal economic policies and the people they purport to represent, the Maori Party not only protects its political patron from the consequences of its own social aggression; but it also furnishes its voters with “proof” of “their” party’s relevance and effectiveness.

 

The message is as simple as it is cynical: “Just imagine how bad things would be if we weren’t here to keep all those crazy conservative Pakehas from running wild!”

 

The Ratana Church’s Depression-era alliance with Labour was likely born out of a similar rationale. The big difference, of course, was that Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana joined forces with the Pakeha poor to end their common marginalisation at the hands of a ruling class made vicious by social fear and political rage. He knew that the ruling elites of both peoples could only be controlled by “the survivors” of colonialism and capitalism, brown and white, working together.

 

The Maori Party, by contrast, almost immediately shed its mass base in favour of a cross-cultural class alliance between the Maori and Pakeha elites. While the National Party’s accelerated Treaty settlement process helpfully expanded the Maori middle-class, the Maori Party maintained a deafening silence as neoliberal economic and social policies wreaked havoc upon its own people. It was a Devil’s bargain: in return for abandoning the constituency which had given the Maori Party birth, the National Party was growing it a new one.

 

It was this shameless collaborationism that drove Hone Harawira out of the Maori Party and into the cross-cultural alliance of Maori and Pakeha socialists that used to be Mana. Harawira wagered that his tactical association with Kim Dotcom’s Internet Party would provide Mana with a parliamentary beach-head larger than Te Tai Tokerau and sufficient List MPs to make a difference. He lost.

 

The kindest thing that might be said about Harawira’s latest gambit is that it is motivated solely by his determination to get Mana back into Parliament. The less kindly among us, however, might wonder aloud, as Sandra Lee did this morning, about the political efficacy of an agreement which debars Mana from standing in any Maori seat but Te Tai Tokerau, and which prohibits criticism of both the Maori Party’s record and its policies. Hone Harawira owes his followers a clearer explanation.

 

Social-liberal criticism (backing-up that of Turia and Pita Sharples) will, of course, focus on Labour’s handling of the foreshore and seabed issue.

 

In the best of all possible worlds the Court of Appeal’s unexpected decision would have been welcomed with open arms by a Labour Party determined to build upon and strengthen the Maori renaissance. Conveniently forgotten by Labour’s Maori and Pakeha critics, however, is the hostile political reception given to Helen Clark’s attempt to do just that.

 

The National Party had attacked Labour’s “Closing the Gaps” policy relentlessly – not hesitating to wake up the sleeping dogs of Pakeha racism if that was what it took to reclaim the Treasury Benches.

 

Already spooked by the “Winter of Discontent” of 2000 (when New Zealand’s leading capitalists threatened the new Labour-led government with a full-scale investment strike if Clark and her Finance Minister, Michael Cullen, refused to rein-in the radical expectations of their Alliance coalition partner) the Labour prime minister took another step back and hastily abandoned the term, if not the substance of, “Closing the Gaps”. She was in  no mood to let the National Party hang the Court of Appeal’s judgement around her neck and sink Labour’s chances of winning the 2005 election.

 

That Labour’s Foreshore & Seabed Act (2004) was in practical terms indistinguishable from the Marine & Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Act (2011) which Tariana Turia accepted without protest from her National Party allies seven years later, speaks volumes about the lengths to which Clark, Cullen and Labour’s Maori caucus were prepared to go to protect Maori interests – even as they were being pilloried as the reincarnation of the nineteenth century’s most hateful colonialists.

 

Those who have spent the last 48 hours condemning Andrew Little for his attack on the Maori Party would undoubtedly benefit from watching the movie All The Way. Covering Lyndon Johnson’s first year as President of the USA (1963-1964) it is a riveting portrayal of just how difficult it is to challenge the racist expectations of an overwhelmingly white electorate – let alone overcome them.

 

To remind passionate seekers-after-change that politics is “the art of the possible” is to repeat a cliché they have heard many times before. Repetition does not, however, make it any the less true. To win power, Andrew Little needs the Maori working-class to remain loyal to Labour. That will not happen if the Maori Party is allowed to paint every expression of Pakeha political criticism as “racist”, and to dismiss every left-wing Maori critic as an “Uncle Tom”.

 

As Lyndon Johnson put it to his tender-hearted liberal running-mate, Hubert Humphrey: “Principles? Principles! Dammit! This isn’t about principles – it’s about votes!”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 23 February 2017.

A Difficult Transition: Maori Abandon Enchanment For Transparency

Driving The Transition: The large iwi-based corporations - epitomised by Ngai Tahu's impressive corporate structure, headed by Mark Solomon (above) are driving the transition from tribal traditionalism to the rational bureaucratic norms of secular society. The journey was difficult and uncomfortable for the Pakeha's ancestors, it will be no less so for Maori.

IF WINSTON PETERS did not exist, Pakeha New Zealand would have to invent him. Very few politicians are willing to risk the opprobrium which inevitably accompanies serious criticism of things Maori. But as a Maori himself, Mr Peters enjoys a sort of immunity from “sickly white liberal” prosecution. It’s as well that he does. Otherwise, holding Maori individuals and institutions to account for the expenditure of public funds would be even more difficult than it is.

 

And Mr Peters willingness to point the finger at his own people’s shortcomings would appear to be catching. Over the past month we have witnessed two important examples of Maori journalists exposing what they claim to be serious problems with the management of significant amounts of public money by Maori trusts.

 

The first of these exposés involved accusations of mismanagement against senior figures within the Kohanga Reo movement. It was Maori Television’s Annabelle-Lee Harris and Mihingarangi Forbes who broke the story. In an item entitled “Feathering the Nest”, the Native Affairs programme drew attention to unusual patterns of credit card expenditure and a number of large unreceipted donations.

 

Considerable effort was devoted to thwarting the Native Affairs investigation – not least an unsuccessful attempt to secure a court injunction against the programme’s broadcast.

 

As a result of Native Affairs courageous journalism, the Ministers of Education and Maori Affairs have jointly demanded a full investigation of the alleged irregularities.

 

The second example involved what might be called a “whistle-blowing” broadcast alleging  serious instances of mismanagement at Tokoroa’s Maori radio station Raukawa FM. In an extraordinary sequence of events, the station manager, Rosina Hauiti, last month took to the airwaves with a long list of allegations against the station’s trustees. When the latter attempted to evict her from the building, Ms Hauiti barricaded herself against all-comers.

 

Though charges and counter-charges continue to fly, Ms Hauiti’s broadcast, like Ms Forbes, has produced the desired outcome – an official intervention. Te Mangai Paho, the station’s principal funder (to the tune of $384,100 per annum) has asked the accounting firm, Deloitte, to investigate Ms Hauiti’s allegations as part of their scheduled review of the trust board’s activities.

 

Speaking at the NZ First Party’s annual conference in Christchurch on Saturday, 19 October, the NZ First leader recalled the late 1980s and early 90s when many businesses engaged in “the greatest deceit” until dragged into line by improved systems of accountability.

 

Mr Peters said Maoridom had called for transparency in the past, but now fended off legitimate investigation with accusations of “Maori bashing”.

 

He claimed that: “Certain ones have gone back to that behaviour, where to challenge them was to challenge their mana, their breeding, any concocted excuse to get out of their responsibility to their own people and the taxpayer. It means that honest Maori, who are the great bulk of Maori, are imaged in the worst possible light, and it cheats them of a certain future.”

 

This newfound willingness to hold itself to account signals that a profound sociological shift is underway in Maoridom. Max Weber, the nineteenth century “father” of modern sociology, would have immediately recognised the processes at work.

 

As Maori capitalism develops (most obviously in the form of the large iwi-based corporation) it is producing scores of tertiary-educated, highly-skilled young graduates. Increasingly, these young Maori professionals are unwilling to tolerate either the business inefficiencies generated by traditional practices, or the injustices so often associated with charismatic leadership. They are past making excuses for, or (even worse) covering up the behaviour of those who will not budge from the old ways.

 

Weber, himself, described the process as a progression from the pre-modern to the modern: “The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’.”

 

The Maori Party’s co-leader, Tariana Turia, is emblematic of Maori who still dwell in the “enchanted” realms of Maoridom. Early on in her political career she spoke openly about having a constant invisible companion: a spirit guardian who protected her from harm and guided her through important decisions.

 

Suffice to say this is not the sort of leadership-style, or decision-making process, the big iwi corporates’ young professionals are being taught at the Auckland Business School. Nor are they encouraged to regard the keeping of accurate records and being able to account for all items of expenditure as responsibilities fit only for lesser breeds. When dealing with shareholders – or taxpayers – neither inherited rank nor charismatic power is entitled to a free pass.

 

The transition from tribal traditionalism to the rational bureaucratic norms of secular society has largely been accomplished in the nations from which Pakeha New Zealand's forebears originated. It was not an easy or a comfortable journey. Nor will it be for Maori – as the recent examples cited above attest.

 

Transparency and enchantment do not dwell in the same house.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 22 October 2013.

A Study In Exhaustion

A Hard Act To Follow: Dr Pita Sharples' contribution to what success the Maori Party has enjoyed is difficult to over-estimate. Compared to the mature Totara he is replacing, Te Ururoa Flavell, is a political sapling.

 

THE MAN LOOKED EXHAUSTED. Hardly surprising really – given the drama of the preceding days. In was November 2008: the Labour-led Government had fallen; Winston Peters was no longer a Member of Parliament; and the Maori Party had just won five of the seven Maori Seats. Slumped on a chair in the corridors of Parliament Buildings, Dr Pita Sharples was looking every one of his 68 years.

 

Perhaps it was my imagination, but as I sat across the corridor from him, waiting to take my turn on Maori Television’s live broadcast from the Maori Affairs Committee Room, I couldn’t help speculating that there was something more to be gleaned from Dr Sharples’ expression that mere physical fatigue. The thought crossed my mind that I was looking at a man who had fought a long battle with himself – and lost.

 

And that could only mean one thing: that Tariana Turia had prevailed, and that the Maori Party would be signing a coalition agreement with the victorious National Party.

 

“Don’t settle for anything less than a seat at the Cabinet Table”, I volunteered. “Make sure you’re where the decisions are being made.”

 

He smiled wanly, knowing already that this was beyond his own, Ms Turia’s, and the whole of the Maori Party’s power. They would receive portfolios, yes, even the highly symbolic title of Minister of Maori Affairs, but in terms of real power they would, like so many of their people, remain outside the door. The Maori Party may have talked its way into the room where the spoils of victory were being divvied up, but Dr Sharples knew already that they would not be offered a seat at the table – not by the Nats.

 

I would like to think that had the choice to collaborate (or not) with the National Party been Dr Sharples’ decision to make, then he would have held the Maori Party aloof.

 

But, it was not his decision.

 

That the whole of Maoridom has become entangled in Ms Turia’s utu upon the Labour Party is a tragedy only New Zealand politics could produce. Those who diminish the role of individuals in moving our history forward – or backwards – would do well to consider Ms Turia’s career.

 

These fierce old kuia, wreathed in the mysteries of their people’s blood and soil, emerge from time-to-time to trouble the deliberations of men. Advised by voices no one else can hear; protected by guardians no one else can see; they are not to be gainsaid or refused. And, when their work is done, they fade back into the mist and silence of the rivers and mountains that made them.

 

Yet, for all of Ms Turia’s formidable strength, it was Dr Sharples’ straightforwardness – his infectious good-humour and grandfatherly wisdom – that allowed the Maori Party to accomplish such good deeds as are worthy of being remembered.

 

Ms Turia may have been Maoridom’s frightening sybil, but it was Dr Sharples who re-built the relationship between Maori and Pakeha, which Labour’s Foreshore & Seabed Act and National’s Orewa speech had so badly damaged.

 

It was Dr Sharples who accustomed Pakeha to the idea that a Maori-based political party could participate in the affairs of government without igniting a civil war. And, in the Iwi Leadership Group, it was Dr Sharples who introduced his people to an alternative model for influencing the colonisers: one that did not involve loud-hailers or hurled fistfuls of Waitangi mud.

 

And now, for his trouble, Dr Sharples has been shown the door by Te Ururoa Flavell. Gone will be the kaumatua’s openness; his refreshing disposition to speak the truth freely, rather than waste everybody’s time by laboriously constructing a lie. In place of the avuncular smiles and chuckles, we shall all have to get used to Mr Flavell’s gloomy monotone.

 

The perfect symbol of the Maori Party in decline: Te Ururoa Flavell

 

Has anyone ever seen Mr Flavell smile?

 

No matter. The Waiariki MP’s passive aggression: his cultural conservatism; make him the perfect symbol of the Maori Party in decline.

 

A study in exhaustion.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 July 2013.

A Short-Lived Illusion: Assessing The Impact Of The Maori Party

Sometime A Great Notion: The fate of the Maori Party offers stark confirmation that ethnic identity, alone, offers an insufficient foundation for enduring electoral success.

THE SWING VOTE. With the formation of the Maori Party in 2004 many Maori looked forward to wielding a permanent “balance of power” over New Zealand politics. With the Maori birth-rate considerably higher than the Pakeha, the wisdom of enrolling on the Maori Roll was thought to be obvious: a demographic guarantee of many more Maori seats. The Maori Vote, overwhelmingly loyal to the Maori Party, would thus become the decisive factor. Neither National nor Labour would be able to govern without its support. The potential for advancing Maori interests seemed limitless.
 

Eight years later, the political prospects for Maori have significantly diminished. The Maori Party is a dwindling political force, riven by personal jealousies and ideological confusion, and likely to lose at least two (and quite possibly all) of the three Maori Seats it currently holds in 2014.
 

The two parties most likely to pick up the seats of Te Tai Hauauru, Tamaki Makaurau and Waiariki: Labour and Mana; are both positioned on the left of the political spectrum, making them ideological non-starters as potential National Party allies. The Maori Party vision of constituting a permanent, ideologically agnostic, component within all future coalition governments has vanished. The Maori Swing Vote, it turns out, was a short-lived illusion. Why?
 

The answer lies in the misapprehension that ethnic identity alone is an unqualified determinant of political allegiance. The founders of the Maori Party: Tariana Turia, Pita Sharples and Professor Whatarangi Winiata all appeared to believe that simply placing the word “Maori” in front of the word “Party” was enough. Regardless of which social class they belonged to or how much education they’d received, and putting aside all personal experiences and aspirations, the Maori voters’ “natural” cultural affinities would make them unwaveringly loyal Maori Party supporters.
 

For a few years it looked as though the Maori Party leadership’s assumptions were substantially correct. By 2008 the party held all but two of the Maori Seats and the prospects seemed good for capturing all seven. But the cultural glasses through which the party insisted on observing the Maori electorate had failed to register the brute political facts of their situation.
 

In the quarter-century since the breakthrough Court of Appeal decision establishing the notion that the Treaty of Waitangi establishes a “partnership” between the Pakeha State and Maori, cultural considerations have increasingly been deployed to mask the embarrassing social gulf which has opened up between the elite wielders of tribally-based, Treaty-settlement-funded corporate power; the narrow layer of well-educated and well-remunerated functionaries who service that power; and the expanding mass of urban and rural Maori who eke out a marginal existence within a New Zealand economy that, increasingly, has little to offer them.
 

It was the Maori Party’s misfortune to enter into a confidence-and-supply agreement with the National Party just as the Global Financial Crisis was hurling tens-of-thousands of young Maori into joblessness and under-employment. Foolishly, Mrs Turia and Dr Sharples had allowed the overwhelmingly working-class Maori electorate’s eighty-year association with Labour and the New Zealand Left to slip their minds. Of the five Maori Party MPs, only Hone Harawira seemed to appreciate the tremendous damage their association with National was inflicting on the notion of permanent Maori participation in government.
 

The result was the Mana Party, whose pursuit of the bi-cultural ideals of the 1970s is predicated on first meeting the material needs of Maori and Pakeha working-class New Zealanders. Only when the marginalised, exploited and excluded of both communities have ready access to good jobs, warm and dry homes, and well-resourced hospitals and schools will Mana’s decolonising policies attract the mass support necessary for their success.
 

The Maori Party’s ambition of exercising a permanent swing vote over New Zealand politics was as short-sighted as it was undemocratic. Throughout human history the universal cry for justice has always attracted more followers than the mystical whisperings of blood and soil. In the end, it isn’t our ethnic origins that determine our electoral choices – it’s our all-too-material interests.
 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 January 2013.

Plots In The Palace

End Game: Maori Party co-leaders Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples had better watch their backs or like the unfortunate King Alexander I of Serbia and Queen Draga they may end up on the receiving end of a palace coup. In the hothouse atmosphere of nationalist politics, to be on the Right's side at the Left's time can have fatal political consequences.

IF THE KING had closed the door to the secret chamber more tightly, he and his Queen might have survived. On that terrible night, however, it was the barely discernible gap between the door and the smooth wall of the royal couple’s bedchamber that betrayed their bolt hole’s whereabouts to the assassins.

The brutality of the murder of King Alexander I of Serbia and his wife, Queen Draga, in Belgrade’s Konak palace in the early hours of 11 June 1903 horrified the whole world. To Serbia’s radical nationalists, however, it was simply a political necessity.

In their eyes, the King had committed the fatal error of aligning Serbia with the German-speaking, Catholic rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As proud Slavs and Greek Orthodox Christians, the young firebrands of the Serbian army looked to Russia as the guarantor of their nationalist objectives. Only with the Russian Tsar’s backing could their dream of a Serb-led "South Slav" kingdom – Yugoslavia – be realised.

For Yugoslavia to be born, the King and Queen had to die.

　
THOUGH IT’S UNLIKELY to be as bloody as the overthrow of the ill-starred Obrenović dynasty, a similar coup may be brewing in the Maori Party – and for broadly similar reasons.

In essence, the Maori Party is a manifestation of what the political scientists call "brokerage politics". In the words of Dr Elizabeth Rata, brokerage politics is "a pragmatic mechanism that … enables minority groups to achieve political recognition despite their limited voting power."

To remain effective, however, a brokerage party must deliver the goods to the minority for whom it is acting. A broker who returns nothing to his clients will very soon have none.

When the Maori Party threw in its lot with National it must have known that the only goods on offer would be symbolic ones. To deliver practical assistance to Maori Party voters (located overwhelmingly on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder) National would have had to embrace a redistributive programme utterly unacceptable to its own supporters.

Symbolism was, however, considerably better than nothing at all. Besides, Tariana Turia’s deep loathing of the Labour Party, and the strong political relationship which soon developed between Dr Pita Sharples and John Key emotionally predisposed the Maori Party leadership to accept National’s offer of partnership.The Maori Party’s electoral base cannot, of course, live by symbolism alone. Already demands are being voiced for tangible delivery in education, health, housing and – most crucially – employment. And, by 2011 even National’s symbolic concessions will have gone as far (perhaps further) as its conservative supporters will tolerate. As a brokerage partner it will be all tapped-out.

The logical next step for the Maori Party, therefore, is to broker a deal with Labour. In a party of the Centre-Left the sort of redistributive policies required to uplift Maori New Zealanders would be a much more comfortable fit. (And if they implemented them under the guise of the National Party-endorsed "Whanau Ora" programme, the Centre-Right could offer no credible objections.)

Even on the symbolic front, a deal with Labour makes sense. On current polling, Labour couldn’t hope to form a government without Green Party support. And since the Greens are even more fervent upholders of tino rangatiratanga than the Maori Party, the brokerage opportunities inherent in a Labour-Green-Maori Party coalition are immense.

That just leaves the problem of Queen Tariana and King Pita.

Like the unfortunate Obrenovićs, the Maori Party’s current leaders have aligned themselves with the wrong people. The dream of sovereignty now requires a change of direction and a shift of allegiances – moves that cannot be made by leaders who are allergic to Labour and/or best mates with Mr Key.

The evidence of palace plotting is everywhere (if you know where to look). In last weekend’s Sunday Star-Times, Hone Harawira announced that he was ditching his vituperative verbal radicalism in favour of a more moderate style of political communication. Rumour’s whisper of a high-profile Maori politician preparing to challenge Dr Sharples in Tamaki Makaurau.

And if you would know from which political quarter these winds of change are blowing, just make your way to the 2010 Bruce Jesson Lecture at Auckland University on 27 October.

This year’s speaker is Maori lawyer and activist Annette Sykes, and her address, "The Politics of the Brown Table", issues a powerful challenge to: "A self-anointed Iwi Leaders Group, a Maori Party that supports a National/Act government, and a group of Crown mandated intermediaries drawn from retired politicians and bureaucrats".

According to Ms Sykes, these "agents for the manufacturing of consent and the management of discontent among Maori" are guilty of "harnessing Maori to a global capitalism that impoverishes the mass of working-class Maori and [is] making them dependent on its survival."

Ms Turia and Dr Sharples would be wise to keep their doors shut tight.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 28 September 2010.

Whanau Ora: Faith-Based Charity?

The architect of Whanau Ora: Encouraged and empowered by National's John Key and Act's Rodney Hide, Tariana Turia has constructed a culturally unassailable vehicle for the privatisation of social welfare delivery in New Zealand.

THE FIRST THING to grasp about the Whanau Ora programme is that it occupies in the New Zealand political environment precisely the same evolutionary niche as the so-called "Faith-based Charities" (FBCs) in the United States.

In the battle to wrest the provision of social services from federal and state authorities the FBCs acted as American Neoliberalism’s "Trojan Horses" – hiding the fundamental goal of welfare privatisation behind the culturally unassailable front of Christian community service.

Being a much more secular society that the United States, and being nowhere near as enthralled to the fundamentalist/evangelical Christian Right, New Zealand presented its home-grown neoliberals with a significant presentational problem. New Zealand’s established charities are by-and-large still relatively free of neoliberal contagion and in any case completely fail the "culturally unassailable" test – being as subject to media scrutiny as any other participant in New Zealand civil society.

Only one group in New Zealand is culturally unassailable – the tangata whenua. Any person or institution foolhardy enough to subject Maori to the same degree of critical scrutiny as other groups in our society runs the very real risk of being branded "racist". "Maori-bashing" has been politically ghettoised in the socially and intellectually disreputable milieu of the unsophisticated Right. "Respectable" New Zealand journalists and politicians are as loathe to attack Maori as American politicians and journalists are to attack Christianity.

All of which makes Maori community organisations the ideal vehicles to lead the private sector’s assault on the hitherto state-dominated welfare "marketplace". The concept of whanau ora is being advanced with exactly the same intention as the concept of "a personal encounter with Jesus": as a way of "turning people’s lives around" by means of an "experience" or "force" that is ultimately untestable – even supernatural.

Which is why the Whanau Ora Report is so full of what critics have called "waffle" and "psychobabble". It is proof positive that the policy we are dealing with is not in any way empirically mandated or scientifically verifiable. Tariana Turia and her hand-picked advisory taskforce are simply (and shamelessly) asking the rest of New Zealand to take "Whanau Ora" on faith.

And it’s working. A group of public servants who approached a journalist with the line: "Hi, We're from the Government and we're here to help" would be subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny – and quite possibly ridicule. But a few months from now, when someone says: "Kia ora, I’m from your local Whanau Ora service provider and I’m here to help" he or she will be received with unstinting respect and everything they say will be recorded at its face value.

The other thing which the presentation of the Whanau Ora Report has done is reveal the full measure of John Key’s political skill. His wooing of the Maori Party – like Ronald Reagan’s wooing of the Religious Right in the United States – has augmented the forces of New Zealand neoliberalism in a way very few people believed possible, and even fewer predicted.

Key had both the wit and the nerve to take on board what the more intelligent members of the neoliberal community (like the Business Roundtable’s Rob McLeod) were saying. That the Treaty settlement process was slowly but surely creating what Dr Elizabeth Rata calls a "neo-traditionalist elite" of tribal capitalists with sufficient economic power to co-opt the Maori middle-class – a group which, hitherto, had owed its primary allegiance to, received its salaries from, and been under the ideological guidance of the State Sector.

Key and his National Party colleagues (along with their ACT allies) have long understood that this situation conferred a considerable political advantage upon the Labour Party (whose connections to the State Sector are numerous and deep). But what if those connections were broken?

If the bulk of Maori middle-class employment could be transferred from public to private bureaucracies – especially bureaucracies masked by the culturally unassailable language of kaupapa Maori – then the outer walls of the public sector’s welfare delivery institutions would be breached, and the principles and practice of privatised welfare delivery firmly established.

No one can say we weren’t warned. The way GEO, the private US corporation which set up the Mt Eden Remand Centre, screened its naked profit-seeking behind an ethnically sensitive programme involving the tangata whenua showed us as long ago as the late 1990s how easily Maori could be persuaded to turn themselves into a culturally unassailable swipe-card for privatisation.

And just as privatised correctional facilities are on their way to becoming highly profitable cogs in the machinery of social control, Whanau Ora, too, will see private individuals, trusts and corporations (albeit brown-faced ones) profiting from the unrelenting institutional discrimination and structural inequality that drives working-class Maori and Pakeha alike into the arms of those who long ago mastered the art of doing well by doing good.