Know Thy Friends

Be careful what (and who) you allow through your gates: It is a truism of war and politics that one should "know thy enemy". In the case of National’s faltering relationship with the Maori Party, however, it’s more a case of "know thy friends".

IN BUSINESS and in politics, it always pays to know who – and what – you’re dealing with. All too often it is unfamiliarity (rather than its opposite) that breeds the contempt that leads to mistakes. Just look at the increasingly fractious relationship between the National and Maori parties. Government ministers’ lack of experience in dealing with Maori nationalism has made them easy marks. By the time they realise just how expertly they’ve been played – it may be too late to avert political disaster.

I’ve seen what can happen in this sort of situation.

When Jim Anderton was planning the Inaugural Conference of the NewLabour Party, his advisors (myself included) warned him against opening the occasion to all-comers.

"If you do that", we said, "every far-Left group in New Zealand will turn up and take it over."

But Jim, who’d been the President of the Labour Party for five years, was unmoved.

"They’ll be a tiny minority", he reassured us, "I’ll handle them."

But Jim didn’t know who he was dealing with. For many decades the Labour Party had rigorously excluded members of the Stalinist, Maoist and Trotskyite communist organisations from its ranks. The leftists Jim was used to "handling" were loyal social-democrats – a very different political animal from the sort of beast he was proposing to let into Wellington’s Overseas Terminal.

"But Jim", we pleaded, "communists are used to being in the minority. Their discipline and articulateness will more than make up for their lack of numbers. At the very least let us vet the membership applications!"

But Jim could not be budged. And, sure enough, on Queen’s Birthday Weekend, 1989, as the People’s Liberation Army’s tanks were rolling over students in Tiananmen Square, New Zealanders were treated to television images of earnest young men and women preaching revolutionary communism to Jim Anderton’s startled social-democrats. The NLP never recovered.

Watching the relationship between National and the Maori Party unravel, I’m forcefully reminded of the danger posed to any political organisation when its leader is unfamiliar with the beliefs, strategies and tactics of the people he has invited under its roof. And in John Key’s’s case he hasn’t even got a cadre of advisers with direct experience of how Maori nationalists work: no one to say "No John, don’t go there!"

Labour politicians, by contrast, are well aware of how ugly things can get when Maori nationalists move into Pakeha institutions. Phil Goff and his colleagues know families like the Harawiras from way back; they saw them in action in the 1980s; and more than once they were on the receiving-end of their "beliefs, strategies and tactics". Helen Clark’s infamous reference to "haters and wreckers" didn’t come out of thin air.

Pakeha are always at a disadvantage in the world of Maori politics. Its labyrinthine twists and turns confuse even the most seasoned political commentators.

Why, for example, did Hone Harawira use his speech in the Prime Minister’s Debate to thank the Iwi Leadership Forum’s for their contribution to the negotiations over the fate of the Foreshore & Seabed Act? Is their participation at an end? And should this almost casual dismissal of mainstream iwi leadership be read in conjunction with his earlier praise of Sir Tipene O’Reagan who "was there, and prominently so" on the day the 2004 protest hikoi marched into Parliament Grounds?

Was this Harawira’s way of acknowledging Ngai Tahu’s paramountcy on the issue? A heads-up to Maoridom that Sacha McMeeking (General Manager for Strategy and Influence with Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu, and the guiding legal mind behind the highly secretive Iwi Leadership Group and its controversial deal with the Government over the ETS legislation) is now leading the negotiations over the Foreshore & Seabed Act?

Ms McMeeking (32) is certainly one of the most impressive Maori leaders to have emerged from the Treaty settlement process of the 1990s. Equally at ease on the barricades as she is in the courtroom and the boardroom, she brings a formidable array of intellectual and ideological weapons to the debate over customary rights.

One wonders what sort of reply Key and his Treaty Negotiations Minister, Chris Finlayson, might make to someone who quite happily informed the audience at this year’s Hillary Symposium that her remarks were going to be guided by "neo-colonial theory – which is a bit like neo-Marxist theory but with an indigenous twist".

Does either gentleman really know who, or what, he’s dealing with?

Harawira also made mention in his speech of the contribution made by the radical legal scholar, and arch Maori nationalist, Moana Jackson. In answering his own question: "So what exactly is it that the Maori Party want to see after the repeal?", Harawira informed the House that "the kaupapa I’ve been touting all ‘round the place over the past few months was approved by our caucus last week as the basis for a new deal on the Foreshore & Seabed.

"It’s based on a paper written for us by Moana Jackson which proposed the notion of tupuna title – which basically says that if the whole world already knows that Maori people were here first, then lets stop being ridiculous by making Maori go to court to prove it. Let’s simply accept it’s true and build on that."

The legal implications of tupuna title for the future of property relations in New Zealand are, of course, nothing short of revolutionary. And if, as Harawira insists, Jackson’s ideas now constitute the core of the Maori Party’s (i.e. McMeeking’s) negotiating position, then Key, Finlayson and the whole National-led Government are rapidly approaching a very deeply-drawn line in the sand.

Caught in a subtle pincer movement between Jackson’s attempt to wipe out 170 years of colonial history, and McMeeking’s negotiating brio, the National-led Government will either have to step over the line, to electoral ruin, or step away from it, and watch its agreement with the Maori Party dissolve.

What happens then? Nothing calculated to make Key, his Government, or the country feel any more at ease. Freed at last from the embarrassing embrace of the National Party, a Maori Party denied its victory over the Foreshore & Seabed is likely to run the war canoes out into deep water and start paddling.

Only then, perhaps, will National finally understand who, and what, it’s been dealing with.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 25 February 2010.