Sowing Dragon's Teeth

Sowing discord: In Greek mythology Cadmus, the bringer of civilisation, slew the dragon that guarded the sacred spring of the war god, Ares. Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, bade Cadmus sow the dragon's teeth and up sprang the spartoi - an army of ferocious warriors. Painting by Maxfield Parrish

FROM A STRICTLY POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE the details of the Government’s innocuous-sounding Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill don’t matter. The numbers on the floor of the House have already been assembled to secure its First Reading, and once that crucial first hurdle has been cleared the news media will rapidly lose interest. The Parliamentary Press Gallery, in particular, is likely to assume (quite rightly) that if Labour doesn’t oppose the Bill at its First Reading it’s not going to oppose the Bill at all. And if Labour doesn’t oppose this bill it is absolutely certain to become law.

Tactically-speaking, the Labour Opposition’s indulgent attitude towards the repeal and replacement of its costly (in terms of the Maori Vote) Foreshore & Seabed Act is a huge mistake. It’s own supporters will be outraged at Labour’s facilitation of what is likely to prove this country’s most significant privatisation of public property. And it is difficult to conceive of an issue more likely to divide conservative voters than the National Government’s apparent willingness to award thousands of square kilometres of New Zealand’s coastline and territorial sea to a multitude of Maori tribes and sub-tribes.

By highlighting the Bill’s most controversial aspects – most particularly its failure to retain the current legislation’s guarantee of free public access to the seashore – the Opposition could drive a mighty wedge into National’s electoral base. To date, Labour’s spokesperson, David Parker, has limited himself to making a virtue of his party’s refusal to "play the race card". Exactly how many New Zealanders end up thanking him for it remains to be seen.

The Bill’s opponents will, of course, get their moment in the sun at the Select Committee hearings on the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill. The media coverage of their submissions is, however, highly unlikely to be either extensive or sympathetic. Most of the news media remains strongly supportive of the Key Government and it is not about to undercut National’s poll-ratings by dispassionately analysing the legislation’s dire implications for the future economic and social well-being of New Zealand.

Were the legislation being introduced by Labour the media’s attitude would likely be very different. Ironically, such blatant partisanship would, on this occasion, be in the public interest. But, by sanctioning only the most cursory and politically sympathetic reportage of the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill the media is going to sell its readers, listeners and viewers short. In their myopic determination to protect "their" government, New Zealand’s media bosses will shirk their all-important duty to inform the citizenry of a direct threat to its rights.

Because, as the eminent New Zealand economist, Professor Roger Bowden, puts it: "In the present context, the [Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill] will effectively have the status of a constitutional change for the country. The Bill satisfies two of the classical tests for an uncodified constitution such as New Zealand’s: it creates property rights, and it cannot be easily reversed."

Once again, Labour’s abdication of political responsibility is baffling. A measure of such vital importance to the nation’s future should not be passed without the active consent of the electorate (in the form of either an unequivocal electoral mandate or referendum). That National is not availing itself of these alternatives, intending, rather, to secure the passage of the legislation in advance of next year’s general election by using the votes of members elected on explicit promises to keep the foreshore and seabed in public hands, is something Labour should feel constitutionally obliged to oppose. At the very least, it should be making the case for the passage of the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill to be delayed until after the voters have delivered their verdict on its merits through the ballot-box.

That Labour shows no signs of doing this can only mean one of two things: either it is tactically inept; or, it secretly fears the judgement of the electorate on this issue. If it’s the latter, we are faced – as was the case with Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking bill – with a measure massively deficient in popular support, but which the Labour caucus is going to vote for anyway on the grounds that its moral judgement is superior to that of the electorate’s.

In other words, Labour is planning to do what John Key did in relation to Section 59: preserve its social-liberal credentials by piggy-backing on it’s rival’s determination to pass an unpopular measure no-matter-what. No doubt they're calculating that such a show of bi-partisan support will leave their MPs unscathed; Maori voters in a more forgiving frame of mind; and their extra-parliamentary opponents with nowhere to go.

Perhaps. But every time the two major political parties behave in this way they dramatically increase the levels of anger and alienation in the broader electorate. Worse still, they engender a sense of betrayal, and the conviction that there is indeed such a thing as "the political class" – an arrogant and self-congratulatory elite with nothing but contempt for the opinions and aspirations of ordinary people.

It staggers me that this political class does not appear to understand that, by swelling the ranks of those who feel alienated and betrayed by their country’s nominally democratic political system, they are placing the rights of all citizens – and most especially those belonging to ethnic minorities – in grave danger.

Those who cast their vote in favour of the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill will be casting dragon’s teeth into political soil already richly fertilised by the reek of earlier betrayals. And when, in true mythic style, these seeds of the dragon’s mouth call forth a harvest of angry political spartoi utterly unresponsive to reason or pity, then the suddenly powerless and personally vulnerable members of New Zealand’s political class will have no one to blame but themselves.

Fighting Them On The Beaches

Effective propaganda: Is it fair to condemn the Coastal Coalition for having the wit to recruit master propagandist, John Ansell, to the cause of keeping New Zealand's beaches in public ownership?

KIWIPOLITICO’s "LEW" has challenged me to denounce John Ansell’s billboards and the Coastal Coalition’s campaign against the Government’s plans to repeal the Foreshore & Seabed Act (FSA).

Were I to do as he suggests, I would be guilty of the most appalling hypocrisy. From the moment the Maori Party’s hand-picked review panel released their findings on the FSA in 2009, I have very publicly opposed the repeal of the 2004 legislation.

Why would I denounce a group of citizens for expressing views which everyone who's taken an interest in this issue knows I support?

I suppose Lew would say that it is the presence of John Ansell (author of National’s notorious Iwi/Kiwi billboards for the 2005 General Election) that renders the Coastal Coalition ideologically toxic.

I disagree.

Mr Ansell may be a formidable practitioner of the dark arts of agit-prop, but that, surely, is an irrelevant objection. The Coastal Coalition has a case to make, and Mr Ansell's assistance will ensure that it's persuasive.

Few people in New Zealand have a more acute understanding of the power of the well-conceived political image than Mr Ansell. His depiction of the Prime Minister, clad in a ceremonial Maori feather-cloak and waving a little Maori sovereignty flag, is a powerful example of his technique.

In that single image a host of National Party voters will see all their worst fears about the Government’s relationship with the Maori Party brought startlingly to life.

Persuading the Government that the repeal the FSA will cost them the support of hitherto loyal voters is, I presume, one of the Coastal Coalition’s prime objectives. Is it fair to criticise them for being lucky (or shrewd) enough to recruit someone capable of scaring the bejesus out of the Nats?

It seems to me that Lew and all the others who have thrown up their hands in horror at the Coastal Coalition’s campaign are only doing so because they're mortally afraid it will work.

Up until the appearance of Mr Ansell’s billboards, supporters of a restoration of Maori customary rights have been relying on the presence of a cross-party parliamentary consensus in favour of the FSA's repeal to starve their opponents of what Margaret Thatcher called "the oxygen of publicity".

There is, however, something rather off-putting (even sinister) about this strategy. Though a very large number (Mr Ansell cites a Stuff poll putting it at 74 percent) of New Zealanders oppose the Government’s plans to give Maori customary title to the foreshore and seabed, this informal cross-party consensus means that within the House of Representatives only a handful of MPs are willing to voice their concerns.

The frustration of FSA supporters is intensified by the fact that both major parties have reneged on their earlier, pre-election, pledges that the foreshore and seabed would remain in public ownership. No wonder the Coastal Coalition is making its appeal directly to the people.

Faced with the prospect of their parliamentary allies no longer being able to marginalise the debate, and with the appearance of the Coastal Coalition and its master propagandist, Mr Ansell, Lew and his colleagues are left with little option but to try and intimidate their opponents into silence by branding them racists.

That certainly won’t work with me, nor Mr Ansell, nor (I hope) with the Coastal Coalition. Indeed, the spectacle of so-called "21st Century liberals" attempting to silence citizens exercising their democratic right to free expression is only likely to increase the Coalition’s public support, and give its campaign to keep New Zealand’s beaches in the hands of all New Zealanders a very welcome boost.

Putting Us In Our Places

No Friend of Dissent: Like many Pakeha politicians who have embraced the Maori Nationalist cause, Attorney General, and Treaty Negotiations Minister, Chris Finlayson, reserves his most deadly venom for those who dare to question the State's race relations policies.

AM I THE ONLY New Zealander feeling less than a respected citizen today? Or that the full and equal protection of the laws no longer applies to me? Am I alone in suspecting that, constitutionally-speaking, something important is about to take place – without the nation’s consent?

What set me to pondering these questions was an extraordinary interview broadcast by Radio New Zealand on Tuesday morning.

Morning Report’s Geoff Robinson was talking to Treaty Negotiations Minister, Chris Finlayson, about the agreement secured between National and the Maori Party over the repeal of the Foreshore & Seabed Act.

Preceding the interview listeners had heard reactions to that agreement from Dr Grant Morris, a law lecturer at Victoria University. Michael Barnett, CEO of the Auckland Chamber of Commerce. And Hugh Barr, spokesperson for the Coastal Coalition – a group devoted to preserving public access to New Zealand’s beaches.

All of these men had expressed critical views of the National-Maori Party deal and Finlayson had been asked to respond to their remarks.

What followed was extraordinary.

Rather than address the trio’s arguments, the Treaty Negotiations Minister immediately launched into a series of aggressive put-downs of his critics.

"I didn’t know that Grant Morris knew anything about this subject," sneered the Minister, "I thought his specialty was legal systems or feminist legal studies." Michael Barnett, according to Finlayson was "just sounding off because it’s Tuesday morning". Hugh Barr received a ministerial tongue-lashing for "writing some crummy article in The Dominion Post which contradicted everything I had told him."

Huffed Finlayson: "I can’t be bothered wasting my time with him."

But, oh, what a difference a change of ethnicity produced in the Minister. When Morning Report asked for his reaction to the Maori MP, Hone Harawira’s, charge that the whole consultation exercise surrounding the Foreshore & Seabed issue had been "bullshit", the Minister couldn’t have been sweeter:

"I’m a bit disappointed in Hone," crooned Finlayson, "because in my opinion he’s a first class chap, and he’s a fantastic MP for the Far North, with John Carter. But one of the things I picked up, from his rohe [tribal territory] actually, was the idea that folk didn’t want to have to go to court, or negotiate, to prove their mana. And I thought that was a fair enough point. So, we’ve added in the universal recognition order as a result of that. So, I think Hone’s a little unfair, with the greatest of respect to him, because I was listening and I was the one who was up on the road hearing what people were saying."

The contrast: in the Minister’s tone; in his careful choice of words; and most particularly in the extreme care he took not to give offence; was, to say the least, instructive.

The Minister’s Pakeha critics: the CEO of the Auckland Chamber of Commerce (an institution not noted for its hostility to National governments); a university lecturer whose comments were measured and utterly lacking in any kind of personal animus; and a champion of New Zealanders’ right to recreate themselves amidst this country’s spectacular natural beauty; were all the recipients of Finlayson’s disdain, and he expended no serious effort responding to their arguments or questions.

How different it was for the Te Tai Tokerau MP. The man who infamously referred to his fellow New Zealanders as "White Motherf***ers" was responded to with "the greatest of respect" because, in the assessment of the Treaty Negotiations Minister, he is "a first class chap" and, like his colleague, John Carter (the National MP who once impersonated a Maori dole-bludger on John Banks’ Radio Pacific talk-back show) is "a fantastic MP for the Far North".

The Minister’s Pakeha critics had dared to suggest that the interests of thousands of New Zealanders had been sidelined in the Government’s rush to reach an agreement with the Maori Party.

As Mr Barnett observed: "We still don‘t know what contact has been made with the recreational and conservation interests, the business interests, the local government interests. But we do know that Government has been dealing with Maori, and that it doesn’t seem to be the so-called ‘balanced’ conversation that they suggested that they were going to have."

Mr Harawira colourfully described this one-sided process as "pandering to the rednecks".

Would that it were so.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 18 June 2010.

The Maori Party Caves

The foreshore and seabed remains the property of all New Zealanders. What belongs to nobody, belongs to everybody.

WELL, there you go. As so many on the Left of New Zealand politics have been insisting for more than eighteen months, the Maori Party’s association with the National Party could only end in disappointment, confusion and betrayal.

John Key has conceded nothing of importance in relation to the proposed Foreshore & Seabed repeal legislation presented to the Maori Party. Both sides are looking for an alternative expression to "Public Domain", but apart from that, all the essentials of National’s "solution" to the current Act remain unchanged.

The problems raised by Mark Solomon on TVNZ’s Q+A programme have not been addressed. Those lucky enough to hold title in fee-simple to sea-front property will suffer no diminution of their rights. Tribes which, through the arbitrary exigencies of history, can present no evidence of continuous "ownership" of coastal territory remain excluded from the pursuit of customary title through the courts.

And no matter what the Crown and the Maori Party end up calling the foreshore and seabed, its residual title-holder (since someone must, ultimately, have the final say) will be the Crown in Parliament.

It is a fundamental principle of the Westminster System that what a Parliament confers, a Parliament can also withdraw. Present legislators cannot bind future legislators.

Reading the Prime Minister’s statement, I’m reminded of the infamous words of Rob Muldoon – uttered following the negotiation of a deal with Social Credit over the Clyde Dam enabling legislation back in 1982.

Responding to a journalist’s question about the nature of the horse-trading that had just gone on behind the closed doors of the Prime minister’s office, Muldoon quipped:

"Horse-trading? Heh! I’ve still got all my horses!"

Putting The Beach Beyond Our Reach

Putting the beach beyond our reach: Both Maori and Pakeha have a mutual interest in taking the foreshore and seabed off the market - permanently.

THE IDEA of vesting the ownership of the foreshore and seabed in the tupuna (ancestors) of the coastal-dwelling Maori hapu (clans) is nothing if not imaginative. Property developers and mining companies are very resourceful, but (as far as I know) they’ve yet to master time travel.

In addition to permanently taking the foreshore and seabed off the market, "Tupuna Title" would also encourage the conservation of New Zealand’s coastal environment. As kaitiaki (guardians) of resources passed down to them by their ancestors, local hapu would have powerful cultural and legal incentives to protect and pass-on the rights of customary usage to their children and grandchildren.

But, how would Pakeha New Zealanders relate to this revolutionary legal concept? The short answer is: with considerable difficulty.

For a start, we’d have to be willing to embrace a radical expansion of the number of things which cannot be bought and sold. The most important of these prohibitions relate to the human person. Since the abolition of slavery in the early part of the 19th Century, it has been illegal to sell or buy human-beings – or any part thereof. Our persons are also legally protected against intentional injury, and the State is prohibited from inflicting cruel or unusual punishment upon our bodies.

The creation of "Tupuna Title" would extend the idea of legal inviolability to the coastal territories and customary rights of New Zealand’s first inhabitants. In a very real sense, these would become an extension of their bodies: things that could never be legally bought, sold, injured or abused.

Once Pakeha New Zealanders got their heads around this extension of legal inviolability, a new compact with the Maori clan-guardians of the foreshore and seabed could be negotiated. In return for reposing the title to this resource in their ancestor’s hands, and placing it beyond the reach of legal confiscation, hapu would grant to Pakeha the inalienable right to access and enjoy New Zealand’s beaches.

But, are we Pakeha ready to embrace a concept as radical as "Tupuna Title"? Or, would we rather the whole of New Zealand’s foreshore and seabed remain vested in the Crown – which we, through our dominant position in Parliament, control? What are the chances of Pakeha giving that up?

No better, I would say, than the chances of the iwi-based Maori corporations having any truck with the notion that their interests should be subordinated to those of the individual hapu and whanau – whose claims to exercise customary usage remain the strongest.

It was the Ngati Apa iwi, and its repeatedly refused applications to establish a commercial aquaculture enterprise in the Marlborough Sounds, that precipitated the legal and political debate which gave birth to the Maori Party.

That debate was both framed and articulated by the growing class of Maori middle-class professionals. They have become the party’s principal advisers, just as the top layer of Maori businessmen have become its principal supporters. Unsurprisingly, it is for the Maori middle-class and the large iwi corporates that the Maori Party now speaks.

What the Maori Party is seeking, on their behalf, is a legal formula for turning the customary rights of hapu into profitable opportunities for iwi entrepreneurs.

The Green Party co-leader, Metiria Turei, sees it like this:

"The most likely outcome is repeal [of the Foreshore & Seabed Act] but legislation which results in exactly the same situation: a confiscation; a denial of access to the courts; the benefits going to some, perhaps, of the wealthier Maori organisations, but not to the hapu and the whanau on the ground who came to our select committee and pleaded with us to protect their customary title."

It’s hard to fault Ms Turei’s reasoning. To date, all of the Government’s statements on the issue have been framed in terms of negotiations between iwi and the Crown. The simplest solution – returning to the legal status quo ante and allowing the Courts to determine customary title on a case-by-case basis – is regarded by everyone (except Act) as too risky politically.

With only the Green Party willing to champion hapu rights, it’s pretty clear that the question of who "owns" the foreshore and seabed will be settled by some sort of "deal" between iwi and the Crown (i.e. the Maori Party, National and Labour).

I seriously doubt whether the concept of "Tupuna Title" will make the cut.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 6 November 2009.

Who Wants the Foreshore & Seabed Act?

Contested Ground? If the notion of customary rights is to acquire a legal significance over and above that contained in the current legislation, a repetition of the "Iwi/Kiwi" conflict, which the Foreshore & Seabed Act attempts to resolve, will be unavoidable.

The Act is strongly opposed by Maori and not strongly supported – indeed, often actively opposed – by non-Maori. Had there been powerful public support for the Act we would have expected to have encountered it, but we did not.

- Ministerial Review: Foreshore & Seabed Act
　
NOTHING better illustrates the weakness of the Ministerial Review Committee’s report to the Attorney General, Chris Finlayson, than it’s self-serving assumption that powerful public support for the Foreshore & Seabed Act does not exist.

Nor could the Committee’s predisposition in favour of the Act’s repeal, be better illustrated.

Had the Committee been genuinely interested in gauging the level of popular support for the Foreshore & Seabed Act, it would have commissioned an independent survey of public opinion. The fact that the Committee did not do this suggests a number of things.

It suggests that they were frightened of what a properly conducted attitudinal survey might have revealed.

If so, they made a crucial error. The whole fraught issue of who owns the foreshore and seabed was driven almost entirely by Pakeha mistrust of Maori intentions, and by the insistence that every New Zealander’s right to enjoy the beaches be irrevocably enshrined in statute law?

The Committee needed to know if this was still the case.

The refusal to scientifically test public opinion also suggests that something else was at work in the committee’s deliberations besides fear. It’s difficult to give it a name, but it has something to do with the notion that the views of Pakeha unsympathetic to Maori issues can be (and should be?) safely ignored.

It’s a notion which surfaces whenever the subject of Maori rights arises in elite circles. And it’s based on the conviction that your average Pakeha "redneck" is too ignorant and prejudiced vis-à-vis the tangata whenua to have an opinion worth hearing.

The Committee’s dismissive statement powerfully reinforces this suggestion of elitism. It obviously never occurred to Finlayson that the choice of a panel comprised of a Maori judicial activist, a sympathetic academic lawyer, and the daughter of Tipene O’Reagan, just might signal to individuals and groups strongly supportive of the Act that turning up would be a waste of time. (At least one such group has stated that when speaking to their submission they got the distinct impression the Committee didn’t want to hear what they were saying.)

There’s another possible reason the Ministerial Review Committee did not encounter very many supporters of the Act on their travels. Bluntly speaking, it’s because the vast majority of Pakeha New Zealanders almost certainly believe that the matter was settled five years ago. What’s more, with a National Government in power, the possibility of the Act’s repeal is probably inconceivable to all those Pakeha "rednecks" who elected Key to office. This is, after all, the same political party which gave us the "Iwi/Kiwi" billboards.

And it is upon this rock of Pakeha expectation that the Committee’s report is likely to founder.

To avoid the sort of devastating shift in political allegiance that Don Brash achieved with his infamous Orewa speech, John Key must provide his Pakeha supporters with a rock-solid guarantee that their ability to stroll, swim, sail, fish, and generally enjoy New Zealand’s coastline will not be in any way undermined. And this is, indeed, the line he has been pushing ever since the report’s release last week.

But what could guarantee public access more effectively than "the single biggest land nationalisation statute enacted in New Zealand history"? At present there is simply no disputing the Crown’s ownership of the seabed and foreshore. By passing the explicit legislative measures recommended under international law, the Crown formally extinguished Maori customary title.
That’s why Maori remain so aggrieved.

But if the Act is repealed – what then? Will it be replaced by a new piece of legislation which simply, in slightly more conciliatory language, re-imposes Labour’s original solution: a sort of Foreshore & Seabed Act "Lite"? Would anyone in Maoridom – let alone the Maori Party – accept that?

And if legislation conferring real property rights on Maori hapu and iwi is introduced? Aren’t we then right back where the country found itself after the Court of Appeal’s fateful decision of 19 June 2003?

Key and Finlayson can obfuscate as much as they like about the Committee recognising Kiwis’ cultural affinity for the beach, but "recognising" something is not the same as surrounding it with enforceable legal protections. Just as acknowledging the public’s "interest" in maintaining "access" to the foreshore and seabed, is very far from acknowledging their right to go there whenever they wish.

And that is the question the Committee should have commissioned a reputable polling agency to ask Pakeha New Zealanders: "Would you be concerned if the Act of Parliament which guarantees your right to stroll, swim, sail, fish, and generally enjoy New Zealand’s coastline, was repealed?"

Now, it may be perfectly obvious why the Committee didn’t ask that question, but the Prime Minister would be well advised to ask the National Party’s pollsters to get the answer. Because if he believes that this issue can be finessed away with soothing phrases and meaningless assurances, and that he and his Maori Party allies will be permitted to cobble together a piece of legislation which extinguishes the foreshore and seabed as the common property of all New Zealanders, then he and his government are in for a very unpleasant surprise.

Goff may be unwilling to play the race-card in the same way as Brash. To salve Labour’s wounded conscience on the issue, he may even help to construct yet another bi-partisan "consensus" over the explosive implications of legally acknowledging tino rangatiratanga. With the Greens, that would give National an impressive parliamentary majority for repeal. But the Prime Minister would be foolish to think that a parliamentary majority is the be-all and end-all of politics.

Because, inevitably, somewhere out there in "punterland" there will be someone with the requisite political skills, and the necessary finance to mobilise them, who’s going to seize upon any attempt to limit New Zealanders’ right to walk freely on their nation’s beaches, and turn it into a populist crusade of such electoral power that our political landscape will be utterly transformed – and not for the better.

Te Riri Pakeha – the white man’s anger – was ugly enough in the Nineteenth Century. It will look no prettier in the Twenty-First.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 9 July 2009.

Our Common Heritage

Unity trumps Identity: Labour's twenty-five-year love affair with the politics of identity has seen its share of the popular vote dwindle: from commanding nearly 50 percent electorate support in the early 1970s, to barely a third of the voters in 2008. Successful left-wing politics has always been about promoting the sort of just and equal society citizens acting together can create. It should never be about fulfilling the discrete, and often contradictory, agendas of groups created out of nothing more than the accidents of their members' births.

THANKS to Winston Peters, Labour now has some serious thinking to do.

Mr Peters appearance on TVNZ’s Q&A programme came as a timely reminder that, on issues as controversial as who "owns" the foreshore and seabed, Parliament is not the be-all and end-all of the political process. More to the point, with an electoral base of approximately 100,000, and the rudiments (at least) of a nationwide party organisation, NZ First is more than capable of filling any political vacuum created by National, Labour, Act, the Greens and the Maori Party "uniting" to smother an incipient Pakeha backlash against the repeal of the Foreshore & Seabed Act.

Labour, in particular, should ponder the consequences of allowing Mr Peters to apply his considerable campaigning skills to this issue. The Leader of the Opposition, Phil Goff, needs to decide – and quickly – if he is happy to see Helen Clark’s and Michael Cullen’s handiwork repudiated by the Labour Left. And, if he isn’t, whether a resolute defence of the Foreshore & Seabed Act would help Labour reconnect with all those communities alienated by the social-liberalism of its disastrous third term.

Amidst all the Maori Party talk about the foreshore and seabed being "stolen" (a palpable lie) it is worth reminding ourselves of the Act’s purpose: "to preserve the public foreshore and seabed in perpetuity as the common heritage of all New Zealanders".

That phrase, "the common heritage of all New Zealanders", offers a clear path forward for the Labour Party. A path which, on the vexed question of Maori-Pakeha relations, would lead it in a new, and much more wholesome, direction than the path it has been following since the early 1980s.

Essentially, for the past quarter-century the Labour Party has been driven by the "politics of identity": the ideologies underpinning the "new social movements" of anti-racism, feminism, gay rights, the rights of the disabled, and environmentalism.

These were the causes of the largely middle-class, university educated professionals who poured into the Labour Party and (to a lesser extent) the trade union movement, in response to the authoritarian and confrontational political style of the Muldoon-led National Government of 1975-84.

And, just as these new middle-class professionals swiftly overwhelmed and supplanted the working-class membership of the "old" Labour Party, their new "identity politics" overwhelmed and supplanted the socially conservative, but economically radical, working-class politics which had guided the party since its birth in 1916.

The great problem with identity politics is that it takes as its focus a series of factors for which the individual is not responsible, and over which he or she has no control. Our race, gender, sexuality, etc are attributes we inherit – they have nothing to do with personal choice, and, for the most part, they are factors we can do nothing about.

This is less of a problem when, in terms of socio-economic, cultural and political status, you’re on the debit side of the historical ledger, because then the world can be forced to make good the discrepancy. If, however, you’re not black, female, or gay, life can get pretty rough. White, heterosexual, males, in particular, are expected to pay, and go on paying, until the scales are evened-up.

But, twenty-five years on, it has become painfully clear that the application of identity politics has benefited no one so much as the social strata which promoted it in the first place: middle-class, university educated professionals.

Working-class women still earn less than their brothers. Working-class Maori still fill our prisons. Working-class gays are still persecuted. Working-class disabled people are still shut out from a full and equal life. Working-class environments remain bleak.

That’s why emphasising our common heritage and, more importantly, promoting our common future, promises to pay such hefty political dividends. Apart from emphasising the things that unite us, our common humanity, it’s a political credo which reaffirms human-beings’ ability to change their world.

Our place in this country need not be dictated by an accident of birth: whether we are Maori or Pakeha; but by how much each of us is willing to contribute to the goals that we – as a nation – set ourselves.

If Phil Goff and Labour refuse to seize this opportunity to democratise and collectivise the politics of national aspiration, then you may be certain Winston Peters and NZ First will grab it with both hands.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 10 July 2009.　

Slouching towards Wellington

The many faces of Winston Peters: all of them, whether we like it or not - our own.

THE POLITICAL CLASS has never understood Winston Peters. Even when they thought they were stoning him to political death in the run-up to the 2008 election, they had no idea what they were really doing.

Peters is "us" – New Zealand – plagued with all our vices, and blessed with all our virtues. Drive him from Parliament and our democracy doesn’t become stronger – it becomes weaker. Banish his "redneckery" from public discourse and all you do is infuse it with the terrible allure of the forbidden.

When I think of Peters, I am reminded of the scene in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, when the beleaguered president stands before the portrait of JFK in the White House and says: ‘When the American people look at you, they see themselves as they would like to be. When they look at me, they see themselves as they are."

That’s the way it is with Winston.

Some of us, of course, are appalled at the sight, but a great many others like what they see. That certainly would have been the case when they watched the clips from last Sunday’s Q&A replayed on One Network News.

There he was – the people’s champion – saying all the things they had been waiting to hear someone in Parliament say ever since the Ministerial Review of the Foreshore & Seabed Act was released on Wednesday, 2 July 2009.

You certainly have to give Winston credit: not only for the performance itself – which was as good as anything he had ever done in the past – but also for his timing. Since the loss of 2008, he has watched and he has waited. And now, thanks to John Key’s extraordinary political naiveté, the moment for him to make his move has arrived.

Like his namesake, Winston Churchill, he’s been dwelling in the political wilderness – driven from power by his enemies, and deserted by his friends. But on Sunday, sensing a moment of national peril, and with the people's supposed "representatives" all succumbing to "sickly white liberal" appeasement, he stepped forward to demand action.

This is National’s worst nightmare: Winston live on network television; whistling "Dixie" and flashing that trademark grin. Naturally, Messers Farrar, Slater and Hooton will spit and snarl, but, in their Machiavellian heart-of-hearts, they know that Peters is on his way back – with scores to settle.

The big question for the Labour Opposition to answer is: "Do we try to beat him, or join him?"

Phil Goff has a heaven-sent opportunity to re-connect with the constituency Labour turned its back on between 2005 and 2008.

Will he take it – and become Prime Minister? Or, will he bow to his Left, expiate the guilt of 2003-04, and see Labour’s fortunes falter?

Surely he’s not silly enough to cast aside an issue that could rescue his party from endless years on the Opposition benches? Surely he won’t forgo the opportunity to join forces with the man who can shatter National’s grip on provincial New Zealand? Or spurn a coalition partner capable of electorally eclipsing both the Greens and the Maori Party?

It’s a no-brainer Phil.

Prove to us you’ve got the balls to do what all leaders must do, one way or the other.

See power lying in the gutter – and pick it up.

It's all pure W.B. Yeats, boys and girls. The words of The Second Coming need only the slightest tweaking:

… somewhere, in bowells of TVNZ
A body in a Saville Row suit with a head of steel-grey hair,
His gaze blank and pitiless as the TV lights,
Is flossing his bright white teeth, while all around him
Flit the shadows of indignant Gallery journalists.
The darkness drops again; but now we know
That eight months of stony silence
Were broken by a Ministerial Review,
And what svelte beast, his hour come round again,
Slouches toward Wellington to be reborn?

My Enemy's Friends

My Enemy's Friends: Until the Maori Party ceases to support the neoliberal agenda of the National Party and its allies, it must remain the un-natural enemy of all progressive New Zealanders.

SOMETIMES important political questions just have to be answered – no matter how much we might prefer to avoid them.

A few weeks ago, I encountered a posting by "Lew" at the Kiwipolitico blog entitled "Memo to the Left: The Maori Party is not your enemy."

I was sorely tempted to respond: "Memo to Lew: Yes it is." But blogosphere debates with well-meaning but misguided political naïfs like Lew are never-ending, and I had better things to do with my time.

The question, however, refused to go away – resurfacing at a PPTA field officers’conference in Auckland.

As I was the guest speaker, I could hardly avoid answering, and I’m afraid my reply was rather brutal.

"Yes, the Maori Party did make a huge mistake by throwing in its lot with National. No, I do not think the Maori leadership had a very clear view of their long-term political interests. Yes, the National Party did trick them. And no, I do not believe – even after six months – they realise how very wickedly they’ve been deceived, nor how much damage their relationship with National is about to inflict on both Maori and Pakeha New Zealanders."

To properly understand the Maori Party/National Party relationship, it is first necessary to comprehend the scale of the betrayal represented by the Foreshore and Seabed Act.

For Maori, the Fifth Labour Government’s decision to nullify the Court of Appeal’s judgement on Maori customary rights was every bit as egregious – and just as devastating – as the Fourth Labour Government’s betrayal of the broader labour movement under Rogernomics.

The Maori Party was born out of the same sort of deep political anguish that saw an embittered working-class battler scrawl on the wall of the Christchurch Trades Hall: "You were supposed to help." The same sort of anger that led to the formation of the NewLabour Party in 1989, and the Alliance in 1991.

It took nearly ten years for the rage of the people who walked out of the Labour Party to subside sufficiently for Helen Clark to be invited to the 1998 Alliance Conference, and for the delegates to vote unanimously in favour of a coalition with her despised party. For most of that decade the emotional intensity of the Alliance’s attacks on Labour had always been much greater than its criticisms of National. How could it be otherwise? Pain inflicted by someone you love is always more hurtful than the blows of an enemy.

With feelings running so high, the old proverb, "my enemy’s enemy is my friend", takes on a grim logic.

But, of course, your enemy’s enemy can just as easily be your enemy too – and in the case of the foreshore and seabed debacle this was especially true. Labour’s erstwhile deputy-leader, Michael Cullen, was telling no more than the truth when he pointed out that his government had no room to manoeuvre over the Foreshore & Seabed Bill.

From the moment the Court of Appeal’s decision was announced, Labour’s pollsters began to register a rising level of anti-Maori feeling in the Pakeha population. Clearly, it would require a strong, bi-partisan effort to withstand such political pressure. Of course, National’s pollsters were picking up the same racist vibes as Labour, but, rather than stand against them, the strategists surrounding National’s new leader, Don Brash, opted to exploit them.

The Orewa Speech delivered by Brash in January 2004, and the extraordinary shift in political allegiance from Labour to National that it accomplished, destroyed any hope of a bi-partisan approach to resolving the issues raised by the Court of Appeal.

Labour was left with just two choices: It could either take a principled stand against National’s racism – and watch its electoral support evaporate; or, it could bend before the racist gale, pass the most generous legislation it could get away with, and wait for better weather.

Labour’s Maori MPs – with the obvious exception of Tariana Turia – knew enough about te riri pakeha (the white man’s anger) to grasp that, in the long term, their constituents would be better off under Labour’s reluctant racists, than they would be under a National Party eagerly exploiting anti-Maori feeling to stay ahead in the polls.

It’s the failure of the Maori Party leadership to make the same differentiation that is setting up their people for disaster.

Driven by its nationalist ideology, the Maori Party refuses to draw a distinction between the Pakeha Right and the Pakeha Left. Both the National Party and the Business Roundtable have exploited this ideological colour-blindness with consummate political skill. John Key has deployed his considerable personal charm to engage with and befriend the Maori Party MPs. (Something Labour, unaccountably, refused to do.) Meanwhile, the Business Roundtable, in an astonishing display of ideological legerdemain, somehow persuaded Turia and her co-leader, Pita Sharples, that tino rangatiratanga and laissez-faire capitalism amounted to the same thing.

On the strength of this (false) identification, both National and the Business Roundtable have been quietly transforming the Maori Party into a stalking-horse for a new round of neo-liberal "reforms". Maori Party MPs are already supporting the privatisation of prisons, and their endorsement of education vouchers and private-public-partnerships in healthcare delivery is widely anticipated.

Seduced by the Right’s uninhibited "love-bombing" (not to mention the "mana enhancement" of ministerial salaries and prestige) Turia and Sharples seem oblivious to National’s and Act’s continuing promotion of anti-Maori prejudice among their conservative base.

While "that nice Mr Key" has been playing volleyball at Ratana Pa, paying court to the "underclass" of McGeehan Close, and hongi-ing furiously with every Maori leader he can find, the National and Act parties have been indulging in "dog-whistle politics" like there is no tomorrow.

In place of the "Maori privilege" of Brash’s Orewa speech, the two right-wing parties have substituted the over-heated rhetoric of "law and order". Why? Because whenever terms like "child abuse", "violent crime" and "dysfunctional families" appear in the news headlines, the stereotype conjured up in the mind of the "right"-thinking Pakeha voter is black – not white.

Not content with becoming a stalking-horse for neo-liberalism, the Maori Party has also allowed itself to be cast in the role of the Judas-sheep: bleating dutifully about Maori "empowerment", even as it leads its trusting followers into the slaughter-houses of poverty, ill-health, educational failure and incarceration.

Although they dearly wish it were otherwise, until the Maori Party stops advancing the Right’s extremist agenda, it must remain the un-natural enemy of all progressive New Zealanders.

This is a slightly amended version of an essay originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 28 May 2009.