Undoing The State

Nation Building?: If a state is merely the institutional expression of territorial seizure, then the law is merely the state's way of justifying and entrenching the land-grab which gave it birth. By this reckoning, any State which recognises (let alone responds to) the claims of those who inhabited the territory prior to its seizure (viz The Marine & Coastal Area Bill) is committing an act of pure folly.

WHAT IS THE DEBATE over the foreshore and seabed really about? Is it simply an argument over who has the best claim to ownership (and, therefore, right-of-access) to New Zealand’s beaches? A dispute over the precise nature of "Customary Title" – driven by a dispossessed indigenous minority desperate to retain this last, vestigial margin of their patrimony? Or is it about something altogether more profound? Is the debate over the foreshore and seabed really about the nature of law, and the future of the state which enforces it?

Let’s not forget that this whole debate began when the Court of Appeal, overturning decades of what was believed to be "settled law", ruled that the customary rights of Maori to the resources of the foreshore and seabed had not been extinguished by the Crown. If those rights could be legally established, said the Court, full ownership of the designated land and resources could pass to the claimants.

The rest of the story is well known to us all, so let’s pause here and ask ourselves what, exactly, the Court of Appeal thought it was doing – or more accurately undoing.

A majority of the judges of the Court were clearly of the view that the New Zealand State was conceived in law and remains subordinate to legal principles and precedents. According to this view, the ownership rights of a country’s aboriginal inhabitants, if not formally and explicitly extinguished, remain in force.

But, as the excellent docudrama, Waitangi: What Really Happened, broadcast on Waitangi Day makes hilariously clear, New Zealand wasn’t conceived in anything except utter confusion. Such law as there was existed only where there was both the will and the means to enforce it. Hone Heke’s axe spoke eloquently and repeatedly on this subject.

Indeed, one could argue that the law – as a tangible and enforceable set of rules – only acquired a purposeful existence after the concrete foundations of the New Zealand State had already been laid.

That didn’t happen at Waitangi – or even at the inaugural meeting of the first New Zealand Parliament in 1854. New Zealand, in the sense of a related and co-ordinated set of institutions operating beyond the effective challenge of any other entity organised within the same territorial space, only came into existence when the settlers, assisted by several thousand imperial troops, invaded the lands and extinguished the authority of the Maori King.

That moment has been described by the legal historian, Professor Jock Brookfield, as "a revolutionary seizure of power" by the Settler State. Professor Brookfield’s description is consistent with the school of jurisprudence which holds that only when there is no other source of legitimate authority to challenge the means of its enforcement does law become real. In other words, law is a consequence – not a precondition – of state creation.

According to this view, the state is born out of what is essentially an act of territorial seizure: not to put too finer point upon it – a land grab. The whole state-building process being nothing more than an elaboration of the means required to hold onto and then manage the territory seized. The mechanisms we construct to do this are dignified by the name of "law". It is, however, dangerous to construe a legal system as anything other than the State’s creature. The law is only ever accidentally about justice. It’s always about politics.

Helen Clark understood all this very well. Her Foreshore & Seabed Act, which Maori quite accurately described as another raupatu – forcible seizure of territory - not only reiterated the "legitimacy precedes legality" formula for the benefit of the Court of Appeal, but also reaffirmed the brute historical reality that "New Zealand" was made by Pakeha, for Pakeha. If Maori were willing to become Pakeha, they could belong. If not – there’d be trouble.

I wonder if the Prime Minister fully appreciates what his Attorney General is undoing with the Marine & Coastal Area Bill – and how difficult it will be to refasten.

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

You Know Something's Wrong When ...

You Guy's Have Got To Be Kidding!: You know something's very, very wrong when the only person the Media 7 team could find to argue for the continuation of Women's Studies courses was ...

THE BETE NOIR of The Hand Mirror set ends up fronting for the value of Women’s Studies courses on Media 7.

Say what?

Yes, that’s right, the only panellist willing to defend Women’s Studies courses (and pretty much the whole feminist discourse) on last night’s Media 7 programme was the Queen of Thorns favourite prick – Chris Trotter.

Prompted by the recent decision to cancel the Women’s Studies course at Victoria University, the producers of Media 7 were keen to examine the likely impact of its demise on the coverage of gender issues by the New Zealand media.

But could they get anybody with a strong personal commitment to the teaching of Women’s Studies to appear on the show? Not on your Nelly! Sandra Coney and Sue Kedgely, founding mothers of Second Wave Feminism in New Zealand, declined. All the women in academia who were approached were unwilling to put their heads above the ivory parapet. Even the women at New Zealand’s premier feminist blogsite – The Hand Mirror – refused to participate.

Finally, in desperation (or was it out of a wicked sense of humour?) they asked Chris Trotter if he would be prepared to comment.

Well, after I stopped laughing, my first question was: "Is there no one else slightly better qualified than me – like a woman – willing to discuss this?" The producers explained that they’d lined up Deborah Coddington to discuss women in journalism, and that a young graduate of the University of Auckland’s Women’s Studies course, Hannah Lynch, would supply the voice of direct experience, but they’d been unable to find any women who were prepared to come on the programme and defend Women’s Studies per se. (To be fair, Marilyn Waring would have fronted, but she had another engagement.)

Blame it on the Imp of Perversity – but I said "Okay, I’ll do it!"

And what a weird experience it turned out to be.

The show kicked-off with an interview between Media 7 journalist Sarah Daniell and a former Women’s Studies student from Vic’ who’s gone on to become a household name in New Zealand journalism ….. John Campbell.

Okay, make that two blokes.

Then Deborah – the former libertarian and Act MP – informed the show’s stand-in host, José Barboza (you’re cursing the timing of that Webstock Conference now, aren’t you Russell) that, as a young journalist, she took her inspiration from Joan Didion, Gloria Steinem and woman journalists writing for the left-wing American periodical Mother Jones. Who knew? And, what went wrong?

For my money, however, the star of the show was Hannah. With the forbearance of age, I shall pass over this budding journalist’s first foray into public political commentary in silence. The programme is viewable here. Make up your own mind.

Suffice to say that, by the end of the programme I was ready to start bellowing out the chorus of I Am Woman and, at a pinch, would have burned my Y-fronts on camera.

Is the backlash born of the barbecue-pit and the sports bar really this strong? Have we truly reached such a low intellectual level in this country, and is the climate of fear in our universities, corporations, party caucuses, trade union offices and newsrooms really so great, that the only people willing to defend what is arguably the most important progressive movement of the past half-century are John Campbell and ….. me!

Surely, there’s something very, very wrong with this picture?

No Ordinary Bill

Liberty Leading The People: The principle of equality has long been regarded as indispensible to the achievement of liberty. The Marine & Coastal Areas Bill, by establishing the new property right of "Customary Title", will enshrine in law a power that only Maori may exercise. By negating the principle of equality in this way, the National Government threatens the freedom of all New Zealanders.

THE GOVERNMENT’S DECISION to rush through the remaining stages of the Marine & Coastal Area Bill is as ill-considered as it is dangerous. For this is no ordinary piece of legislation, easily repealed by a newly-elected House of Representatives. It is a bill which confers upon Maori, by virtue of their indigeneity, a new kind of property right (Customary Title), along with a powerful new set of legal powers to enforce that right – powers which the legislation’s many critics believe will undermine the generally accepted principles of liberal democracy.

The formal equality of all citizens lies at the heart of the liberal-democratic state. Indeed, any state which invests one part of the population with more rights than another, or strips a minority of citizens of rights enjoyed by their neighbours, is quite rightly condemned for promoting inequality.

The historical path towards full political equality has been anything but smooth. Revolutions and civil wars have been fought to secure its full recognition.

The right to elect a government, for example, was originally restricted to high-status men of property. And even when the property qualification was abolished, women remained excluded from the franchise. In most colonial societies the indigenous population was denied any role at all in government.

The key point to acknowledge here is that, from the 18th to the 21st Century, the expansion of human rights has been a genuine progression: from privilege and exclusion – to equality and increasing participation.

Our own founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi, reflects the logic of this progression. The absorption of New Zealand into the British Empire (Article One) is followed by a clear description of how the transition (from tribal society to modern state) is to be managed (Article Two). The document is then concluded by the granting of formal equality to all of Queen Victoria’s new subjects (Article Three). By the standards of the time, this was an extraordinarily generous arrangement – a triumph of missionary zeal and the British Foreign and Colonial Office’s liberal optimism.

Until relatively recently, that liberal optimism did not appear to have been misplaced. Through much travail, and many injustices, the transition of the Maori people – from pre-modern tribalism to full citizenship in a modern state – seemed on the point of fulfilment.

In the 1970s, however, New Zealand intellectuals’ faith in this progressive vision faltered. The reality of economic inequality, coupled with the persistence and institutionalisation of racial prejudice, undermined their confidence in the assimilationist policies of successive New Zealand Governments. Maori intellectuals, in particular, rejected the liberal-democratic assumptions upon which assimilation was based. Maori, they insisted, possessed an indissoluble and separate identity, which could only be protected in and by Maori-controlled institutions. Article Two of the Treaty – which guaranteed tino rangatiratanga – was not a formula for transition, but a charter for the permanent preservation of tribal power and independence.

The extraordinary fact of the past forty years of our history is the manner in which this bold rejection of Captain Hobson’s famous declaration of 6 February 1840: he iwi ko tahi tatou (now we are one people) has become the official policy of the New Zealand State.

Not, I hasten to add, the policy of the New Zealand people – who have never been given the opportunity to formally endorse – or reject – the separatist "two nations in one state" orthodoxy which now prevails in our universities and throughout the public service. Though these latter groups celebrate "The Treaty Debate", the term is cruelly inappropriate. The only issue up for debate among New Zealand’s elite policy-makers is the speed at which our liberal-democratic institutions should be "adapted" to the new bi-cultural orthodoxy.

The Minister for Treaty Negotiations, Chris Finlayson, has unabashedly located himself alongside the Maori Party at the sharp end of this sham debate. His airy sanctioning of the abrupt curtailment of the Maori Select Committee’s consideration of the Marine & Coastal Areas Bill made a nonsense of his Government’s earlier promises of democratic accountability.

The overwhelming majority of submitters opposed the legislation (a situation which the Prime Minister, John Key, had previously reassured the electorate would cause the bill to be withdrawn). No matter. Mr Finlayson, like the leader-writer of The NZ Herald, clearly holds the view that there must be "a gradual acceptance that a post-colonial state cannot be governed simply by majority rule".

There’s simply no way Mr Finlayson and his Maori Party allies are about to let a few "clowns" prevent them from exploiting a wavering and wafer-thin majority in the House of Representatives to pass a piece of legislation inimical to the democratic beliefs – and rights – of all New Zealanders.

Dissatisfied Maori nationalists in Tamaki Makaurau are organising a hikoi of protest from the north against Mr Finlayson’s bill. Perhaps dissatisfied Pakeha democrats in the south should do the same?

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 15 February 2011.

Could It Happen Here? (A Scenario Inspired by Egypt’s Revolutionary Moment)

The Fire Next Time: Suppose the 30,000-strong hikoi that rolled into Parliament Grounds in May 2004 had refused to disperse? If New Zealand is ever to have an "Egyptian Moment", that moment will be created by the tangata whenua - on behalf of us all.

THE GREAT HUMAN SPECTACLE of revolutionary passion in Cairo’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square has prompted me to think about what could possibly spark a similar uprising here in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

To my mind, there is only one chink in the armour of the existing state apparatus large enough for something sharp and dangerous to be driven into its heart – and that is the increasingly ill-defined relationship between the New Zealand State and the tangata whenua.

Crucially, the State’s own perception of its powers and responsibilities in this bitterly contested area, including its sense of legitimacy, has become deeply confused and conflicted. Confronted with a sufficiently powerful challenge from the Maori people, it is possible the Government would become politically paralysed just long enough for events on the street to spiral out of control and acquire the sort of unstoppable momentum that brought down President Hosni Mubarak.

It might begin with something as simple as the recent call by Maori Council members from Tamaki Makaurau for a nationwide hikoi against the Marine & Coastal Area Bill. The call was accompanied by a vote of No Confidence in the Maori Party leadership, which could easily be interpreted as an invitation to the Maori rebel MP, Hone Harawira, to make himself available to lead the proposed hikoi – just as he led the 2004 protest against Labour’s Foreshore & Seabed Bill.

Let us assume that the simmering dissatisfaction with the Maori Party leadership’s handling of the Marine & Coastal Area Bill, and its treatment of Mr Harawira, is powerful enough to mobilise the same sort of numbers as the 2004 hikoi. And, let us further assume that in 2011 an additional list of grievances gets added to the protesters' bill-of-fare.

What if issues such as the sale of New Zealand land to foreigners; the threat to privatise state assets; the loss of sovereignty inherent in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement; and the constant degradation of Aotearoa’s natural environment; were grafted on to the injustices of the Marine & Coastal Area Bill? What if the hikoi’s leaders possessed the revolutionary sophistication to forge a conceptual link between the abrogation of tino rangatiratanga in the Nineteenth Century, and the loss of New Zealand’s economic sovereignty in the Twenty-First? Between what happened to Maori then, and what is happening to Pakeha now? What if Maori and Pakeha grievances became conjoined?

A hikoi filling the streets of Wellington, armed with a list of revolutionary demands, and made up of not only of Maori of all ages, but also of a surprising number of Pakeha, advances on Parliament. The protest leader tells the vast throng filling Parliament Grounds that the time for piecemeal change has passed: that only a thorough-going revision of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements – as promised by the National Government – will rescue Aotearoa. Such a revision, he declares, must be based on Treaty of Waitangi, and must guarantee to Maori and Pakeha, alike, the full and undisputed possession of all their rights – political, cultural and economic.

Then, over the cheers of the 30,000-strong crowd, their leader warns them that they must learn from the events of 2004. That they must not simply return to their homes and leave the making of change to others. That they must stay where they are – until their demands are met.

With this last suggestion, the revolutionary potential of the hikoi becomes ominously clear. Watching from the Beehive, the Prime Minister must now decide whether to clear the grounds, or enter into dialogue with the protesters – and thus confer upon their demands an aura of legitimacy.

The Government dithers, and the delay is fatal. As word spreads – by e-mail, texting, Twitter and through the blogosphere – hundreds, and then thousands, of young people pour into Central Wellington to join the uprising.

Reluctantly, the Prime Minister orders Police to clear the protesters from Parliament Grounds. The Police Commissioner is uneasy. There are close to 50,000 people participating in what is already being called the Peoples Constitutional Convention of Aotearoa. Moving them will require a massive use of force.

Rumours quickly spread that the Police intend to use tear-gas on the protesters. The crowd’s instant response is to storm Parliament Buildings. The front doors are forced open – the revolutionary crowd now occupies the House of Representatives.

Right-wing students and business executives, whipped into a murderous fury by right-wing bloggers, attack the protesters still occupying Parliament Grounds. Shots are fired. Several people are killed and many injured. Police officers are accused of allowing the right-wingers through their lines. Some accuse AOS personnel of handing out weapons to the counter-revolutionaries.

The Prime Minister declares a State of Emergency and calls upon the Military to "assist the civil power". Mass demonstrations and strikes break out in all the main centres. Tens of thousands march to mark the funerals of the murdered protesters. Occupations of Auckland’s Aotea Square, Cathedral Square in Christchurch, and the Octagon in Dunedin, follow.

Those in occupation of the House of Representatives declare themselves to be the Provisional Government of the Bi-Cultural Republic of Aotearoa/New Zealand and order the New Zealand Defence Force to defend the Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti from their enemies.

Maori soldiers, ordered to suppress the uprisings, mutiny. The Provisional Government of the new republic now has an army.

The revolution becomes unstoppable.

History's On Hone's Side

Media Target: Practically every journalist in the Parliamentary Press Gallery has spent the past week channelling the Maori Party leadership's antagonistic thoughts towards Hone Harawira. Had they stepped back a few paces from the action, and considered the historical precedents for principled dissidence within New Zealand political parties, they would have realised that Hone's chances of emerging from the current crisis with enhanced - rather than diminished - mana are actually pretty good.

THE CRISIS GRIPPING the Maori Party deserves much better media analysis than it’s getting. The final result of the 2011 General Election may well turn on who emerges victorious from the conflict between Hone Harawira’s faction of the Maori Party and the faction led by Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples. What we are witnessing is a struggle of considerable political significance.

In our own struggle to gain perspective on this crisis, what we – the voters – need most is a parliamentary press gallery that places sufficient distance between itself and the main antagonists to give us an independent account of the action.

Sadly, this isn’t happening.

Overwhelmingly, the story that is being relayed to us by the Press Gallery is the story the Maori Party (and, one suspects, the National Party) leadership wants us to hear.

Now, we mustn’t be too hard on our political journalists. Proximity to power is a crucial aspect of parliamentary reporting. Without ready access to cabinet ministers and party leaders the Gallery simply cannot do its job. Proximity isn’t everything, however. To avoid being "captured" by the political movers and shakers, it’s vital that political journalists regularly step outside the parliamentary hothouse to breathe in some un-spun air.

It would also be of great assistance to the Press Gallery’s readers, listeners and viewers if it possessed a slightly firmer grasp on New Zealand’s recent political history. Because, on at least four separate occasions over the course of the past quarter-century we’ve witnessed intra-party crises very similar to the crisis unfolding in the Maori Party .

In 1989 there was Jim Anderton’s defection from the Labour Party. In 1992, Winston Peters defected from the National Party. In 2002, the Alliance – a small group of relatively inexperienced politicians in coalition with the much larger Labour Party – imploded over its leadership’s decision to support the invasion of Afghanistan. And, finally, in 2004, Tariana Turia abandoned Helen Clark’s government over the Foreshore & Seabed Act.

In assessing the many possible outcomes of the current crisis, surely it would be helpful if our political journalists interrogated these historical precedents?

Were they to do so they would quickly discover that the principled defection of a dissident MP is very far from being the slow walk to oblivion that so many Gallery journalists ("assisted", no doubt, by the governing coalition’s spin-doctors) seem to think it is. Because, to the contrary, Jim Anderton, Winston Peters and Tariana Turia were all re-elected by their constituents, and all of them founded a new political party which went on to play a major role in the political life of New Zealand.

The fate of the Alliance is also instructive. Like the Maori Party, the coalition drawn together by Jim Anderton contained elements spanning virtually the entire political spectrum. When a serious conflict erupted these disparate elements simply weren’t prepared to compromise and the party split asunder. Its now separated components were never again able to attract significant electoral support.

What do these historical precedents suggest in relation to the current crisis in the Maori Party?

First, they suggest that if he is forced out of his party Mr Harawira will be triumphantly re-elected by the voters of Te Tai Tokerau.

Second, they suggest that, by forcing Mr Harawira out of the Maori Party, Ms Turia and Mr Sharples would precipitate a fatal split in their nationwide organisation – from which they will find it extremely difficult to recover. (Let’s not forget, the defection of Jim Anderton and his followers effectively kept the Labour Party out of power for three electoral cycles.)

Third, they suggest that if Mr Harawira possesses the courage to test his claim that more than half of Maoridom has tired of the Maori Party’s overly accommodating relationship with National; and if he is prepared to offer Maori voters an alternative political vehicle in November; then Mr Harawira can be reasonably confident of playing a vital role in the formation of New Zealand’s next government.

Listening to the journalists of the Parliamentary Press Gallery regurgitate the private promptings of the Prime Minister’s and the Maori Party’s spin-doctors, we could all be forgiven for assuming that by "dealing decisively" with Mr Harawira, Mr Sharples and Ms Turia have miraculously cauterised their party’s gaping wounds.

Well, it ain’t necessarily so. Self-inflicted damage is always the most difficult to repair.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 February 2011.

Sorry Bomber (Some Thoughts On Martyn "Bomber" Bradbury's Call For A New Left Party)

Revolutions aren't made on television, Bomber, they're made on the street. And have you met the people who live on that street!

ONE’S FELLOW CITIZENS can be a terrible disappointment, Bomber. You will discover this the moment you cross the Rubicon from political observer to political participant. "The People", God bless ‘em, especially when encountered individually, are not always hewn from that heroic material so beloved by 18th and 19th Century revolutionaries.

Standing on their doorsteps, Bomber, it’s easy to become profoundly disillusioned with the human-beings whose votes decide your country’s future. Regardless of their location in the social hierarchy, and irrespective of their role in the processes of production, individuals all-too-frequently behave in ways utterly at odds with their objective self-interest. Parliamentary campaigners for the Left will regale you with stories of anti-feminist women, racist Maori, pro-capitalist proletarians and anti-welfare beneficiaries.

"There better be wisdom in crowds," grumbles the weary candidate following a particularly gruelling canvassing drive, "because there’s bugger-all in the average voter!"

Even worse than the voters with no conception of their own self-interest, are the voters who just don’t care. If you can get past the vicious dog chained-up in their front yard, and make your presence known over the blare of their massive sound system, your party-political spiel elicits nothing more than a bemused shake of the head.

"Not interested, mate", they’ll drawl, shutting the door firmly in your face. If their mailbox wasn’t already stuffed-full of junk mail, you’d leave them a pamphlet – or slip your card under the door. But that low growl, emanating from the Hound of the Baskervilles straining against his chain just a few metres to your right, suggests that it might be wiser to move on to the next house in the street.

As often as not – the neighbours are even worse.

But, of course, if you’re really serious about forming a New Left Party, Bomber, you’ll soon be experiencing all these things first hand. And don’t for a minute think there’s some way of avoiding the bruising experience of face-to-face canvassing – cos there ain’t.

The people you’re planning on drawing into the electoral process: the state-house tenants struggling to raise a family on two minimum wages; the young Maori solo-mum trying to keep it together on the DPB; the sickness beneficiary doped up to the eye-balls on lithium (because this country doesn’t really run to a decent mental health system); none of these folk read Tumeke, Bomber, or Bowalley Road, or The Standard, or Kiwipolitico. They don’t read newspapers either, or watch Citizen A. They just might pick up snatches of talk-back radio, or catch the odd TV-news bulletin – but I wouldn’t count on it.

So, to win them over you’ll have to knock on their front doors, introduce yourself, and attempt to engage them in political discussion. Which won’t happen, because while you’re launching into your spiel, they’ll be asking themselves: "What does this prick want from me? What the fuck is he talking about?"

Standing in front of them, Bomber, you’ll come across as so completely alien: so far removed from their bleak, narrow, hard-scrabble and often violent world; that you might as well have beamed down from another planet.

The barriers to effective political communication: functional illiteracy; cultural impoverishment; sheer exhaustion: each of these factors, on their own, Bomber, is enough to prevent the anomistic underclass from receiving your message. And if – as is likely – the person you’re addressing is of a different ethnicity, then your communication difficulties will be radically compounded.

So, if the underclass is politically inaccessible to the Left (which is, I’m afraid, the brutal message of the Mana by-election) then what about the working-class? Well, I’ve got news for you, Bomber, and, as Jim Anderton is fond of adding: "It’s all bad."

In fact, you should have a chat with Jim about winning and holding the support of working-class voters. Because you know what, Bomber? He was the only member of the NewLabour Party and the Alliance who ever really mastered the art.

Why? Because Jim never, ever, ever, by the slightest word or deed, gave the voters of Sydenham/Wigram reason to suppose that he considered himself, or his political and moral values, to be better than their own. In this, he remains their true representative. Like so many of them, he takes a conservative stance on abortion and illicit drug-use. But, also like them, he is prepared to embrace radical economic solutions to entrenched social problems.

It’s all about respect, Bomber. The giving of it, and the receiving of it. Respect – and respectability – lie at the heart of Anglo-Celtic working-class culture. Jim Anderton gets that. It’s why Labour could never reclaim Sydenham/Wigram from him. No matter how jarring some of their opinions on issues relating to race, gender and sexuality might be, Jim Anderton would never disrespect the people whose votes he was soliciting. He’d never call them "rednecks".

Can you say the same, Bomber? Not really.

Which leaves you politically situated slap-bang in the middle of the only political market which the "post-modern" Left has truly made its own: young(ish), well-educated, middle-income and upper-middle-income, Pakeha voters. And that market, as I’m sure you need no reminding, Bomber, is now the happy hunting-ground of both the Labour and the Green parties.

What I would say to you, Bomber, (in case you do need reminding) is that in order to win the votes of more than the ever-dwindling band of political activists who draw their ideological inspiration from the left-wing philosophers and politicians of the 19th and early-20th centuries, a New Left Party would have to offer the voters of Auckland Central, Wellington Central, Port Hills and Dunedin North more-or-less the same policies as Phil Goff and Russel Norman.

That’s the problem with the voting public, Bomber. They will insist on ignoring the Left's advice! I like the way Bertold Brecht put it in his famous poem "The Solution", written after the East German workers’ revolt of June, 1953.

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers’ Union
Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

When you work out how to do that, Bomber, please let me know.

Waitangi's Ironic Welcome

Welcoming " The Enemy": John "Junior" Popata lunges at the Prime Minister on 5 February , 2009. As he approached Te Tii Marae on 5 February 2011, did John Key grasp the irony of being greeted by Wikitana Popata as "the enemy"? Convicted alongside his brother for assaulting the Prime Minister two years ago, Wikitana was sentenced to just 100 hours of community service. A "settler government" less concerned with keeping the goodwill of Maori might not have been satisfied with such a lenient sentence.

I WONDER if the Prime Minister grasped all the ironies of his latest "welcome" to Waitangi. It’s hard to know where to begin - there were so many.

Perhaps the most obvious was the identity of the young man with the megaphone who abused Mr Key as he made his way on to Te Tii Marae.

Two years ago – to the day – Wikitana Popata and his brother, John ‘Junior’ Popata, had physically accosted Mr Key on his way to the same meeting ground.

In any other country than New Zealand such an attack would have been treated extremely seriously. It is difficult to imagine that a person found guilty of assaulting the President of the United States would be at liberty to harangue him again, from a dangerously short distance, just two years later.

True, but we Kiwis are a forgiving bunch. The National-led Government’s need to keep its Maori Party coalition partner on-side, and the extraordinary fact that the accused were relatives of the Maori Party MP, Hone Harawira (who, equally extraordinarily, gave John Key’s assailants his moral support) meant that the two young protesters’ ultimate punishment was very light.

Now, there are those who celebrate this sort of easy-going approach to the personal security of our politicians. That the Prime Minister can be manhandled by protesters in front of the television cameras without the Diplomatic Protection Squad emptying their pistols into those responsible is held to be a good thing.

Our national day is a very relaxed affair compared to, say, France’s Bastille Day. Tanks and guided-missile-carriers do not roll beneath a triumphal arch as Mirage jet fighters trail banners of red, white and blue smoke across the nation’s capital – not in this neck of the woods. Here the tradition is for several hundred protesters, shouting separatist slogans and carrying their own flag, to march up to the nation’s birthplace on the Waitangi Treaty Ground.

That this tradition has been allowed to develop should not be viewed as evidence that "Pakeha racism" is on the wane but, rather, of its growing subtlety. It is precisely because we do not take the ritual posturing of the protesters seriously that we allow them their little show of defiance. That the Police and the Navy are not ordered to break up the annual protest-march to the Treaty Ground is not proof of our tolerance – but of just how patronising the whole Waitangi Day celebration has become.

The late Sir Robert Muldoon at least paid the Maori nationalists of his day the compliment of taking them seriously. He understood the very real challenge they posed to the integrity of the New Zealand state – and acted accordingly. John Key is willing to endure the insults, and even the roughings-up, because he’s firmly convinced that it represents nothing of genuine political significance: that it’s all just theatre.

He’s wrong, of course. States that decline to defend their constitutional integrity place themselves – and their political representatives – in mortal danger.

If he had listened carefully to what Pita Sharples said in his State of the Nation address, delivered last Saturday evening, Mr Key would have heard him describe the steady evolution of a political-economic entity known as the Iwi Leaders Group (ILG).

The ILG now negotiates with the New Zealand State in much the same way as the great feudal magnates of medieval England negotiated with their King. And what Mr Sharples speech made very clear is that the ILG will use the forthcoming constitutional review to secure for the leaders of the Maori tribes, the same sort of "Magna Carta" of aristocratic rights and privileges that the barons extracted from King John at Runnymede in 1215.

Like the new legislation regulating the ownership of the foreshore and seabed, the growing power and influence of the ILG is but the latest instance of the re-modelling of New Zealand’s constitutional conventions which has been going on for nearly 30 years. The citizens of this country have never been seriously consulted about these changes. If put to a referendum, I strongly suspect Pita Sharples plans for New Zealand would be decisively defeated. But, as the anonymous leader-writer for The New Zealand Herald blithely expressed the new orthodoxy among this country’s elite:

"Progress in the nation’s central social partnership does not come in sudden breakthroughs or even visible steps. It is a gradual acceptance that a post-colonial state cannot be governed simply by majority rule."

Does John Key subscribe to these sentiments? I’d like to think not. Even so, I doubt if he appreciated the true irony of his "welcome" to Waitangi. That the young firebrand, Wikitana Popata’s, angry declaration: "The enemy is amongst us! He is the one responsible for stealing our lands!" Could now just as easily have come from a conservative Pakeha as a radical Maori.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 8 February 2011.