KEY POINTS:
Waitangi will become the political battleground today and tomorrow for the great election-year contest between Labour and the Maori Party but Prime Minister Helen Clark will try to avoid potential troubles at Te Tii Marae.
Instead, she has devised a programme with "dignity" for herself with plans to visit a marae at Karetu, half an hour from Waitangi, to confirm Labour's new northern Maori candidate, 40-year-old Kelvin Davis.
Mr Davis, the former principal of Kaitaia Intermediate, will attempt to unseat Hone Harawira, who won the Te Tai Tokerau seat from Dover Samuels in 2005.
The Prime Minister will not be among the group of cross-party MPs that will be welcomed on to Te Tii Marae this morning and has not accepted an invitation to participate in a leaders debate with National Party leader John Key and others at the marae this afternoon.
"The key thing for me is a programme which contains dignity," she said yesterday.
Unfortunately that meant avoiding the marae - where her attendance attracts protest.
"The atmosphere is such that if I don't go, there probably won't be incidents and if I did, there would be."
A group from Tuhoe is expected at Waitangi to protest at last year's police raids, including Tame Iti, who faces firearms charges.
Helen Clark will attend the Governor-General's reception tonight at Waitangi and host her own breakfast meeting tomorrow on Waitangi Day itself, before heading to Manukau City celebrations.
Meanwhile, Treaty Negotiations Minister Michael Cullen yesterday defended the Human Rights Commission against an attack from Maori Party MP Te Ururoa Flavell, who called it a "proxy" for the Government.
Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres, a member of the commission, issued a statement saying there had been "significant developments" in relation to the Treaty of Waitangi and indigenous rights in the past 12 months.
Mr Flavell said the statement demonstrated that the commissioner's role had become reduced to that of a Government proxy.
"2007 was the year that the Government refused to sign the international declaration on the rights of indigenous people and stood by while terror raids targeted a small Maori community in Ruatoki," the MP said.
The Human Rights Commission had supported - against Government policy - the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted in September last year.
"They can't have it both ways," Dr Cullen said. The problem with the declaration was a simple one. "Many of those who voted for it came from one of two directions: Either they don't have an indigenous population to worry about or if they do they said they were not going to take any notice of its contents anyway.
"The only countries which would take such a declaration seriously and have significant indigenous populations tended to be quite leery about it or to vote against it."
The Maori Party won four of the seven Maori seats last election and believes it can win them all this time.
"Of course they would say that, wouldn't they?" Helen Clark said yesterday.
