Dominic O'Sullivan: Iwi and Kiwi, not fear and loathing

There was an aspiration of substance in the National Party leader's provocatively titled "We Are All New Zealanders" speech, in Whangarei.

But his shaping of political debate since the earlier Orewa speech has given impetus to the re-emergence of an assimilationist "one law for all" rhetoric, which challenges the propriety of collective identity and Maori language and culture as Maori understand and define them.

This climate of suspicion overshadows, and probably makes impossible, Brash's proposition that "We ... need a Government that will stop patronising Maori; that will stop thinking that a bunch of second-rate educational programmes is good enough; that will stop being satisfied with parking a significant part of the Maori world on welfare; that will start being outraged by the fact that 40 per cent of all new recipients of the DPB are young Maori women; and that is appalled that more than 90,000 Maori children are raised in households dependent on welfare."

These aspirations are not the cornerstone of the National Party's policy debate in the election campaign, because they cannot be couched in the populist anti-treaty language of reactionary conservatism.

At Orewa, Brash set the Maori policy agenda by focusing discussion on needs and rights. This reduced Maori policy to welfare policy, which is itself marginalising. It is a marginalisation entrenched by the "one law for all" ideology, which takes for granted a superior form of culture and socio-political norms into which all must be subsumed.

When one speaks of public policy in terms of "need" one's focus is on the material. Rights, however, are different. Wealthy Maori, for example, have the same right to language as poor Maori, or the same right of access to due legal process regarding the foreshore and seabed. Material need in this sense is irrelevant to rights.

Maori claim different but not superior rights. The purpose of those rights is for Maori to exercise self-responsibility; the opportunity to make decisions for themselves against their own criteria and in pursuit of self-defined goals. Further, it is the opportunity to take responsibility for one's successes and failures and to avoid passive reception of what outsiders determine as best for Maori communities.

Self-determination is a different but equal expression of the citizenship rights claimed by all, because it is a right that many wish to pursue collectively and in their own cultural and political environment.

So Maori are not concerned with a "birthright to the upper hand" as Brash suggested at Orewa, but are concerned to view material progress alongside cultural imperatives.

This has particular implications for state education, where successive governments have been most willing to allow limited self-determination. When populist politics are used to prey on people's fears, prejudices and ignorance, this approach to Maori education policy creates a tension between the liberal emphasis on citizen's right to choice, which is at the core of National Party philosophy, and the prospect that the Maori exercise of choice might be seen as recognition of a "different" right.

Balancing liberal values of choice with public perception of financial support for schools and health providers based on recognition of indigeneity creates a political problem for the Right, which is played out every time the words Maori, treaty and "one law for all" are mentioned in public debate.

This ideological tension shows that the "one law for all" rhetoric is motivated by a deliberately twisted logic to express a politics of envy concerned with denying Maori universal human rights where they are perceived to interfere with the wishes of the electorally more significant.

The Canadian political scientist James Tully argues that "one law for all" thinking comes out of prejudices that "are socially constructed by the dominant groups as invisible, as handicaps, rather than resources, as something to get rid of rather than to cherish. They are socially constructed as non-resources, as opposed to the languages and cultures of the dominant groups which are ... constructed as valuable resources to be learned by others".

Brash did this when he ascribed literal truth to a Maori claim that a road construction be stopped lest a Waikato River taniwha be disturbed. The ensuing ridicule had more to do with ignorance of the language of metaphor than with engineering expertise.

New Zealand is not well served by a race debate that encourages fear-generating misinformation, venerates ignorance, and excludes Iwi from Kiwi.

* Dr Dominic O'Sullivan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Maori Education Research Institute, University of Waikato.