Editorial: National in a hole over Maori seats

The most far-reaching political decisions are sometimes made on the hoof. MMP, for example, was a royal commission recommendation rapidly gathering dust until a party leader, cornered in the hurly-burly of an election campaign, thought he could safely promise a referendum on the subject. National's promise to abolish the Maori seats in Parliament is developing in the same way.

The abolition of the seats was not a non-negotiable, "bottom line" promise until National's leader, Don Brash, was pressed on TVNZ's Agenda programme to declare whether it was or not. Dr Brash seemed reluctant to declare it so, but at the third or fourth prodding, he did. His reluctance was understandable; at that time National had no obvious partners for a governing arrangement and the Maori Party was keeping its options open. But the abolition of the seats is the most tangible policy to come from Dr Brash's popular attack on Maori "privilege" and he could not be seen to downplay its importance.

Consequently, if National is in a position to form a government after this Saturday, the abolition of the Maori seats will be a promise hard to moderate. At this stage no other party likely to be in the next Parliament supports outright abolition. But a party such as New Zealand First might not come to the defence of the seats if National puts it on the spot. And a bare 51 per cent of the votes in Parliament is all that it would take to abolish a 140-year-old feature of our democracy. Unlike several other constitutional arrangements, including MMP, the Maori seats are not "entrenched" in electoral law requiring a 75 per cent majority of Parliament to change them.

The Herald has long taken the view here that the seats reserved for Maori are an anomaly. That view was formed when there were just four such seats and they were held so securely by the Labour Party that they gave Maori little public impact. Since then the number of Maori seats has been allowed to rise with numbers on the Maori role and seven seats are now reserved. Furthermore they are not as assured for Labour as they once were. At the 1996 election all the Maori seats switched to New Zealand First. Though they returned to Labour after a single term, they can no longer be taken for granted.

This time the polls give a new independent Maori Party every prospect of winning most of the seats and, if the mood is as uniform as it was in 1996, possibly all of them. National might find itself committed to abolishing the Maori electorates at the very moment the seats are providing distinctive and assertive representation for the first time. Voters need to think about the implications of that a good deal more deeply than the National Party appears to have done.

All other parties, save Act, regard the fate of the Maori seats as something for Maori voters to decide. The seats will disappear the day Maori no longer feel a need to enrol in separate electorates to be assured of a voice in the country's affairs. National believes the question is properly one for the whole country and polls suggest public opinion overwhelmingly agrees. But that could be an entirely Pakeha portion of the poll and the seats could be abolished wholly on the votes of non-Maori MPs. It would be unfortunate if the only party claiming that separate representation was no longer needed was the party that has been least successful lately in bringing Maori into national politics.

Abolishing separate representations does not alter the facts of national life. Maori have roots in this country that go deeper than any other people's. They find their ancestral identity nowhere else. Their need for political expression here is therefore greater than that of any other minority. One way or another they will ensure their voice is heard.