Audrey Young: Keep in touch, or say goodbye

Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia broke the rules by turning up to her parliamentary office this week with a terrible flu and head cold.

The patient kept her distance from the stream of visitors to her ministerial office, no kisses, handshakes or hongis - Turia's doctor is apparently sure it is ordinary flu.

Turia is a woman driven because she knows she is leaving Parliament at the next election and wants to achieve as much as possible before then.

By this time next year, Bill English's second and most important Budget for the Maori Party this term should have been passed.

If all goes well, it will contain a huge policy gain - funding of perhaps more than $1 billion for the Maori Party's whanau ora policy.

Turia described it in a speech this week as "one of the most ground-breaking projects I have ever taken on".

It will bring together funding from various Government departments - health, education, justice, housing, social welfare - to fund a new approach to service delivery.

Last Saturday, as the other parties battled it out for Mt Albert, Turia marked the Maori Party's fifth birthday by announcing the taskforce that will come up with the detailed policy design to help get Government approval.

Roughly modelled on John Tamihere's Waipareira Trust, it would allow a co-ordinated approach by private providers to families in need of state assistance, instead of having various departments working in silo fashion.

Tamihere, once at loggerheads with Turia in the Labour caucus, has been helping the Maori Party in the development of the policy.

Turia describes it as a way for Maori to restore their own rangatiratanga instead of being paralysed by state-created dependency.

It sounds good even if it is not yet clear how it would work.

The party has had very little resistance to its ideas since signing up as a support partner to National. But since then it has announced a growing collection of policies that could at the very least be described as race-based - a Maori bank, Maori prisons, free access for Maori to university, Maori seats on the Auckland Council.

Three years ago there would have been three parties, National, Act and New Zealand First, leaping into issues of separatism.

Now National in government is encouraging the development of such policies. It contents itself that middle New Zealand will see the sense in trying something new to get better results in health, education and crime on the basis that past policies surely haven't achieved it.

National and the Maori Party have given little thought to the political management of any growing disquiet because no such disquiet has been publicly evident.

Act has been circumspect in this Parliament, but in the past it has been as vociferous as National in separatist politics.

And it is Act, not National, standing in the way of Maori seats on the Auckland Council.

The select committee hearing submissions on the Super City plan has formed an offshoot to hear submissions on the Maori seats - because there are so many.

National's Tau Henare is chairing this subcommittee, and will be joined by his colleague Simon Bridges, Labour's Shane Jones and the Maori Party's Hone Harawira.

Any compromise will have to win the support of Act if National is to avoid an embarrassing standoff with the minister promoting the Super City legislation, Act leader Rodney Hide.

Hide might be taking a strategic stand against the Maori seats for electoral purposes - his opposition is a far cry from his offer last year to support entrenchment of the Maori seats on the basis that what was good for the general seats was good for the Maori seats.

National has already been softened for some sort of compromise, as difficult as that might be to broker.

Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples spoke at National's northern regional conference two weeks ago. He was warmly received as he talked about the quality of the relationship with National.

Sharples is one of those gifted communicators who can get away with saying almost anything. ("Why did the Maori cross the road? To get the other side. Why did 10 Pakeha cross the road? To make sure the Maori didn't put a claim on it," he joked at the conference.)

Sharples' teflon qualities were evident this week in the lack of reaction to his radical notion for free university access for Maori.

Labour is giving the Maori Party an easy ride because it has not yet developed a strategy to deal with it. Labour issued a press statement a day-and-a-half later on Sharples' speech but there were no questions in the House on it.

But reaction on blog sites and talkback radio would suggest that this, the most extreme of ideas mooted this term, sparked considerable disquiet among the public if not in the political arena.

Sharples says it was an idea he never expected would get off the ground and one not discussed widely with colleagues.

The speech illustrates a difficulty facing the Maori Party - it must find the balance between giving MPs their voice and mana, and having to work within political realities.

Those realities include saving your battles for the ones you might win - such as the highly sensitive Foreshore and Seabed review that is about to land back in the Government's lap in a fortnight.

Te Tai Tokerau MP Hone Harawira, the self-appointed conscience of the Maori Party, drew comparisons this week in his newsletter between his party and (unnamed) iwi that had bought into the corporate image of professionalism and objectivity in their dealings which he believes has been at the expense of fighting for social justice.

The Maori Party has been phenomenally successful in securing a role in Government after only one term in Parliament. It and National need to remain mindful of not only where they are taking their policies but if they are taking their constituents with them. Otherwise they could turn out to be a one-term phenomenon.