Editorial: Modern claims test our mettle

One of the more bracing ironies of political life in 2010 is that a National Government has developed a relationship with Maori that its Labour predecessor never managed in nine years.

The last administration was hampered by Helen Clark's tin ear for Maori issues.

In dismissing marchers in the Foreshore and Seabed hikoi as "haters and wreckers", she destroyed a relationship that had delivered Labour most Maori votes for almost all of the previous 70 years. That led directly to the formation of the Maori Party.

The change in the political landscape has brought the Maori agenda to the centre of political discourse in a way that the activists of the 70s would never have dared to dream of.

The mammoth - and by no means all-Maori - turnout at a march up Queen St in support of the allocation of Maori seats on the Supercity council suggested that Maori aspirations are gaining purchase in the minds of the population at large.

Meanwhile the Government and Treaty Negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson seem sensitive to the responsibility that history has laid on their shoulders.

Yet no one should imagine the way ahead is free of obstacles. Prime Minister John Key keeps a close eye on the way the political winds are blowing.

He nixed a Tuhoe claim for the return of Te Urewera - land which they owned by a promise enshrined in statute and then systematically and cynically dishonoured - because the more conservative elements in the party and in opinion polls thought Maori had been getting too good a trot in preceding weeks.

Now, the Waitangi Tribunal is set to publish its recommendations on claim number Wai 262, a claim by Maori for everything, known and unknown, that was here before 1840. That includes flora and fauna, art and language and, more importantly, control over their use, alteration and development.

Meanwhile, the Maori Council has suggested a Treaty entitlement to the new 4G telecommunications spectrum, on the basis of a Tribunal ruling that spectrum was a taonga under Article Two of the Treaty.

Communications Minister Steven Joyce has poured cold water on the latter idea, saying that spectrum was not known about at the time that the Treaty was signed - and the same thinking underpins many critics' objections to Maori claims of all kinds.

But that argument leads up philosophical blind alleys. Hydrogen, first identified just before Cook arrived, was not "known here" then, but there was quite a lot of it about these islands.

Likewise there was plenty of petroleum in the land of Taranaki iwi before the invention of the internal combustion engine and it was still there when iwi rights were extinguished by a 1937 Act of Parliament. Yet Labour ignored a tribunal finding that petroleum rights should be subject to Treaty claim.

In short, too many who feel uneasy about Maori claims of any sort ignore the real issue. Arguments over whether Maori customary title to the seabed and foreshore would stop families playing beach cricket are irrelevant.

The question is whether Maori, in the 21st century, are entitled to a share in the profits of commercial exploitation of the resources they call taonga.

The stakes are high and will only get higher. But brushing aside Maori claims on the basis that we are talking about post-colonial technology is neither fair nor honest.

Our response to Maori claims - not for special treatment but for the right to what is and always was theirs and what was promised in our founding document - will be a measure of our maturity as a nation.