KEY POINTS:
The Race Relations Commissioner, Joris de Bres, has given the country a fairly clean bill of health in his latest annual review issued this week. He began these reports as recently as 2004, the year of Don Brash's Orewa speech and the passage of the Foreshore and Seabed Act. Race relations ranked top of a survey of public concerns that year, as it had the two previous years. But it hardly featured among issues at the 2005 election and has been dormant since.
Does this mean the views vented at Orewa have disappeared like smoke from a volcano, or that the eruption had a fearful effect on those advancing Maori interests and little has happened since to challenge public tolerance? The question seems not to arise for the commissioner. His review of last year is content to celebrate progress in relatively obscure places such as the national school curriculum, which was revised last year. It acknowledges the Treaty of Waitangi, values the different cultures of the population and aims to be "non-sexist, non-racist and non-discriminatory".
Far more important, perhaps, are the demographic trends appearing in our schools. Mr de Bres notes that 40 per cent of pupils last year were of Maori, Pacific and Asian descent. And an increasing proportion of births - 25 per cent in the year to September - were of mixed ethnicity. Two-thirds of Maori babies also belonged to another ethnic group, as did a third of European and Asian births.
Dr Brash invoked this trend as a reason to look forward to the end of ethnic distinctions. Mr de Bres says it means "we should look ahead in the knowledge that upcoming generations will be living diversity as well as learning about it". Well, maybe. It probably depends on whether official policy in education and other fields encourages diversity or commonality.
The office's chosen "race relations theme" for 2008 is called "Finding common ground". A document will be issued shortly suggesting some principles all of us might agree on. Foremost among them will be respect for the different cultures that co-exist in New Zealand now.
Principles are fine but race relations are tested on actual events. It is strange that the commissioner has not made more of one recurring source of tension lately - over burial rights. More than once, Maori relatives of a deceased person have taken the body from the home of a Pakeha partner for burial far from the person's immediate family. The law sides with the family but Maori custom supports the seizure. The police are caught in the middle and are reluctant to enforce the law. It might be helpful to hear how the Race Relations Commissioner would suggest this instance of diversity might be resolved.
The commissioner seems to have no taste for controversy, particularly where the Government is concerned. He offers no view of its refusal last year to vote for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a decision that is defensible but disappointed the Maori Party, among others.
Similarly, he hedges his bets on the Urewera incident last year, observing that the armed police raid on a Tuhoe township has caused distress and left "unanswered questions". He might have urged the police to make more effort to repair the resentment left by an operation that failed to convince the Solicitor-General of its primary justification, a terrorism prosecution.
The Race Relations Office was established in the hope that it might one day render itself redundant. It has since been incorporated into the Human Rights Commission, where most of its work belongs. With many more reports like the latest, we might soon save a commissioner's salary.
