Jim Hopkins: Dear Pita, we are all in this together

Dear Pita, (if you'll allow the familiarity) Sir, you have the better of us, if you'll allow. You are a person of note, a minister, part of that empire of government which, they say, had its beginning hundreds of years ago in the forgotten meetings of wild and hairy people in the freezing lands of Scandinavia.

No blood was shed to put you where you are, Dr Sharples, though the history of democracy is a bloodstained thing.

On occasions, it's been necessary to defend it and, on occasions, to extend it as well. History's violent endeavours have bequeathed us all one cardinal thing - the abolition of privilege.

There was a time when few had access to a ballot. Now, that entitlement is granted to all in equal measure. Made universal, a privilege has been abolished.

Yet privilege persists, as it always will, in other forms. You, Sir, enjoy the privilege of being taken seriously when you raise issues for our consideration.

And we have a responsibility to respond. So let's begin at the beginning. If the archaeologists are correct, we both come from the same place and stock. We share a common whakapapa, if you will. It seems salutary to mention this, since you attach such importance to the vagaries of genes.

Put bluntly, Sir, but respectfully we are both the fruit of quickened apes. And we both came "out of Africa", apparently, there to go our separate ways.

Your ancestors, sensibly, headed for Taiwan. Mine, inexplicably, chose the wastes of Europe. But in each case, our tribes went on their way, adapting, inventing and massacring others as required to ensure the success of their journey and the power of their dominion.

They must have, Sir, or some other lucky sods would be here in our place.

Instead, it's us. And we share much, Sir - the fiction of a past (for that's all it can ever be in retrospect) and the promise of a future.

You believe it is a binary thing, determined in part - and in law - by happenstance of race. Put simply, Sir, you claim the privilege of pigment, however dilute it may now be. Still, you claim it, both in prison and in politics - if, indeed the two are separable.

Well, good luck to you. Race, gender, property ownership, all of these have enjoyed privilege in the past. Others before you have said what you're saying. Sometimes for different reasons and sometimes with horrible results.

Clearly, you seek nothing of the sort. Rather, you seek advancement for those still, in your view, disadvantaged. You consider there's a blessing to confer. And there's the nub, Sir. Every blessing owns its own curse.

You have chosen to emphasise race. So be it. Unless we are mad, everything in life is a choice. And you've made yours. But it will also sanction the choices of others. It will vindicate the rednecks, Sir. If ethnicity is your touchstone, it can be theirs as well.

In a land long besotted with equality, anyone claiming advantage is an easy target, especially when marked by the colour of his skin.

The creeds of an imported faith may endorse you, and the codes of a foreign law, but that won't budge the bigots. You will become their justification. And it is your constituents who will suffer.

As they may if you get what you wish. Putting aside the possibility that your demand for guaranteed seats on some future city council may violate Articles 1 and 3 of this vexatious Treaty others signed on our behalf exactly 61,390 days ago, it's impossible to believe you seek only three places at the table - and those a mere condescension, offered at the colonists' grace and favour, like their equivalents in Parliament.

Sir, the Polynesians were miraculously adaptive. Their journey across the Pacific proves that. In this land, it was the innovation - and abundant crops - of Maori farmers that spared Wellington's first Europeans the disaster of famine.

In those times, the tribes built sailing ships and traded with the world. Assert that tradition, Pita. Remind a blind land that Maori were dynamic, entrepreneurial, eager to become a new society.

Surprise us, Pita. You're a leader. Lead! Being Maori has, alas, become an article of faith, stultifying and uniform. To be Maori, you must say only predictable things, all keenly sustained by a mewling European establishment seeking to expiate their needless guilt.

Sir, asserting past injustice gives you a platform - and an audience, albeit racially demarked.

We both know how easy it is for the man on the margin to mutter mutinously. He can reflect, and fan, the disaffection of the few. But should he seek the support of the many, he needs to transform not only them but himself.

He needs to assert that his place in the world is not an institutional ghetto. Three of 20 is a sop, nothing more. Tell us you'll have more than the crumbs from someone else's table, Sir.

Change the equation. Tell us councillors will earn their place, as their athletic kin do every weekend. Then you will find you have a nation's attention, and not a hikoi's alone.

Yours sincerely, A Bystander.