KEY POINTS:
Labour's only possible chance of winning the general election is to hope it can nobble National's John Key by exposing him as a lightweight.
Until now he really has seemed to be a Teflon man. No matter how much dirt is thrown at him, nothing seems to stick. I suspect it has nothing to do with his political skills, but more to do with a growing mood that voters want a change at the top.
But that doesn't stop Labour from trying. When in a radio interview Key voiced a fairy tale version of our country's history, Helen Clark and Michael Cullen couldn't contain their glee. Key apparently suggested that New Zealand was founded on a mutual love and respect between Maori and Pakeha and there was never a cross word between the two.
Labour couldn't believe its luck and harangued the hapless Key as a simpleton with less than a child's grasp of the country's history.
The potentially devastating attack was somewhat derailed when Key claimed the radio station unfairly edited his interview and cleverly, to close the matter down, laid an official complaint about the item. National's Gerry Brownlee found past comments from Cullen that he claimed were similar to what Key had said.
From now on any mistake, real or imagined, that makes Key look inexperienced or ignorant will be jumped on. If Labour can raise enough doubts about Key's competence it might have an outside chance of wooing enough people back before election day.
This incident does raise the question of how much most of us know about our history. Despite the best efforts of authors such as Michael King, James Belich, and Chris Trotter, most of us are pretty ignorant.
Like Key, we all have a sanitised, short and biased version of history. Mine goes something like this.
Before the Europeans turned up, Maori, like most of the world at that time, spent their leisure time raiding each other's territory, killing and pillaging the luckless inhabitants.
Most negotiating with the early European settlers was over how hapu leaders could get their hands on muskets to give them a competitive advantage. Apparently shrunken heads were the best currency for guns. Market forces were all the rage - more heads got guns, more guns got more heads, and so on. In the Far North, my ancestor Hongi Hika managed to get himself 100 muskets and kill more Maori in one excursion than all the deaths on both sides combined during the Land Wars.
With the war parties doing their thing and the pox brought in by the Europeans, Maori were pretty much screwed by the time the missionaries tamed them with the white man's religion. The whalers and sailors had spent the earlier years raping and stealing land from the locals.
After Maori burned the then capital in the Bay of Islands and banned their people from mixing with Pakeha or drinking their alcohol, the British ruling class felt they'd have to do something about the lawlessness.
After the French came snooping, making alliances with Maori in the south, the British thought they'd better get their act together. They managed to con enough Maori into believing that if they signed a treaty they'd all be protected from the Pakeha thugs by a little old lady from the other side of the world.
A document was duly signed, guaranteeing Maori all the rights of British citizens and protection of their land and property. There was, of course, the small hitch that the English version was different from the Maori version. But, anyway, it ensured a compliant takeover of the country rather than the alternative of sending an army of redcoats at great expense to subdue the natives for a country the British ruling class didn't really want.
A few of the locals, such as Hone Heke, realised soon after they signed the treaty that it was a fraud and protested by regularly cutting down the British flagpole. To this day the Waitangi flagpole is set in concrete and made of metal to prevent repeats.
Things calmed down for a while after the Governor promised not to allow any settlers to steal land. Any purchases would be done through the Crown and recognised iwi leaders.
But migration from the mother country soon put a stop to that, particularly as local Maori wouldn't sell enough land. It also didn't help that many of the local ruling class were selling to the settlers huge tracts of land that didn't belong to them.
The settlers set up provincial governments and passed laws to take the land without their consent. When Maori protested, the settlers sent in volunteer armies to kill them and steal their land anyway. Once they'd stolen enough land to share among the members of the militia they pinched some more to sell to cover the expenses of their excursions. Many descendants of these criminals begrudge today modest compensation to the Maori descendants of the former landholders.
As you can see, it's quite a different version from Key's.
