Tapu Misa: Goff treading unwarily in race minefield

There's nothing quite like race to inflame emotions and generate heated comment (except, perhaps, for that other "r" word, religion), as I'm reminded every time I write on the subject.

My column on Hone Harawira's incendiary email a couple of weeks ago brought a record number of emails - and although the vast majority of them were positive, they showed how little insight many of us have into our own prejudices and in-built biases.

"Examine yourself, Tapu," wrote one, who accused me of coming across as "more bigoted". (I did; I feel fine, thanks.) "We live on different planets," wrote another. (Yes, most definitely.)

Someone once wrote that the greatest advantage of being part of a majority group is the invisibility that comes with being considered "normal". You are, whatever your faults, the way the world is supposed to be. No one expects you to be an ambassador for "your" people, or accuses you of being a disgrace to them when you fire off an ill-considered email in the middle of the night. You're free to be yourself, a flawed human being like the rest of us. Members of visible minority groups can only yearn for that kind of freedom. They suffer a different kind of invisibility, their normalness obscured behind the "otherness" of being different. They stick out for all the wrong reasons, their failures magnified, their successes seen as an exception to the rule.

I don't have room here to go into the intricacies of race relations. Or to discuss why Treaty settlements are a matter of justice, or why we as a nation should want to behave better than a horde of raping, pillaging Vikings, or the fact that Treaty wrongs weren't committed all that long ago, or the entirely reasonable proposition that a people deprived of their economic base by colonisation should suffer inter-generational damage, even if many of them manage to "get over it" and move on.

But it's clear to me from the emails I get that there's a groundswell of goodwill in need of good information and leadership.

It isn't easy to talk about race, nor to break free from it - even for a consummate speechmaker like President Barack Obama, whose determination to transcend racial politics has come up against the realities of 21st-century America. Talk about it, don't talk about it - Obama can't seem to win.

But he at least knows that race is a minefield to be treated with caution. Labour leader Phil Goff seems less wary of the dangers.

It can't be easy to be trailing, apparently unloved and unnoticed, in the wake of a popular Prime Minister, who's enjoying an unusually long honeymoon with the voting public.

Goff can be forgiven his frustration, having emerged from the shadow of one strong leader only to languish in the shadow of another.

Despite the obvious weaknesses of John Key's coalition Government, and the raft of contentious legislation it's been pushing through under urgency, Labour hasn't been able to land a telling blow.

Goff probably has only one shot at the PM's job, and time is running out. Harawira's incendiary email - and popular approval for Goff's visceral overreaction to it - has thrown him a lifeline he seems determined to exploit.

He's now extending that to the Foreshore and Seabed Act and the Maori Party's support of National. It's a route fraught with risk for Goff and Labour. Not only does it drive the Maori Party and National even closer together, it makes Key look moderate by comparison.

Goff's "Nationhood" speech was carefully worded but it was difficult not to miss the sub-text. Labour's rising star, Shane Jones, a former chairman of the Waitangi Tribunal Fisheries Commission which divvied up fisheries assets among 70-odd iwi, was more blunt when he railed against "the crutch of victimhood", and the Maori Party's hiding behind "the fig leaf of race" rather than debating the issues.

But it's one thing to criticise the Maori Party for betraying its grass-roots supporters with its support of the ETS and ACC bills. It's another to renege on a commitment to work with National on repealing the Foreshore and Seabed Act after earlier acknowledging that Labour had mishandled the issue. And to imply that those who believe in just settlements are stuck in grievance mode and "victimhood".

As Scoop business commentator Pattrick Smellie points out, National conceded little that wasn't in its own interests.

"Ngai Tahu's late-90s forestry deal ... valued forests as if they had been converted from forests to dairy land, which is much more valuable until you include the Kyoto Protocol cost of felling without replanting. By the time of the deal, New Zealand was a signatory to Kyoto, so the Government has decided to avoid time in court by agreeing to compensate.

"Not one cent will go to the beneficiaries of the much larger Central North Island Forests settlement from earlier this decade, when an ETS was clearly on the cards and the deal done accordingly. So, yes, the $25 million price tag for affected Maori settlement forests is a lot of money in anyone's book, but it's a lot less than the $70 million-plus Ngai Tahu was after, and it's stopped a long, messy court case ... Enraged whiteys: move on."

Goff says that revisiting the foreshore and seabed issue will reopen old wounds; that it will set Maori against Pakeha - as if it will have nothing to do with him. He's wrong. Just how divisive it proves to be will depend in large part on the kind of leader he wants to be.

Tapu.Misa@gmail.com