KEY POINTS:
Koro Wetere arrived to begin his 27 years in Parliament's deep fryer with no enemies. To the astonishment of other MPs - and they were happy to be quoted - he left in 1996 still enemy-free.
Last night's half-hour documentary, E Tu Kahikatea, was an attempt to discover the man who could be effective in a difficult job, Minister of Maori Affairs, and emerge still loved and respected. In a determinedly retro style that plays now as fresh and new, in choosing a gentle push for answers over attack, it found out.
It was the third in a series looking at Maoridom's strong contributors, none of whom are self-promoters, despite all being manifestly strong personalities.
Keep an eye out for Sir Peter Tapsell, the surgeon shamed into learning te reo.
The show tracked Wetere from extraordinarily humble beginnings near Te Kuiti. Boyhood friend Colin Meads remembers him - "We got up to all the things kids got up to in those days" - including a delightful tale of how the young Wetere assembled the component parts for a bicycle. Meads also pointed out Wetere did a lot for local Maori "by expressing their value in the community".
The young Wetere learned elders had an arranged marriage in store for him, "and I went bush". He bobbed up in Kawhia, where he would be changed forever. He met his wife there and started on becoming a church minister, taking him into the Ratana Church, with its traditionally close ties to the Labour Party.
The retirement of Iriaka Matiu Ratana, the MP for Western Maori, a safe Labour seat, saw Wetere tapped as her replacement. He was assured of election.
Given his return to Parliament each election was also guaranteed, he had time to learn the politician's craft, with the clips of his time in the House showing a man of stern and careful mien. He was not afraid of confrontation. His answering a question in Maori provoked a debate which ended with te reo being accepted as an official language of this country.
Against that, his blushes when Richard Prebble called him "the best Minister of Maori Affairs ever" probably spoke more of the reasons for his popularity than anything the public ever saw.
A bonus of documentaries like this is they give us a chance to confirm our suspicions about how history is really made and it can be different from the carefully polished official version.
For instance, there was Wetere's stinging reply to Geoffrey Palmer's 1983 question about how long Maori had been presenting land claims to Parliament: "Since 1883, when [King] Tawhiao went to London to try to persuade the British to honour the Treaty".
That likely did more to jump-start the settlement process than any street demonstration.
Shane Jones, once one of those demonstrators and now a Cabinet minister, admitted Wetere's contribution. "We weren't happy with Koro [as a Minister of Maori Affairs] and didn't think he was mature enough, but then when you looked at what he achieved - funding for Maori, land returned, te reo as an official language, and all the other things - we were the immature ones."
* E Tu Kahikatea, Maori Television, 8pm Wednesdays.
