Noel Harrison: Graham Latimer: A Biography

Reviewed by ADAM GIFFORD

Sir Graham Latimer has a remarkable ability to enrage people. You wouldn't know it by looking at him - he is not a big man, he's soft spoken and polite, with a farmer's plain turn of phrase, a twinkle in his eye and a wry humour.

But mention the northern knight to Winston Peters and he goes off like a 3am brawl in Courtenay Place.

Fellow MP John Tamihere holds Sir Graham personally responsible for holding back a new wave of younger, more competent leaders.

Pakeha resent him for getting too much for Maori. Maori accuse him of doing too little. "Tell me one thing he has actually achieved for Maori," a tribal administrator asked me recently.

The list I would draw after 15 years of contact as a journalist with Sir Graham would be long. Often credit must be shared with others, or has been stolen by others, or the achievement is not regarded as such by his detractors.

This biography goes some way towards answering the challenge.

Where it falls short is that Harrison, a former journalist and chief executive of Northland Polytechnic until 1990, was unable to look beyond the surface of Maori politics and explain where his subject sits in te ao Maori, the Maori world.

Instead he tries to place Sir Graham within a race relations framework. At times the book reads like a treatise on race relations over the past century.

It is not altogether the wrong approach. Sir Graham's role has often been in small but critical interventions between te ao Maori, and the political and economic elites - a phone call here, an introduction there - allowing himself to be used as a sounding board by politicians.

As president of the New Zealand Maori Council since 1972 he had limited power and insignificant resources to work with. But by persistence, gambler's luck and using networks built up through his involvement in sport, National Party politics, the Anglican church and te ao Maori, he won the Treaty of Waitangi the constitutional significance previous generations of Maori leaders sought for it.

He traces Sir Graham's life from his birth and upbringing in circumstances of extreme poverty by the side of the road in the gumfields of the Far North, his time in the Army as a member of J Force in occupied Japan, his shift after the war to Auckland and then to Kaipara for a job with Railways.

It was there that Ngati Whatua elders picked him out, a hard worker with a young family, a passion for sport and dreams of owning his own farm, and drew him into their tribal concerns. He didn't speak Maori, was not schooled in the customs, but they saw in him someone who could bridge the worlds.

The status he achieved was resented by Maori academics who doubted his motives and were unwilling to admit an unschooled farmer might have more to offer than themselves, and by a radicalised leadership. But what he had over these two groups was he had never been anti-Pakeha, he had a small measure of economic independence and when the opportunity came to act in the late 1980s, it was one he had been working towards for a quarter century.

The settlements hammered out with Labour and National governments by Sir Graham and his fellow negotiators protected the Treaty settlement process and provided the foundation for a new generation of Maori leaders to build on.

Harrison relies too much on secondary sources, and rarely gives the story behind the story which readers of biography will be looking for. That said, this is an overdue look at one of the most significant New Zealand politicians of our age.

Huia $29.95

* Adam Gifford is the editor of a monthly digest of Maori news.