John Roughan: Waitangi was a glimpse of our goodness

One little picture printed in a newspaper on Waitangi Day made my day. I don't know why the Sunday Star-Times didn't run it bigger. It showed Don Brash seated beside Tame Iti at Ti Tii marae intently engaged in conversation with him.

It was a glimpse of the goodness of New Zealand. The intimacy. One man, in suit and tie, the leading voice of one-nation mythology; the other, a tattooed face in combat fatigues, the cheerful rebel of the Ureweras. Yet in that photograph they had made a connection.

Dr Brash, like most of older white New Zealand, firmly believes that Maori have no case for particular attention or cultural deference, that we became "one people" by proclamation at Waitangi, that the treaty has no application to modern government beyond the settlement of ancient disputes and that since Maori are all of mixed blood now anyway they should be content to be New Zealanders like the rest.

Considering these views of his mana and heritage, Mr Iti made the more magnanimous gesture in sitting where he did, but we are accustomed to Maori gestures like that. Comment concentrated instead on Mr Iti's latest disturbance to public equilibrium.

Television had shown him dressed like a jackass firing a rifle into a crumpled flag at a Tuhoe welcome for the Waitangi Tribunal. It was symbolic of something in Tuhoi history but the National Party and Act had used it for their first salvo of election year when Parliament resumed last week.

Why, they demanded, had the police not charged him with a firearms offence? Not so long ago the police, backed by good governments, resisted this sort of pressure. Not now. On every issue from road patrols to dubious 111 calls, the commissioner has adopted the policy that it is better to call an inquiry than to stand by a contentious but reasonable decision.

So by the time he took his seat beside National's leader at Waitangi, Tame Iti had been duly charged. They weren't sitting together by design, at least on Dr Brash's part; it takes the Maori genius for gesture to produce this sort of moment.

But it takes something good in the Pakeha character, too, to respond as Dr Brash clearly did in that photograph. They say the camera never lies but that is not entirely true. Shots later published, showing the two men looking in different directions, gave the impression they were uncomfortable throughout.

Possibly that was the image Helen Clark had in mind when she chortled in Parliament this week about "the photo opportunity from hell", although I suspect she regarded the friendly photo as even worse from a political point of view. Ms Clark seems to have a low opinion of us.

"Here's a man," she said, "whose behaviour was being debated last week as totally inappropriate, so it has to be the photo opportunity from hell to be seated next to him at a powhiri." Does it?

New Zealanders in my observation are normally open and decent in personal dealings. Regardless of political disagreements, most of us, finding ourselves sitting alongside someone such as Mr Iti would respond readily and with genuine interest to his conversation, whatever view we took of his caper with the firearm and the flag.

And afterwards we'd tell anyone who asked that he was a friendly enough bloke, even invited us to call on him if we are ever down his way, which is roughly what Dr Brash told reporters after the Sunday powhiri.

Why does Ms Clark imagine we are going to think less of him? Because she, herself, is an exception to the national type. She is one New Zealander who could not have sat comfortably beside someone such as Mr Iti and could not have put aside her disapproval.

She said this week: "I didn't put myself in that position because Ti Tii marae has been associated with incidents of that nature for a long time and I don't wish to be associated with that."

Incident? To be seated beside a Maori nationalist on a firearms charge is an incident? For a paragon of social equality Ms Clark can be extremely sensitive to unseemly company. That is the reason she has always had a problem with Waitangi.

Yet she so dominates the Government and Parliament that even the press gallery cannot always see around her. Her failure to front at any potentially troublesome events there incurred not a word of criticism. It was even described as "astute".

Conversely Dr Brash was given little or no credit for going back to a place where he took mud in the face last year. I wonder what the verdicts would have been had the Prime Minister returned to the scene of her jostling last year and Dr Brash had largely confined himself to the safety of a vice-regal reception.

This Prime Minister has many attributes, personal and political, but she lacks a largeness of spirit that will deny her, I think, a ranking among our best. She lacks in particular the ability to rise to the ceremonial or spiritually challenging demands of national leadership.

Waitangi every year is a kind of touchstone for progress towards a post-colonial settlement. Last Sunday was counted a success in the press because nothing happened. Nothing untoward, nothing too ugly or edgy or, from what I read, nothing touching or uplifting either. Until, you remember that photo.

When a New Zealander of the Brash mindset sits down with one of his demons, he removes his political blinkers and splendid things can happen. Ordinary, amiable, decent things.

Waitangi, in its own way, never fails.

* John Roughan is a Herald assistant editor.