Audrey Young: Major differences looming large for Key

Tariana Turia. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Prime Minister John Key has some serious work to do, and soon, with the Maori Party over three very big issues: foreshore and seabed, the whanau ora policy (social service delivery issue) and the tax-cut/gst tradeoff.

Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia, has started using the same "ownership" rhetoric of MP Hone Harawira and Ngati Kahu leader Margaret Mutu.

It is a disturbing development. One can almost accept the perpetuation of misinformation from Harawira and Mutu about what the Court of Appeal said but Turia has a greater responsibility to set out the reality of the position. Whether she intended to not, she is perpetuating the myth that the Court recognized that Maori owned the foreshore and seabed. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.

Here's what she said last Thursday on Waatea News (RNZ's Checkpoint): "That's about the Crown taking a property right away from our people which they don't do to anybody else in this country and it was the reason why there was such outrage in the original foreshore and seabed issue where Labour took the ownership of the foreshore and seabed away from our people and put it into Crown hands."

The Maori Party needs to make up its mind. It talks about wanting their kaitiakitanga (guardianship) recognized and insisting that ownership of the foreshore and seabed is not on the agenda. Then Turia says Labour took away their ownership.

Just to be clear, Labour did not take the ownership of the foreshore and seabed away from Maori.

Labour shut off the right of iwi to claim customary title in the courts - which was huge, without having to exaggerate what Labour did.

National promised to restore that but is now heading down the same slippery path Labour did – thinking it could come up with something better, fairer, faster than the courts could deliver.

Helen Clark and Margaret Wilson could be forgiven for having a little smile about National's problems - how easy it was for National to promise to fix Labour's law but how hard it is to do.

All the hoopla at the end of last week was over the concept supported by Key that nobody own the foreshore and seabed – that way, he said, "you don't get into the emotional concept of ownership."

Sorry John. You may have discovered that non-ownership is as emotional as ownership.

Turia rejected the concept of no ownership.

I have my own personal test on whatever solution emerges – and that is that I never want to feel like a visitor on the beaches that matter to me.

Labour often over-eggs the differences between the Maori Party and National. But Labour's Annette King was right last week to highlight the differences between what Key is saying about whanau ora and what Tariana Turia is saying.

Key appears to be saying that the Government accepts the policy on the condition it is for all-comers, Turia appears to be saying its Maori-ness is intrinsic to the concept (my words) and that she does not want to impose it on others (her words).

They can't both be right, can they?

Then there is the issue of the tax tradeoff - a rise in gst of 2.5 per cent points to 15 per cent, and big tax cuts. Key and Bill English will present the Maori Party with figures to show exactly how low-income Kiwis will be compensated either in benefit increases or tax cuts. That will not be hard.

The issue of concern late last week was the looseness of both Key and the National Party about coalition talk. The Maori Party's newest MP, Rahui Katene, told reporters on her way to Parliament that pulling out of the coalition was an option. That kind of thinking aloud from an inexperienced MP was one thing.

But John Key said on radio that he wouldn't be going ahead with it unless he could get the Maori Party support because he wouldn't want to "blow up" the government over it.

Key's was the more surprising in as much as the confidence and supply agreement requires the Maori Party to support the Budget. He had just outlined a tax cuts policy that neither he nor Bill English would have dreamed was possible a year ago (not without the stunning public relations management of the Tax Working Group which reframed the tax debate into an economic debate – "take a tax cut from the landlords and help your country").

And in the next breath Key is virtually inviting the Maori Party to be the tail to wag the dog - Key saying he would introduce National Party policy (which he can pass with Act support) but only if the Maori Party agrees. Quite bizarre.

Composure on both sides was regained after Maori party co-leader Pita Sharples said that the issue was not a deal breaker. No one at this juncture could seriously have thought it would have been a deal breaker because the strength of the relationship is quite palpable.