Dialogue: How much insult will Maori take?

The stage is set for something historic at Waitangi this year. With the absence of the Navy and the Governor-General, by order of the Prime Minister, the Maori sovereignty flag may fly in more ways than one.

If I read the signs right, Maori may be ready at last to take the opportunity presented by proportional representation and claim their share of national power. To do that they need a party answerable only to Maori. That must be painfully obvious after the disappointments of the past year.

The failure to front up to Waitangi, the vindictive order to the Governor-General and the Navy and, most of all, the loss of nerve on overt Maori services, has had a profound impact.

When the Ratana Church puts a Labour Prime Minister in a position to be rebuked by one of its members, it is not a solitary act. When the Prime Minister can find no marae to welcome her this Waitangi Day, she begins to realise she is in trouble. When she announces that if Ngapuhi behave well at Waitangi this time she might deign to go next year, she adds another insult to injury.

Her efforts to be pictured hugging babies and sipping tea with Maori in the North this week were transparent and too late.

Maori are not alone in their surprise at the spinelessness of a left-leaning Government on race relations, and at the efforts of the white liberal media to excuse it.

(These efforts reached their nadir one morning late last year on National Radio when political editor Al Morrison had Kim Hill extend her arms in front of her and draw them together to demonstrate that Closing the Gaps was conceptually flawed.)

It has long been noticeable that National politicians have been more comfortable than Labour MPs at Waitangi. Even before she came to power and refused to go, Helen Clark never looked happy there. Yet Jenny Shipley, starchy southerner that she is, visibly revels in the place.

As Prime Minister she worked assiduously in her first year to negotiate an official return. Out of office last year, she turned up to watch the February 5 forum that she had helped the Ngapuhi to set up the previous year, and to take part in the dawn service on Waitangi Day. If she is the person I think she is, she'll be there again on Monday and Tuesday. It probably costs a few votes in National's constituency but politicians do sometimes act from higher motives. She must be amazed at her opposite number.

Maori voters have left Labour once; they will find it easier a second time, and it is more likely to be permanent. There have been meetings and suggestions from a Maori journalist, Derek Fox, that a dedicated Maori political party is taking shape.

To envelop a fair range of Maori opinion, it will need to be more than just another party nestled somewhere between left and right on the spectrum. It could be a new dimension to parliamentary politics.

Nearly a year ago I sat through a constitutional conference at Parliament that died the moment it began. It wilted under immediate challenge from Annette Sykes and fellow dreamers, who demanded equal representation on whatever it might do.

Thereafter the assembled worthies proceeded to talk about practically everything except the challenge in front of them.

It became obvious that the aspirations of the likes of Moana Jackson could not be satisfied by anything that was not initiated and nurtured entirely by Maori.

At regular intervals Maanu Paul, of the Maori Council, would rise to remind everyone that Professor Whatarangi Winiata had designed a constitutional partnership in which decisions would be reached by separate procedures in a Maori House and a Pakeha House and the endorsement of a combined Treaty House. Each time he rose the proposition was politely heard, then steadfastly ignored. Nobody bothered to mention the obvious - that a democratic society is never going to award 20 per cent of its population equal power with the other 80 per cent. Not now, not ever.

Sovereignty, as Moana Jackson understood, is not something awarded to you in any case. It is a right you claim as an individual or a minority and assert to the extent you lawfully can.

If Maori plan to wait for Pakeha to agree to a bicameral system of separate and equal ethnic parliaments, they will wait forever. But if they can form a political party and constitute it in a way that channels the range of Maori opinion into its decisions, they could reach the same end.

That assumes the party will be in a position to bargain in Parliament. There is always the risk support will not be needed by a Government, but that has been so for most of the time that Maori have been represented by Labour. The chances are much greater that an independent party will win a share of power.

It is quite conceivable that such a party could set up a Maori assembly in which delegates elected from tribes and regions would vote to decide the party's initiatives and positions on bills before Parliament.

The possibilities there are immense for Maori cultural expression, leadership, welfare and pride. And quite quickly, I think, the rest of us would realise the country was better for it.