Dialogue: Murmured chat brightened a dispiriting day

There was an awkwardness about Helen Clark's return that infected the house. I don't suppose she will come back, writes JOHN ROUGHAN.

During the dawn service an elderly man alongside me talked quietly about the children who have come through the classes he runs at his marae in the Bay of Islands.

Hau Hereora said he and his wife have been teaching the preschool kids about their culture and its protocol since he retired from Affco at Moerewa nearly 20 years ago. He showed me his gold watch.

"You should see those kids," he said.

He was proud of his fitness, too. The carved stick he held was for oratory, not walking. He loved walking. He said he sometimes walked all the way from Kawakawa to his home at Waikare.

Ordinarily you wouldn't hold a conversation during the dawn service at Waitangi but this year nothing much was happening. Ordinarily, men like Mr Hereora would be sitting on the benches along the walls of the meeting house and I would be on the floor, with Chief Justice Sian Elias and others who come every year for the dawn karakia.

Ordinarily, we would be enchanted by oratory in a language too few of us understand and by the waiata of visitors from various tribes.

For two hours before dawn there was normally a warmth in the meeting house that could make you believe New Zealand, with an effort, will be all right. The Governor-General and the Prime Minister would speak and try to match the spirit. Jenny Shipley did it particularly well.

Last year the treaty partner didn't turn up and the focus was lacking. This year the Crown returned but the spirit never did.

The reason, perhaps, was the chairs, awaiting us in tidy rows. There was something intimate about sitting on the floor. Possibly it also had something to do with the absence again of a Governor-General. Somebody decided Dame Silvia Cartwright should silently attend the waka launching instead.

Or maybe it was the Prime Minister, sitting hunched and looking pinched while several of her colleagues tried to say something worthy. There was an awkwardness about Helen Clark's return that infected the house. Few of the old men spoke, and none for long.

Then, when the Prime Minister was practically forced to her feet by the officiator, she was heckled by a hirsute character with eccentric views even by standards of Maori radicalism.

Beside me, Mr Hereora flinched and shrank with embarrassment. He looked down at the stetson on his knee and fingered the hatband.

The fellow ought to have been thrown out. The order was given, the wardens gathered. But it hardly seemed worth the trouble. The gathering, already lacklustre, degenerated into long, rambling representations to Helen Clark about the Maori Government of Aotearoa.

Mr Hereora shook his head. It wasn't that he disagreed with the assertion of Maori sovereignty but this was not the time or place. There was a way to say these things but these people had never learned it, he murmured.

The radicals were "a lost generation" in his view and they are no longer young. I had noticed that.

The same people have been leading the demonstrations at Waitangi for 25 years. Their dreadlocks are now grey, their arms matronly and black T-shirts cannot hide their paunches.

They are well into their 40s, 50s and 60s and the good news is that they are not being replaced.

At Waitangi last year, Annette Sykes and others made a determined effort to encourage younger voices to the fore. They held workshops and drew up radical declarations for the young to make. And they found a young man to front the effort but when he spoke at the disrupted mid-morning service, he was moderate and pleasant.

Mr Hereora said hundreds of children had passed through his tutelage over the past 20 years. His eyes glistened and he sucked his breath. They knew their tikanga and would never forget it.

"They won't do this," he said, looking at the hairy interjector a few rows in front of us, and at an earnest woman with her supporters up front, accusing the Prime Minister of treason.

Jenny Shipley used to attend a forum on February 5 where this same nonsense was vented. That left the following day relatively untroubled. Helen Clark has not copied the practice because, I suppose, the forum was hard to control.

I don't suppose she will come back to Waitangi, though her predecessor will. Though last week she announced her retirement from politics at this election, Jenny Shipley was there again on Wednesday.

All the seats had been taken when she, Burton and several National MPs slipped into the 5 am service and sat on the floor. She waved away several offers of a chair until one was brought to her and she accepted it with resignation.

Spotting her, Mr Hereora said, "Jenny Shipley was good here. I've told her that a few times."

In the years that Helen Clark was not there, Jenny Shipley relented to pressure to speak. But not this year, not even when the leader of the National Party was called and the absence of Bill English was glaring.

Surprising too. In past years he has been on the floor in his woolly socks.

Waitangi is the crucible for a certain quality of leadership. At the dawn service Jim Anderton recalled Norman Kirk hand in hand with a child at the treaty grounds. Not many Prime Ministers have had that instinctive touch.

Leadership is much more than sound judgment and safe political management. At times it requires the facility to express hopes, fears, faith and sentiments that feed the national spirit. Maybe next year.