Editorial: 'Information' on treaty a $6.5m waste

The promises that are easiest to make in election campaigns can be some of the hardest to turn into practical policies. No promise made by the Labour Party in 1999 could have been easier than the undertaking to run a Treaty of Waitangi education programme. Not only was the promise safe from criticism - who could possibly oppose an educational project? - but it saved the party from taking a definite position on a contentious subject. Where did Labour stand on questions of disputed sovereignty, for example? It would provide treaty education.

Four years on, a year into the Government's second term, there appears still to be little flesh on the bones of the promise. A "treaty information unit" has been set up within the State Services Commission and given a budget of $6.47 million for a three-year programme starting next year. But information unearthed about the unit under the Official Information Act has brought to light papers that suggest nobody is yet quite sure what form the project will take. The change of title from "education" to "information" seems to be significant, at least to the commission. In a paper to the Cabinet in April the commission expressed concern about some of the directives it was receiving. Suggestions for "short dramatisations", it said, "seem to be somewhat at odds with the 'factual information' thrust of the programmes".

And the fact that the commission was chosen to run the project is interesting in itself. In March, the policy was under the care of the Ministers of Treaty Negotiations, Margaret Wilson, and Maori Affairs, Parekura Horomia. By April, the task had been transferred to the Minister of State Services, Trevor Mallard. The papers reveal no reason for the switch but more than likely the Cabinet felt Ms Wilson and Mr Horomia were too firmly associated in the public mind with promoting a Maori view of the treaty.

Therein lies the trouble for this $6.47 million "information" programme. Unless it is to provide no more than the most rudimentary historical information, it is going to have to take a position on some of the most difficult and delicate political questions facing this country. What exactly did the treaty say, in English and Maori? What did it mean? Which version should we follow? Why did the British Government offer the treaty and why did so many Maori chiefs sign it?

Only the first of those questions can be reasonably answered within a "factual information" programme, and even then there will be disputed translations of the Maori wording. Even the original Maori version was written by a Pakeha missionary, Henry Williams. As for the subsequent questions, they are still far from resolved in academic circles, let alone ready for popular instruction.

The Government, of course, would like to short-circuit academic arguments and to convince the country that promises were made which were not kept and that restitution is due. But opinion polls suggest most New Zealanders accept that land was improperly seized in some cases and they generally support compensation for descendants of the original occupants. Dissension arises when the treaty is invoked for claims to resources that were unknown in 1840 or for a slice of an asset established since colonisation or, in the claim to foreshore and seabed, for exclusive ownership of amenities everyone else values as part of the public estate.

Those are not the kind of concern that can be assuaged by official information or education in the ordinary sense. They are properly and inevitably matters of intense political debate. If a national consensus can be reached it will come from reasoned argument led by politicians of courage, not from the few bare facts that can be comfortably disseminated by state servants. The Cabinet is full of former educators. Let them save our $6.47 million and front their own campaign.