John Roughan: National's treaty policy retains its dumb arrogance

What possesses an intelligent man like Bill English to stand grinning on the full page of a newspaper alongside a statement as crass as: "I'll settle past treaty claims by 2008."?

Desperation possesses his party, no doubt, but you would think it would play to his strengths.

English has interesting, far-sighted views on most subjects but National has never come to grips with the idea of treaty settlements. It thinks they are rather quaint old breaches of contract that simply need to be redressed once and for all so we can move on to more agreeable things.

"Then we can all paddle in the same waka," the advertisement says.

The treaty trash-vote threatens to be a hotly contested commodity in this election. It is New Zealand First's natural habitat, but Act makes regular forays there when it falls below the 5 per cent threshold. Both are climbing into the white robes again.

And both are better on the subject than National. NZ First's leader has the distinct advantage of being Maori, which means he is aware, as Pakeha generally are not, of the pull of Maori sovereignty and he is well placed to confront it.

Act in its better moments directs its thrust at the genuine drawbacks of deference to Article 2, the tino rangatiratanga clause of the treaty.

Its "malign effects", MP Stephen Franks told expatriates in Sydney last Sunday, were "excuses for nepotism, indifference to conflicts of interest, deliberately uncertain law, pork barrelling, legislative reinforcement of superstition, the revival of failed collectivist solutions to social ills [and] the preservation of hereditary privilege at the expense of meritocracy".

But to National it is just some unpleasant historical detritus that needs to be cleared away as quickly as possible.

The truly dismaying aspect of this pitch is that National has been there before. Last time it came to power it was going to resolve all outstanding grievances within 10 years or something.

Once in power, National wisely said little more about its deadline. Its Minister in Charge of Treaty Settlements, Doug Graham, soon realised he could not rush it, although even he was too much of a lawyer to see beyond legalistic finality.

Early on, he was saddled with a "fiscal envelope" - a unilateral declaration of a financial ceiling on settlements. For all the ensuing furore, and its eventual backdown, National has learned nothing.

Its latest policy has all the dumb unilateral arrogance of the fiscal envelope. It promises to "close the book" on claims within 12 months of taking office and settle all past claims within five years.

It is insulting not just to those with a right to bargain as equals, but to all voters. Deep down we all know the treaty exercise is not about history, land and "full and final" settlements. It is about recognition and power here and now.

Heaven forbid that the reports of the Waitangi Tribunal are ever taken as history. The same must be said of the grievance summaries accepted by the Office of Treaty Settlements for claims that bypass the tribunal.

The office, under the previous Government and this one, deliberately does not much question the historical accounts presented to it. Staff are instructed to get on with checking the legitimacy of the claimants and their coverage.

Those seem to cause far more disputes than any research of a claim.

Likewise, the reports of the tribunal give little sign of rigorous historical dispute. The tribunal sits on marae, where it is greeted with an outpouring of emotion, listens with profound respect for oral accounts of events long ago and gives its conclusions in language that seems carried away by the experience.

It doesn't sound like balanced history should, but then nor do scholarly accounts of colonial history these days. Tendentious scholarship is a far greater concern than tribal legend. The Waitangi Tribunal is unabashedly a truth and reconciliation commission and it is probably typical of such exercises that truth is subservient to the reconciliation.

By now most people are aware that today's payouts are not the first on the major claims and few imagine they will be the last. The claimants regard them as generational rent.

And fair enough. Generations will go on paying until Maori feel their stake in this country, culturally and economically, is such that they have no more need of the exercise.

I share a vague sense of hope that the Waitangi procedure can advance that reconciliation. It is a view Stephen Franks finds odd, especially in a generation that changed divorce law because it held that litigating grievances needlessly exacerbated tensions in a dead marriage.

The difference is, I hope, that the marriage of 1840 is not headed for divorce.

National, Act and NZ First may be right that treaty handouts will do little to improve the prospects of most Maori but none of those parties is proposing programmes that might.

The single most effective way to short-circuit not just the treaty industry but most of the post-colonial tensions in this country would be to teach Maori language thoroughly at primary school. Know people's language and you probably understand their thoughts. But suggest that to parties of the right and they react as though you were forcing poison upon their kids.

One way or another we will get there, but at the rate the National Party is thinking it will take a little longer than 2008.

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