John Roughan: Somewhat strange behaviour for a Governor-General

COMMENT

For a fleeting moment at Waitangi I swear I saw the Governor-General. I'm sure it was her - tall, silver-haired woman in black. She ambled in front of me, dutifully followed by a soldier in dress uniform - a sure sign of a Governor-General.

Otherwise she was just a face in the crowd down at the beach where Hobson came ashore in 1840 and where the waka are launched on Waitangi Day soon after the dawn service.

We could have used her at the dawn service. But Dame Silvia Cartwright never comes to preside at a public ceremony on the treaty grounds. It is odd really.

Why would one in her position come all this way to keep a low profile? Here of all places? Doubtless these things are the subject of prim, purse-lipped discussion at Government House but previous incumbents have managed to turn protocol to better purpose.

Her immediate predecessor, Sir Michael Hardie Boys, wouldn't miss a public engagement at Waitangi until the year he was ordered by Helen Clark to stay away.

The previous year, Ms Clark's first as Prime Minister, Sir Michael had attended even though she did not, and when he spoke at the dawn service he had gently suggested she should be there.

Regardless of whether political leaders could face the tension, Sir Michael considered it a New Zealand Governor-General's particular duty to be at Waitangi on February 6. The G-G is the direct constitutional descendant of Captain Hobson, who offered the treaty to the chiefs in the name of the British Crown.

When Britain handed self-government to the settlers, Maori continued to regard the "Crown" as their contractual partner and still do. Governments of this country invoke that title for all their dealings with Maori.

The Crown's representative is left as a "mere" ceremonial head of state. But ceremony has its purpose. Sometimes, in periods of national dissension, it is more valuable than words.

The role, however, has to be visible, somewhat formal and dignified. If Dame Silvia and her advisers imagine that it is enough to mingle in the crowd, they are doing us a disservice.

There is a want of leadership on both sides at the national birthplace these days. But up there something hopeful always happens.

Normally when the waka pull away from the treaty grounds they are just paddled around the corner to the marae. This time they went a little further, to Paihia.

Paihia, next door to Waitangi, can seem like another world on the day. The gateway to the glittering attractions of the Bay of Islands hums along, glad of the traffic but grateful also that the complicated national stuff is away around the point, out of sight.

So it was a surprise to come upon the waka - four of them this year - beached at Paihia where a sizeable crowd had gathered on the roadside watching the crews perform their haka.

The crews were almost entirely young boys under the tutelage of a few men who lined them up, introduced each haka to the crowd and stood back while the kids went at their heritage with the usual serious gusto.

The crowd watched with its usual charmed detachment. After some time a man in the crowd suddenly spoke out. A school teacher, I suspect, he greeted and thanked the crews, speaking English but in the formal, forthright Maori style.

Among other things, he called the foreshore they were performing on "your land". The crowd let it pass. When he finished there was warm and sustained applause along the roadside.

Leadership can happen unexpectedly.

We have a right to expect it, though, from someone selected to provide it. And the Government that selected her is going to need it.

It is apparent in the popular response to Don Brash that we are in for a full-blown backlash against the modern judicial conception of the treaty. It's hard to see the Clark Government standing strongly against it. "Closing the gaps" wilted under less.

But the Governor-General is, or should be, immune to electoral considerations and capable, like the judiciary, of speaking and acting in the purest national interest.

Dame Silvia, it turned out, did have something to say on Waitangi Day. She waited until she was back in Wellington, at her evening reception, to say that the phrase "he iwi tahi tatou", uttered by Governor Hobson at the signing of the treaty, did not mean "We are now one people".

She had it on good authority that to Maori in 1840, the phrase would have meant, "We two people together make a nation". Dear, dear.

Discussion about what Hobson said can only reinforce the Brash backlash. What the British representatives said in 1840 matters less than what Maori accepted.

Unless you want to treat our founding document as a confidence trick, you have to look at the circumstances of 1840 to see what the chiefs reasonably expected to give and receive.

They were, I suspect, signing up to a system of law which they knew by then was better than the codes of tribal honour and vengeance that had governed their society for centuries and which, with the arrival of firearms, had caused convulsions within it over the 20 years to 1840.

Nothing in the treaty gave the chiefs reason to expect the scale of immigration that ensued. The law they adopted recognised tribal authority and property and Maori now appeal to the law to accommodate those rights at some cost to a simple majoritarian democracy.

A Governor-General who comes from the judiciary is well placed to speak these things. It is time she stepped up.