Lindsay Mitchell: Playing the blame game won't solve anything

COMMENT

In his appraisal of the debate about the Treaty of Waitangi and race relations headlined "We all want fairness - so let's discuss how to get it", Charles Waldegrave talks of our "unwritten social contract" being disturbed.

The social contract he describes is between Maori and non-Maori, and he believes it needs to be renewed.

His contract features an important assumption that it is the role of government to help to meet the needs of citizens who are disadvantaged. He asserts that the "vast majority" are of this view. I am less sure.

Government's role expanded throughout the last century, slowly initially and rapidly in the second half. When New Zealand was colonised it was considered to be the role of families and communities to look after their disadvantaged. The same expectations fell on the whanau or iwi.

Gradually those obligations were shifted from family and community to the larger public. It began when old-age pensions, paid for from taxation, were introduced - a seemingly fair and feasible idea with low life expectancies and a small aged population.

But from that seed of an idea grew a multiplicity of social benefits. Today we have maternity, medical, hospital, and pharmaceutical benefits. And we have family benefits, veterans' pensions, benefits for widows, miners, orphans, invalids, the unemployed. There are emergency benefits. There are independent youth and single parent benefits. And parental leave benefits, student allowances, and housing benefits. Maori are not excluded from any of these.

The 1962 Maori Welfare Act was the basis of a programme that sought "the social and economic advancement and the promotion and maintenance of the health and general well-being of the Maori community and the facilitation of full integration of the Maori race into the social and economic life of the country".

The 1973 New Zealand Yearbook states: "An important feature of the programme is that it does not seek to impose standards from without; rather it calls upon the Maori people to exercise control and direction in their own communities in the essentials of good citizenship and civic responsibility".

The wisdom of those words seems to have been lost in the ensuing years. Many Maori and Pakeha have lost their focus on good citizenship.

"Good citizenship" may sound stuffy today but it encompasses the types of attributes Charles Waldegrave describes: a desire for fairness and equality of opportunity. It also requires a readiness to work together to make these things possible.

Many have lost their sense of civic responsibility because government has assumed far too much of it. Government has made entire sections of the population dependent by trying to solve problems that should have been dealt with by families or communities.

Sir Apirana Ngata warned that dependence on welfare would weaken Maori, and he was right inasmuch as it weakens everybody, regardless of race.

It is not the Treaty of Waitangi that is breaking down. It is the social contract long held between individuals, groups and, by extrapolation, between races. It is breaking down because those who aren't interested in being good citizens are not living up to the pact.

The proportion of people who fit this bill is growing. If anything, Maori are taking an undeserved drumming for this when criticism should be directed at all who have abdicated responsibility for themselves and their children to the state.

Part of the anger being directed at Maori is because Pakeha are tired of the blame game. At a time when we are facing huge problems in continuing to fund everybody's genuine needs, let alone all the unnecessary, self-inflicted ones, it is pointless to constantly hark back to the past as a justification for present failure.

This habit isn't just confined to Maori extremists. Plenty of others from all walks of life are happy to blame outside forces when their inner ones are inadequate.

We all want fairness, apparently, but some will never get enough. Those who have been scraping by with precious little of it in their daily working lives have, at last, found a voice.

Charles Waldegrave believes that once we have set some agreed goals we will be "able to arrest the current disturbance in our informal social agreement". No doubt he envisages this consensus taking place under the auspices of an elitist commission of inquiry.

It isn't as simple as that. Agreeing on goals is easy. Agreeing on how best to achieve them is where people find themselves at loggerheads.

That is why New Zealand's future rests on the wider political debate. And so it should. We all have a vote.

* Lindsay Mitchell is a research fellow for the Institute for Liberal Values.