Party time: Wild contrast in offerings on windswept hill

By JULIE MIDDLETON

The Maori warrior guarding the One Tree Hill obelisk watches over Loelak Phalangkun as she lays a Big Mac, a Coke, a serve of fries and a packet of cigarettes on the ground below his feet.

She lights one of the cigarettes, propping it up among the golden arches' finest potatoes.

Then she pokes a cluster of incense sticks into a nearby spotlight surround, lights them, and crouches briefly facing out to the Manukau Heads, hands pressed together in supplication. The musky smoke is snatched away by a swift west wind.

The junk food and ciggies are an offering to the Thai student's God and her dead ancestors, she later explains, and she has chosen the spot for its height.

As Ms Phalangkun, 25, leans against the summit's stone ramparts, waiting for the incense to die as is her religion's custom, Act supporters await their leader.

Richard Prebble is to launch the party's Treaty of Waitangi policy, which compresses to the sound-bite "one law for all".

In fine political stunt style, he is to plant a sole baby pohutukawa on One Tree Hill - something the Auckland City Council couldn't manage last weekend. That ceremony was cancelled after Ngati Whatua refused to attend; its Waitangi Tribunal claim includes the site.

Sheltering from squalls under a tartan umbrella are dapper list candidate Harry Law, MP Stephen Franks and Robin Roodt, Act's Maungakiekie hope. He has just worked out that the hill shares the electorate's name. "I'm an ex-Japie!" he says in explanation and introduction, referring to his South African roots.

Franks, in jovial spirits, cuts in: Why do Japies [rhymes with harpies] have such flat heads? The answer: "I don't know!" while slapping his forehead with an open palm. Roodt laughs. There are 1000 Japie jokes and he knows them all.

Law, a member of Act's recently launched Asian chapter, sucks thoughtfully on a cigarette. Although he's been here since 1951, there's lately been a rise in abuse. He blames Winston Peters.

Prebble arrives with an entourage, most of its members in well-cut suits which can't block the biting wind. Next to the iron fence encircling a famous stump, he consigns his $19.99 tree - a "pohutakawa" according to its Act-made label - to a terracotta pot rather than the ground.

To put it in the earth, he quips, would contravene the party's zero-tolerance-to-crime stance.

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