KEY POINTS:
There was a period around 20 years ago when New Zealand finally seemed to be coming to terms with the Treaty of Waitangi.
The country was still trying to discover how the Treaty fitted into its national consciousness (just as it continues to do), but there was a sense at the time that the search was nearly over.
And in 1990 the sesquicentennial commemoration of the Treaty's signing (only bureaucrats could promote such an awkward designation) was to be New Zealand's watershed year - a heady mix of national maturity and national epiphany.
The Commonwealth Games were here (with their ironic allusion to the British Empire that created and then set about violating the Treaty). And the Queen visited, and was met with the obligatory protest, this time culminating in a wet T-shirt being hurled at her - no training camps in the Ureweras needed for that.
There was also a well-organised spate of publications on Treaty-related topics. A few were great, but many more were pallid fruits propagated by Government departments.
State-sponsored history, like state-sponsored art, seldom produces works of lasting importance, and most of these books and pamphlets now lie mainly unread on library shelves. But at least efforts were being made to address the role of the Treaty, and the message emphasising its significance to the country looked like it was sinking in.
By the middle of the 1990s, several major Treaty claims were in the final throes of being resolved. And the Government hoped to hasten this process by introducing its fiscal envelope (another fine example of civil service idiom) limiting the "burden" to the taxpayer of these settlements. Never mind the burden many Maori communities had endured for generations - that was all behind us now.
So 1990s New Zealand was definitely forward-looking, and if it took a billion dollars to silence the Maori claimants once and for all, then so be it.
For all the cultural cringe of the 1980s, the nation had come out from under the duvet and found the atmosphere not intimidating or confusing, but bracing and even invigorating.
Jim Bolger, National Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997, in particular seemed to relish the large-scale settlements his Government engineered. And the vague promises of the principles of "partnership", "protection" and "participation" were spoken of in some quarters as though they were the new articles of faith for the Treaty.
Then it all changed. Almost as quickly as the sometimes shameful state of our race relations seemed to be a topic to be consigned to the past, the revelry in national unity began to unravel.
The signs were few at first - a bit more reticence in quoting Governor Hobson's pronouncement that we are "all one people", followed by mounting Maori discontent with the clanking apparatus of the tribunal, the inherent injustice of the fiscal envelope, and for the first time, even some Maori trust boards and runanga which were under fire from their own constituents for their management of settlement funds.
Then there was the return of activism - Moutoa Gardens and One Tree Hill being among the more visible examples.
Meanwhile, on the other side of this widening divide, European dissatisfaction at what looked like an unending procession of Treaty claims was intensifying. The only difference was that this antagonism did not take the form of pronounced public protest, but instead, tended to be mumbled under the breath of the grumbling classes.
By 2000, the "Treaty Debate" - as this constitutional and cultural identity crisis became known - began to blanket the nation in the same old arguments and prejudices that many hoped had been relegated to an earlier, less enlightened age.
All this culminated in Don Brash's breathtaking and uncharacteristically opportunistic Orewa speech in 2004, in which he proposed kicking away the few remaining props supporting the role of the Treaty in the country's public life.
However, Brash's tenure as opposition leader was short-lived, and his aspirations for a post-Treaty New Zealand sank with him.
Yet, three terms of the Clark Government have done very little to address the health of the Treaty. New Zealand still remains one of the very tiny minority of countries in the world where a thorough survey of its own history is not a compulsory topic in schools.
And to compensate for the thousands of young adults who finish their secondary education with no real knowledge of the Treaty, the Government responded by introducing its much unloved drive-by Treaty roadshow as a sap to the culture of the drive-through generation.
There has since been some tinkering to the school curriculum to ensure the Treaty gets a mention, but it appears without a suitable context, and will probably end up being little more than a fresh coat of paint applied to a dilapidated edifice that is disinclined by nature to give any serious recognition to the Treaty.
In many ways, as the country enters election year, our view of the Treaty is less clear than at any time in the past two decades. For a start, the agreement is now portrayed typically in racial tones, rather than fundamentally as a constitutional arrangement as its authors intended it to be.
The greater threat to the Treaty relationship at the present time, though, is not hostility directed at it, but widespread public indifference to anything associated with the agreement.
In the space of less than one generation the Treaty has gone in popular perception from being seen as a national founding document - unique to any modern nation-state - to something viewed as being spectacularly banal.
Instead of stirring people's thoughts whenever it is mentioned, the Treaty of Waitangi is now just as likely to elicit an impassive stare.
Whatever the status of the Treaty in the country's constitution or among some Maori communities, there is a more general feeling that for most New Zealanders, it has become increasingly indistinct from images of clutches of protesters chanting slogans about Maori sovereignty, and has grown progressively irrelevant as the nation becomes more of a cultural Babel, and consequently less connected to its own history.
The challenge for whichever party becomes the new Government this year, then, is to separate the Treaty from the slogans, the misconceptions, and the prejudices that have grow like grime around it and give our founding document the recognition it deserves - nothing more, nothing less.
* Paul Moon is Professor of History at AUT University and author of The Newest Country in the World: A History of New Zealand in the Decade of the Treaty.
paul.moon@aut.ac.nz
