Leaders urged to find new basis for treaty

By SIMON COLLINS

A "shipwrecked" Treaty of Waitangi needs a new basis that New Zealanders can support, says former environment minister Simon Upton.

He told the Knowledge Wave Trust's leadership forum on its final day yesterday that he was guilty of "evasion" when he required local bodies, through the Resource Management Act in 1991, to take account of the "principles" of the treaty.

"I am quite sure that none of us knew what we meant when we signed up to that formula," he said.

He said most New Zealanders did not support a "treaty-based nationhood" whose rules were "so arcane that only an elite can understand them".

"The truth is the treaty is shipwrecked between three bodies - Parliament, the courts and the Waitangi Tribunal - none of which can claim simultaneously the authority, the legitimacy and the public respect needed to point the way forward," he said.

"We must carve out a space and find the people who can bring this debate back in touch with the public at large and propose solutions that an overwhelming majority of New Zealanders not only feel they can live with, but solutions that will come to be actively grasped as the basis of our nationhood."

Mr Upton, 45, left Parliament in 1999 to take a job chairing the roundtable on sustainable development of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. Herald columnist Colin James referred to him later in the forum as a possible first president of a New Zealand republic.

He said people responded to Maori claims that the treaty gave them a right to rangatiratanga, or chieftainship, with "denial, evasion or constructive engagement".

"Many New Zealanders will simply deny any space for Maori beyond common citizenship," he said.

"Sovereignty in their book means one man, one vote. Whatever rangatiratanga means, it cannot limit majoritarian democracy."

Instead of simply denying the treaty, successive governments had resorted to "evasion".

Mr Upton said that when it framed the Resource Management Act, the National Government was aware of treaty "principles" developed by the Court of Appeal in 1987 and by the Waitangi Tribunal in dealing with Maori land claims.

"But given the extraordinarily wide reach of the act, handing over its implementation to local councils with no clear guidance on how those principles might intersect with the claimed rangatiratanga of any particular group amounted to a legislative evasion," he said.

He considered that it was now time for "constructive engagement" to build a new national consensus.

One of the 100 "emerging leaders" at the Knowledge Wave forum, Auckland Theatre Company associate director Oliver Driver said the treaty was "about a mutual relationship, about respect, about integrity".

He said it was shameful that so few Maori, Pacific Islanders and Asians were in the room, and only 12 out of 55 speakers were women.

"It is depressing to hear my Prime Minister speak of politics rather than people, Mike Moore encourage bombs in Baghdad while eating beef in a ballroom and why the most inspiring emerging leaders I have met so far were considered the entertainment," he said.

He invited leaders to consider why they panicked when they found themselves in South Auckland.

"Dean Barker has failed three times and our support for him gets stronger. Bailey Junior Kurariki failed once and we locked him in prison and pretended it had nothing to do with us."

Herald Special Report - February 18, 2003: