By AUDREY YOUNG
Marie Tautari has two brothers in Parliament, Winston and Jim Peters, but is more inclined to back Tariana Turia's Maori Party attitude to the foreshore and seabed.
Her brothers' party, New Zealand First, has insisted that the foreshore and seabed be vested in Crown ownership, the price of their
support for the Government's other measures giving Maori a greater say over management of the foreshore.
But Mrs Turia's leadership has impressed her.
"She will be a very humanitarian leader," Mrs Tautari said yesterday at the party's inaugural hui in Wanganui.
"She will be very loyal to Maori values, which really are not accommodated much in this country.
'So I am hopeful that with Tariana's leadership we will see a different sort of way in which Maori participation in politics may occur. She is definitely a very inclusive person.
"I came to look to see what the party is about and to see if it has a future. I do support it because I have looked at what politics has delivered to Maori over many years and I think it has fallen far short of Maori expectation, far short."
Maori still viewed themselves as being in a relationship with the Crown through the Treaty of Waitangi and they expected that relationship to be reflected in the way policies were put forward, she said.
"How can the Government say the foreshore belongs to the Crown when there were already people here who were the total users of that foreshore and seabed, and in the treaty the arrangement was that they would purchase the land as the Maori wished to sell. Where did it slip away?"
The 11 Peters children grew up on the foreshore at Whananaki, 30 minutes north of Whangarei. Mrs Tautari is the third-eldest.
"When I was a child, there was hardly a Pakeha picking up anything [seafood] in that foreshore, nothing.
"But when there became a commercial reality out there they came in. None of my family can deny that. We were all at that foreshore.
"We all saw it. And the thing that really gets me is that I don't think very many Pakeha people actually understand how dependent Maori people were and still are on that food."
