The Mr Fix-it of fisheries

Stemming tribal infighting over fisheries assets is just one of Shane Jones' achievements. He talks to JULIE MIDDLETON in the final of the Secrets of My Success series.

The business world was agog when Waitangi Fisheries Commission chairman Shane Jones negotiated a halt to the Maori fisheries battle several weeks ago.

Affably verbose but with a no-nonsense approach, he engineered an agreement to stop 10 years of messy tribal infighting about the best way to allocate $700 million in Government-given fisheries assets that, according to one report, had been bleeding $1 million a month in lost returns.

He offered two dissenting tribes, Tuwharetoa and Te Arawa, $20 million to develop their freshwater fisheries for their agreement to the latest plan, Ahu Whakamua (Looking to the Future). They accepted, splitting from their allies.

More work is still to be done. The model, which would create the country's largest commercial fishing company, has to go through a select committee next year before becoming law. But everyone's question right now is how Jones accomplished an apparently impossible task.

The answer would appear to stretch right back to his childhood up North, when he was marked out as one to lead - not a role that he embraced at first.

Jones was born 43 years ago into Te Aupouri and Ngai Takoto tribes in the Far North. He also has some Dalmatian and British heritage. Like many eldest children in Maori families, Jones, one of six, was raised largely by his paternal grandmother, who herself had 17 children.

While still running around barefoot and immersed in marae life - he's fluent in Maori and dedicated to his culture - Jones was picked by his elders, many of them Anglican clergymen, to be raised for a future as a priest.

But right through his childhood and teens, Jones "bridled against the suggestion that I'd spend the rest of my life wandering around in an Anglican frock".

Then at the "militaristic" and now closed St Stephen's School in Bombay, Jones discovered that his lack of prowess at athletics and rugby was more than compensated for by good academic results.

The combination of mental agility, outspokenness - he's not afraid to criticise his own - and his continuing aversion to Anglican finery saw the next few years occupied with study at Auckland and Victoria Universities and passionate involvement in the Treaty of Waitangi protest movement.

Jones recalls a furious elder accusing him of being a "calabash-breaker" - destroying something precious.

He's more moderate these days; he's calmed what he calls the "mercurial" side of his nature. His vision is clear: that Maori business blossoms in an economically more healthy New Zealand.

"Unless we expand the economic pie, then Maori or any other group are never going to be beneficiaries of a larger slice," he explains. "The way to expand the pie is to invest in skills, education and experience."

He has all of those, in abundance. To cut a lengthy CV shorter, Jones has a BA in political economy, has completed an honours year at the University of Western Australia and has a masters in public administration from Harvard, financed by a Harkness Fellowship.

He was involved in the birth of the Resource Management Act and the Crown Forest Rental Trust, and acted as interpreter and researcher for Waitangi Tribunal hearings. He is chairman of the Maori business development body Poutama Trust and chairman of Nelson's Sealord fishing company.

He headed the first attempt by Muriwhenua, in 1986, to state their grievance over a fisheries quota management system. He and his wife, Ngareta, have found time to raise seven children, now aged from 5 to 23.

Few probably know that Jones used to write radio drama for the late, lamented Ears kids' radio programme. He has property development interests in North Auckland.

Last year was a monumental one: Jones fought off bowel cancer.

But throughout his career, he says, influential Maori, among them Sir Graham Latimer, Koro Wetere and the late Matiu Rata and Dame Mira Szaszy have backed him.

Discuss the foundations of his working life and Jones returns constantly to one theme: once a decision is made, you have to make it work.

"A lot of decisions we make don't turn out to be the greatest things in the world, but ... when you're put in a position to arrive at a conclusion and make a decision, then don't fiddle around," he says.

"Then you can assemble all sorts of clever and highly technically proficient people to help you make the best of the decision."

Certainty is a human craving, he says, so set boundaries firmly, especially when working collectively. "Be very open and state what the boundaries are. If you move into a set of discussions and you don't create a set of boundaries, then irrespective of where you start from you'll get lost."

A lack of decisiveness and focus has given Maori business a bad reputation, he says.

"So much that happens in the Maori world is wasted time and effort because it's either not ordered or it's too unstructured.

"When you're going into business or economic management, the force of your personality is not what will cause something to happen - it's the power and effectiveness of the structure that's in place."

And delicate handling of the gulfs between elders and a better-educated, more outward-looking younger generation.

"In working in a Maori context it's absolutely essential that you do not belittle the mana of the iwi or the leadership you're dealing with, because much of the leadership has not been forged through economic or business experience - it's leadership that has been achieved in a hierarchical or cultural/voluntary sense," says Jones.

Knowledge is not equal. "You've got to respect the fact that you're not coming to negotiations or discussions as a party of equals. In the time of our children and grandchildren there will be far greater parity but at the moment there isn't.

"You have to guard against making people feel or look as if they are ill-equipped or incapable of leading their particular iwi.

"If you don't acknowledge and take people forward with you, then you'll lose them and they'll retreat into tradition - and tradition will be to reject and to resist because it's foreign, it's strange and it's moving Maori into an area we've conspicuously been absent from."

The key for Jones has been working as an "interest-based negotiator - someone who tries to discover what interests we share in common ... rather than coming in with one fixed position".

But the battles are not yet over. Expect the select committee hearings to be fractious affairs. But Jones is dogged and he's determined that Maori assets are developed, not squandered "like a form of Lotto".

He's resolutely forging ahead, despite "the scepticism of people who believe it can't be done, and the resistance of people who believe it's a foolhardy decision because it only enables Maori to be assimilated into globalisation".