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David Round
A ‘conversation’. The very word fills me with foreboding. ‘Conversations’ are creatures of the caring classes; the schoolteachers and academics, the higher-paid end of the public service and all the professional carers in charities, lobby groups, trusts and the social sciences; all comfortably off, and all dedicated to their own deadly vision of a truly caring and happy world where they and people just like them intend to be in charge.
The Maori water claim is not just an argument over an increasingly valuable resource. It is also another nail in the coffin of racial harmony and national survival.
Our crisis is one of character. We are in the situation we are in because of the sort of people we are. Any solution must spring out of our own energy and faith in ourselves, out of a shared understanding of the world and of our hopes for the future, and out of a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood which impels us to care for each other but which also impels those who are cared for to desire that they pull their weight in striving for the common good. ‘Without vision the people perish.’ Most of all, we must have faith in ourselves.
We have come to be divided by a new racial bitterness that will soon be incurable. A vocal racial minority continues to make increasingly extreme demands upon what remains of our national resources and possessions, and even the appeasement of those demands does not satisfy the appetites of those who see every act of generosity as a sign of weakness, and who then demand yet more. To continue in these courses is very short-sighted, for that path leads inevitably and all too swiftly to an apartheid nation, national bankruptcy and civil strife.
I have been thinking about ‘culture’, my friends, and am trying to get a handle on this most important matter. Culture is jolly important. We hear a lot about Maori culture, and hear all the time that we are a ‘bicultural nation’, although this is of course disputed by those who insist that we are actually multicultural.
For some years I taught constitutional law at the University of Canterbury. I was also a debater, in those days when debating was a more popular activity than it is now ~ and it would happen, from time to time, when I appeared to speak in a debate, that the chairman, in introducing me, would tell the audience that I was a remarkable man, because (among other things) I lectured in constitutional law, and this in a country that did not possess a constitution! I would smile politely at this merry jest and pass on to the subject of my discourse.
The Auckland City Council’s plans for a $2.6 billion rail loop to assist in easing the city’s transport woes have encountered, as all Aucklanders will be aware, a perhaps unexpected obstacle. One Glenn Wilcox, a member of the Maori Statutory Board which ‘assists’ the council, has pointed out to its transport committee that the rail tunnel between Mt Eden and the Britomart Centre proposed as part of the loop would trespass on the territory of Horotiu. Many Aucklanders had probably forgotten about Horotiu, but he is a taniwha. The taniwha is the principal monster of Maori mythology, and this one’s territory, Mr Wilcox tells us, evidently runs (how does he know?) from Myers Park to the sea, therefore including the area of the Town Hall and Queen Street. ‘The tunnel goes right through his rohe[territory]’, Mr Wilcox told the committee. He added that ‘[i]t concerns me that they [the council] do not see Maori as a component of the city, and that is where I come from’.
There is an old joke, which I am afraid I have used more than once on occasions where speeches may be required to run along very familiar lines, in which one remarks that ones job as a speaker is a little like the challenge which faced Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth husband on their wedding night ~ he knew what to do, but he didn’t know how to make it interesting. Something similar, I fear, must be the lot of those who write on the subject of the Treaty. There is only so much to be said. After that one can only repeat oneself.
In New Zealand the chief threat to nationhood has been the Maori separatism which our leaders continue to promote, at the cost of the rest of us ~ costs both immediate, in terms of loss of assets and resources ~ the foreshore and seabed is next ~ and long-term, in terms of national disintegration.
Something very suspicious is happening. The Prime Minister and Attorney-General insist that their proposed new foreshore and seabed law will allow free public access, and accuse Dr Hugh Barr, of the Coastal Coalition, of telling ‘untruths’ when he disagrees. But when the Attorney-General says that he will nevertheless propose amending the bill in order to make things 100% clear, the Maori Party threatens to abandon its support for the bill, Hone Harawira calling ACT’s leader ‘a little fat redneck’. Why might Maori be angry, if things were only to be made clearer, and nothing were actually to change?
