Somebody should have told them. Somebody should have told old Kupe and Cook, "Look chaps, it's all very well setting sail in leaky boats, eyes on the far horizon, heading for the great unknown, but you don't do that, lads.

"You shouldn't look forward. You should look back! That's what we do!"

And how!! We're the world champions of looking backwards. There's nothing New Zealand does better. Kupe and Cook may have thought it was quite the thing to boldly go where none had gone before, but we won't have a bar of it.

No!!! Our best adventure is packing a nice, safe, low-fat lunch and heading straight back where we've already been.

We've been doing it since 1984 with the Treaty - the only lottery in the world where you don't need a ticket, except the one you got at birth. This crazy, retrospective exercise, largely inspired and generally managed by a hand-wringing, brainwashed, tertiary educated We Shall Overcome, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, middle-class elite desperately looking for something - anything - to fill a spiritual void, has basically bequeathed us a divisive drama, full of angst, anger, frictions and factions.

It's created a mythic nation within a nation, raised expectations that will never be met and provoked a sullen, muttersome sense of resentment, sadly focused on all the wrong people - because this retrospective expedition wasn't launched to satisfy its beneficiaries but rather to vindicate the guilty revisionism of its navigators.

Maori have actually behaved entirely rationally throughout the process. They've quite properly - and sensibly - responded to economic incentives. As anyone would.

Momma mia, if the Italian Government decided it was going to compensate all the descendants of all the Celts who got shafted by Julius C, we'd be frantically combing the archives before you could say, "Bobadecia's your uncle".

But the Italians aren't doing that. Perhaps because they realise that the past is called the past because that's what it is. Or perhaps because they recognise that wars have a very corrosive effect on treaties.

There's not many folk nowadays looking backwards and insisting we honour all those hopeful treaties the rulers of Europe signed before 1914. The shots fired that year instantly made them redundant. And if Parekura Horomia is right when he argues that our history is not peaceful and benign but rather riven and tainted by war, then so was the 19th century judge who called the Treaty "a nullity".