Brash's knife hovers over Maori offices

Don Brash

National will today unveil plans to review and possibly abolish several key Maori agencies as leader Don Brash moves to revive the race relations debate.

Speaking in Whangarei today, Dr Brash will include signals about which institutions National may move to abolish over time.

Set to be reviewed are Te Puni Kokiri (the Ministry of Maori Development), the Office of the Maori Trustee, Te Mangai Paho (the Maori broadcasting agency), the Waitangi Tribunal and the Office of Treaty Settlements.

Although Dr Brash may not be specific about eventually getting rid of Te Puni Kokiri, it understood that is the expected result of the review National will undertake.

The agency that develops policy and audits other Government departments has a budget of about $55 million and employs 400 staff in nine regional offices.

It was put under review by the Government two years ago, which resulted in strong criticism from the State Services Commission. It was subsequently restructured.

National believes core Government agencies should be doing the work at present charged to Te Puni Kokiri.

Maori Affairs Minister Parekura Horomia says Labour would keep the agency, but New Zealand First has pledged to review agencies based solely on race. Act would end taxpayer funding to race-based services.

Dr Brash sparked a surge in National's support when he devoted his first Orewa speech to race relations and the party is expecting a similar response as it returns to the issue in the lead-up to the election.

National narrowed the gap between it and Labour in last night's TVNZ-Colmar Brunton poll, but is still three points behind.

It unveiled its primary election card - the tax-cuts package - last week and is likely to be disappointed with the poll.

Dr Brash is also expected today to name certain pieces of legislation from which treaty clauses would be removed, including the Land Transport Management Act.
The party has pledged to speed up the treaty settlement process and Dr Brash is also expected to shed some further light on how it would do this.

National's settlement deadlines are extremely ambitious and its plans for speeding up the process will be carefully scrutinised.

But there remains confusion over whether the party, which had to damp down mixed messages over its forestry policy last week, will make the abolition of the Maori seats an absolute bottom line.

Dr Brash labelled that a coalition bottom line several months ago, when discussing why he believed it highly unlikely the party could form a government with the Maori Party.

More recently, his deputy, Gerry Brownlee, the party's Maori Affairs spokesman, said that although the issue was important to National, it was not a bottom line.

"I don't think you can say in an election such a policy will be a bottom line.

"Clearly tax cuts are a bottom line. And some of the changes we want to make in education are clearly pretty much bottom line," Mr Brownlee said then.

But Dr Brash said twice at the weekend that scrapping the Maori seats was a bottom-line policy.

He said yesterday that he was unaware of Mr Brownlee's comments.

"We are committed to the abolition of the Maori seats."

Asked if that was a coalition bottom line, he said: "I can't imagine circumstances where the party would be willing to back off that".

New Zealand First opposes abolition of the seats without Maori support and is the party National is most likely to need to form a government.

Dr Brash said: "Let's just see what happens after the election.

"If we've got eight or nine times the vote of New Zealand First, it will be New Zealand First that has to compromise their commitment, not the National Party."