Audrey Young: Leadership muted as maverick blasts bill

Photo / Alan Gibson

There is a simple reason MP Hone Harawira is winning the public relations war within the Maori Party over the bill his leaders have negotiated to repeal Labour's Foreshore and Seabed Act.

He has no strong counter-weight advocating for the bill.

Harawira's voice is starting to reverberate like an echo chamber.

The sales pitch of Maori Party co-leaders Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia have been half-hearted and apologetic.

Attorney General Chris Finlayson would make a powerful advocate as to why the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill is better than Labour's law from a Maori perspective.

But National has quite reasonably left the sales pitch for the bill to the Maori Party.

After all, securing the review of the act and then repeal was its win in the confidence and supply agreement, not National's.

Labour has made acceptance of the bill more difficult.

Yes, Labour decided to reverse its position and support repeal of its own act.

But in a bid to minimise its exposure to claims of flip-flops, it has run the line that the National bill is virtually no different to Labour's law that prompted thousands to march against it.

It is a line that Harawira is using and Maoridom is buying, although it is wrong.

The Maori Party National Bill restores the right to go to court, it gives Maori the right to negotiate directly with the Crown for title, it relaxes the test to gain customary title (when compared with the territorial rights order under Labour), and gives successful iwi actual ownership of the foreshore and seabed, including development rights - with the proviso it cannot be sold.

Harawira has opted for purism over pragmatism. He and his supporters concentrate on the fact the bill does not "return" the entire foreshore and seabed to Maori, and/or that the ownership rights of customary title will fall short of the other parcels of foreshore and seabed that are in private title.

Harawira is not spelling out the obvious to his support base.

Based on recent New Zealand history, it is obvious that if the bill becomes law it may not take too much time before the aspects of it, such as the test to gain customary title, are re-cast by a coalition agreement or a court.

That court case could perhaps be the result of a case taken under the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as New Zealand First leader Winston Peters suggested yesterday.

Perversely, the Maori Party's strongest advocate for what the bill does - or has the potential to do - turns out to be Peters and the Act Party.

The inability of the Maori Party co-leaders to be positive about what the bill offers is allowing Harawira to triumph.

That may well result in a bill that is stripped of all that they gained, other than the ability to claim customary title through the courts.

Turia and Sharples have been imploring their membership to support the bill, to give something for future generations to work on.

It would help their own cause if they supported it for what it could do for present generations.