KEY POINTS:
Why bother? I know it is another nice long weekend strategically positioned immediately after Auckland's Anniversary Day that enables us to gently slip back into work mode after the summer holidays with a couple of four-day weeks, but Waitangi Day is a farce.
In being treated badly, jostled
and abused, John Key joins a long Waitangi Day hit-list that includes Prime Ministers, politicians, Governors General and even the Queen.
For the past quarter-century every flake from Maoridom who wants to get a headline has punched, thrown stuff, kicked, sworn, bared their ass and spat at whatever authority figure had the bad luck to be drafted into attending what must be the world's most tedious national day "celebration".
After she was ritually humiliated on the Te Tii Waitangi Marae, Helen Clark rightfully boycotted the damn place for the rest of her sojourn as PM. Frankly, if I had been Prime Minister I would have abolished Waitangi Day altogether as a result of the rudeness and ignorance displayed by the morons that use the occasion to make some half-witted point.
I suppose it is some advance that Key was being applauded by others outside the marae as he stepped out of his car for a hongi with Pita Sharples, only to be attacked by Dumb and Dumber. I cannot recall any Pakeha politician since Norman Kirk getting even the mildest bit of appreciation at the lower marae.
Reportedly, one of the men arrested babbled that without protest Maori would not have te reo or kura kaupapa. Exactly what great leap forward for Maoridom they were expecting on this occasion was not apparent. Judging by their pictures perhaps the men were protesting the injustice of the obesity epidemic.
Let's face it, when the Harawira clan declare there is no reason for physical protest at Waitangi I guess we can conclude there is not a lot to demonstrate about at the moment.
This Government and the agreement with the Maori Party is less than three months old.
It has not had time to offend anyone yet.
The time for Maori to physically protest will be in a year or two when, or if, Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia fail to deliver promised rewards to their constituency.
Education Minister Anne Tolley was jostled with Key and Sharples, which reinforces my opinion that the men were, in fact, anti-obesity campaigners. That very day she had rescinded Labour's loopy regulation that schools must serve only healthy food options in school tuckshops, saying she did not believe teachers should have to be "food police".
I spoke to a secondary school principal who breathed a sigh of relief. Already under siege from a host of compliance requirements, he was happy to see one small bit of bureaucratic red tape removed.
The problem for him was one stray pie or sausage roll in the tuckshop and the ERO could mark down the school the next time it did an inspection.
Under the old rules even a fundraising sausage sizzle in the school grounds was banned.
The loony part was that kids could bring a chilly bin load of junk food and fizzy drinks from home or sneak over to the dairy by the school and gorge themselves on chocolate, they just couldn't buy "non-healthy" food in the school grounds.
Denied a pie or a doughnut at the tuckshop you can guarantee the junk food junkies would be topping up elsewhere. The regulation did nothing to address the issue of childhood obesity. Apparently 8 per cent of children are porkers but, worse still, at least 27 per cent of their parents and other adults are even fatter.
Those statistics indicate that the problem is not childhood obesity but adult eating habits.
Instead of an ineffectual, inefficient and time-wasting bureaucratic ban, the last government and its Green Party cohorts would have been better off waging a serious public education campaign about healthy food options aimed at adults who hopefully might learn and then pass on the message to their children.
We haven't banned the sale of alcohol or cigarettes.
We haven't passed a law penalising people who discriminate against those with mental illness.
We have public education campaigns designed to change attitudes towards those issues. And guess what? They work.
Tolley did the right thing in scrapping an unworkable and silly regulation on schools but the Government now has a responsibility to spend a little on that kind of healthy eating campaign or the country's health system will pay the long-term price of an increasingly obese nation.
Actually, maybe there is another ad campaign the Government can do for Waitangi Day. One that says when guests turn up you don't whack them, bare your bum or yell at them.
It's called politeness.
