KEY POINTS:
Parts of Northland looked like a disaster area after this week's storms. The Prime Minister said it might be necessary to relocate some communities if this sort of thing continues. Hone Harawira did not complain.
Parts of Australia's Northern Territory sounded like a disaster area in the report
of a board of inquiry into sexual abuse of Aboriginal children, which delivered its findings last month. The Australian Prime Minister decided drastic law enforcement was necessary. This week, Hone Harawira called him a racist bastard and said his people would resist such a forceful response if it were tried here.
Nobody has suggested the Maori Party MP's northern electorate harbours domestic violence and child abuse on the scale that prompted the Australian inquiry, nor can his people enjoy the kind of territorial autonomy that is possible for Aborigines who have returned to remote homelands there.
In different ways, though, Maori leaders aspire to the same degree of sovereignty and believe it the solution to practically all social deficiencies besetting a dispossessed race. Sovereignty would be more credible if it were asserted for all needs, but in social policy, where it is called "empowerment", it has been widely accepted. People do better, I think, when they can solve their own problems.
But when you read a report such as John Howard did and there have been many previously - you have cause to wonder whether "empowerment" will work.
There are about half a million Aborigines in Australia. According to Helen Hughes, the author of a recent book, around a third of them live fairly ordinary suburban lives, conscious of their heritage but living in their own houses, sending their children to mainstream schools, and employed in the national economy.
But she says half of them live in ghettoes on the edge of towns such as Alice Springs and Darwin. And the rest, about 90,000, live in remote homelands. Many have returned to their ancestral land only in the last generation.
For most of the 20th century, they were in mission stations, reserves or other settlements set up for their education and participation in Australian society. They are now called the "lost generations" and those family groups that have answered the spiritual call of their ancient territories have been assisted by Labor governments with land rights legislation and welfare policies that pay benefits in cash rather than kind.
The romance of this revival of customary life must be difficult to sustain against the mounting reports of social conditions in many Aboriginal communities.
Hughes entitled her book Lands of Shame. The best that seems to be argued for remote homelands is that they are no worse than the urban ghettoes. Unsurprisingly, there is a severe shortage of doctors and other social services, including police.
Modern states are not organised to serve disparate small groups living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and finding enough "bush tucker" to spend their benefits on booze. The consequences are as dissolute and violent as any drunken people can be, exacerbated by the distance from normal social controls. Women and children suffer the most.
The report on sexual abuse is entitled Children are Sacred. It runs to 300 pages.
I'm told that reading most of them requires a strong stomach. The summary was enough for me. It gave no sample of the horrors within but it was a classic in the genre of limp-wristed hand-wringing.
It feigned urgency: "A disaster is looming for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory unless steps are taken forthwith ... Unless a firm commitment to success is undertaken immediately, a further generation is likely to be lost."
But it concluded "the best that can be hoped for is improvement over a 15-year period - effectively a generation or longer".
The report was commissioned for the Northern Territory Government and when it was received, the Chief Minister Clare Martin said her Government might be ready to announce its response in six weeks.
But in Canberra, to everybody's surprise Mr Howard was moved to act immediately.
The steps he announced - six-month bans on alcohol and pornography, threats to withhold benefits from parents who did not send their kids to school, health checks of children, extra police and use of the armed forces if necessary - were not among the 97 anodyne recommendations of the inquiry, but they were right in line with the root causes the inquiry had identified for the wretched state of so many indigenous communities.
Cynics observed they were also in line with Mr Howard's political interests this election year. Trailing Labor under new leadership, his long reign looks likely to end unless he can pull a popular trick, and racially charged issues have worked for him before.
Action that is politically expedient can also be right. It is action that the Maori Party might take if it had the power.
