John Roughan: Maori challenge themselves

United Nations declarations on human rights are easy prey for cheap-shot columns because they come from a committee that is bound to contain member states with a sorry record on the subject.

But seriously, the principles they declare are powerful reference points for public policy in liberal democracies and can be influential in judicial decisions without being formally incorporated in domestic law.

Previous New Zealand governments have taken them very seriously, which is the reason they have given for repeatedly refusing to support the declaration on the rights of indigenous people.

Fellow former British colonies, Australia, Canada and the United States, have taken the same view.

It seems the four of us have been almost alone at the UN in our attitude to indigenous rights. British constitutional liberalism struggles, perhaps uniquely, to resolve the tension between individual and ethnic political rights.

Suddenly, three of the old colonies where British immigration was allowed to swamp native populations, have reversed their vote on indigenous rights, though Canada and Australia are unlikely to have done so as strangely as New Zealand did this week.

The Maori Party, who pressed for the change, sent a deputation to New York with all the secrecy of an SAS mission and the first the public knew was the news on Tuesday morning that the deed had been done.

John Key's Cabinet must have agreed to the stealth, might even have asked for it. But why?

Did National want to pretend that it was of so little moment, so "purely symbolic", that it was not worth mentioning? Or did the Maori Party fear that advance notice would prompt a public outcry that could stop it?

On the evidence of the public reaction this week neither party needed to worry. New Zealand has come a long way on this subject under John Key. When we read the terms of the declaration now we probably can satisfy them.

Key's governing agreement with the Maori Party surely satisfies the right to consultation, co-operation and consent to legislation that may affect them.

The Maori Party is surely a "representative institution" for that purpose.

And the new family supervision programme Whanau Ora supports a Maori initiative to solve the social dislocation that colonisation caused.

All the old colonies have made progress in giving a distinctive place to the displaced race. The United States, Canada and Australia have made territorial arrangements where indigenous tribes govern their affairs. On North American reservations this appears to extend to a degree of independence from local law and taxation.

In New Zealand no such territorial accommodation is possible. The country is too small and the residents too mingled everywhere. To give the displaced people here a distinctive place we have revived the Treaty by which their forbears consented to British government.

The Treaty reserved their "rangatiratanga", chiefly authority, self-government in other words, over any territory they wanted to retain. They lost almost all that territory by fair means and foul, and we have set up a permanent commission of inquiry, the Waitangi Tribunal, to redress the foul.

But their ultimate need is not territory, even if it were possible to restore it, it is self-government. Or a better word, self-determination. A minority is likely to consent to majority rule if its consent is recognised and institutionalised in a form that reinforces their pride of place in the world.

Canadian political thinkers who have wrestled with the tension between individual and ethnic rights, suggest that an ethnic national identity is one of everyone's individual needs.

The closest synonym to the word ethnicity is not race, it is nationalism. Everybody needs a place in the world where people of their ethnicity are sovereign and secure.

There is a case for particular political rights for indigenous minorities that does not exist for immigrant minorities. Immigrant minorities, no matter how many generations removed from their home country they may be, have a secure place in the world.

The indigenous minority needs their place here, in a bi-national state of our invention.

We are probably inventing it in the attempt. Already, thanks to Key's partnership with the Maori Party, there seems to be less talk of sovereignty from Maori and possibly more discussion of how far they want to go.

It surprises me that some sort of national Maori assembly has not already formed to feed policy ideas and political strategy into the Maori Party which plainly needs both.

The UN declaration will present difficulty for any future government that refuses to deal with the Maori Party. The government would need to find, or create, a representative institution. But it would be better that Maori did that.

In fact, the declaration carries a bigger challenge for Maori than for the country as a whole. Maybe that is why they went to New York so quietly.