KEY POINTS:
Helen Clark's failure to engage with Waitangi has been the greatest disappointment of her premiership. You can see it in the face of her supporters. They're saying, "She should be here".
You can hear it in the tones of television reporters. They have felt the spirit of the place and the vacuum where inspiring leadership should be.
Wednesday was probably her last chance to meet the challenge, and she avoided it, making forays from her hotel to safe locations where she answered media questions with snide comments about John Key's embrace of Maori agitators.
He clearly senses the importance of what happens there. A leader who handles Waitangi well reaches to a depth of unity in the national soul, beneath politics and protest. Those can happen there at any time in the celebration and they needn't matter if the Prime Minister preserves the dignity of the office.
Helen Clark thinks the dignity of the office is preserved by her lying low. At least that is the excuse she gives, I don't believe that is the reason. I think it is a deficiency in character, an insecure pride that renders her unable to bring herself to do what she knows should be done there.
It's a deficiency commonly seen in highly educated people. They fear to be humbled, seeing no possibility of dignity in it, or they might emerge with greater respect and even affection.
Worse, they lack a sense of grandeur that cannot be easily discussed in intellectually respectable terms. I'm not sure Clark can be accused of this. A Prime Minister who has gone out of her way to observe military anniversaries and lent her office to the promotion of literature, culture and heritage must have some spiritual awareness.
You needed that dimension to appreciate the dawn prayers in the meeting house at Waitangi in the years before she spoiled them.
It is 10 years now since Jenny Shipley brought the national celebration back to Waitangi. Back then, the dawn service was ignored by protesters and most of the media. Its loveliness was almost a secret among the public figures and officials who turned up every year, whispering in ghostly groups in warm darkness before trooping inside to sit on the floor and listen to oratory and waiata until daybreak.
Helen Clark never came as Opposition leader, nor in her first term in power. She'd heard, I'm sure, how Shipley had prayed and that wasn't her.
When finally she did agree to attend, in her second term, her reluctance had unnerved the hosts. They put lines of chairs in the meeting house to make it more like a venue she would find familiar.
The novelty of her appearance attracted more media and the sort of idiots who had been denied the audience Shipley used to give them the day before. Clark sat glowering at the front, unable to bring herself to offer a prayer, and the service never took flight.
I think it has been that way ever since; I haven't attended for a couple of years.
John Key told television this week he intends to do everything as Prime Minister at Waitangi that he has done as Opposition leader. I look forward to it.
But life, as John Lennon said, is what happens when you are making other plans. Truly significant steps in national life always seem to happen while public attention is fixed on something else.
My eyes were on Waitangi the day they should have noticed a deal signed at Parliament by Michael Cullen, Minister for Treaty Negotiations, and 41 hapu of Ngati Porou.
Their agreement, the first under the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004, gives East Coast subtribes the rights that made Don Brash blanch. It appears to confirm all the customary authority over sand and sea that coastal iwi were claiming in the courts before the Government stepped in.
Hapu have been given effective ownership of the shore, though not exactly freehold title to it and without the power to prevent anybody else enjoying it. But only enjoying it. No commercial uses of the bays will be permitted without the approval of the local rununga. No marinas, fish farming, even marine reserves.
They will be able to make fishing bylaws for the area and confer place names. They will have to be consulted by councils contemplating any changes to coastal land use, and some of their intended activities, unspecified as yet, will be exempted from compliance with resource management procedures and local body plans.
The Foreshore and Seabed Act turns out not to be the repressive, neo-colonial outrage the Maori Party supposed. Nor is it, as the Government liked to suggest, an innocuous defender of the status quo.
It takes New Zealand another step down the road to a new kind of nation.
Are we ready for this? John Key says he hasn't studied it either. But he sounds relaxed about it.
