KEY POINTS:
All Tariana Turia was trying to get across, she explains, is that by supporting the anti-smacking bill her party was trying to help return Maori to the old ways of not hitting children.
The co-leader of the Maori Party had said on the Marae television programme that smacking
arrived with the colonists and the Christians. Before the Europeans came Maori did not hit their kids.
And with that, Turia was in hot water again. Talkback callers and internet bloggers went to town. Accusations flew that Turia was just shifting the blame for the child abuse problems within Maoridom.
Before the sudden midweek consensus between National and Labour television images were dominated by fundamentalist Christian groups descending on Parliament.
After the agreement all sides claimed victory. Turia welcomed the new consensus as an important day for Maori. She said she hoped there would now be an education programme to ensure families were able to be transformed into safe places for children.
But while the heat may have gone out of the debate, it has not gone out of the issue. Anger will surely flare again when the next child is beaten to death.
New Zealand's child abuse statistics are routinely referred to as horrific. When the perpetrators are Maori, the outcry is huge. Which brings us back to Turia's comments.
Turia has had months of highly charged emotion, fronting up to opposition from her own people and Christians who want to retain the right to smack. Dirty emails and "challenging" telephone calls have, at times, reduced her to tears.
She has been wearied by the emotion but not swayed. Even the Anglican Church, she says, has said she was right. The early missionaries observed Maori did not hit children. "My understanding is unless children were going to hurt themselves that basically they were free little spirits."
People talk about how brutal Maori were, but she points out that in 1889, 49 years after the Treaty of Waitangi, the British Parliament passed a law to protect children from cruelty. Corporal punishment in England then included beating, flogging, imprisonment, starvation and mutilation.
"What we're talking about is people who came here who were from a very violent society. That whole notion within the churches of spare the rod and spoil the child, the rule of thumb which was about hitting children with a stick no bigger than your thumb, all of those things were brought here.
" I suppose we're talking about not restoring but transforming, our families back to our own kaupapa and tikanga of not hitting children. And we need to do that."
People may have latched on to her comments about colonisation, but surely, she asks, we should all be thinking about the fact our child abuse statistics are the worst in the OECD and that Maori children are 12 times more likely to be admitted to hospital with injuries than other New Zealand children.
These are critical issues, says Turia, and colonisation is relevant.
"I'm not making excuses for them because there is no excuse but I'm just trying to put some context around it, that these things did not happen before. The reason why our people are in the situation they're in is because of the theft of their land and their resources.
"People don't like me saying things like that and they think I'm blaming them, but I'm not blaming people individually.
"But I think that what I am saying is that we had a system imposed on us which is not our own and through it we've basically not adjusted. And that's the impact."
She is puzzled by some of the response to the party's anti-smacking stance. "I mean, I get sick and tired, quite frankly, of people who write unsigned letters to my office that are so highly critical of us as a people about almost everything that we do which appears to not be right.
"Then when we try as a political party to provide some leadership on an issue that we consider is really serious in our families, we get lambasted for that too."
She is not idealising the past, she says. She has always believed you have to look back to inform your present and your future. "I don't think there's anything wrong with me going back to that period in our history where our children were nurtured and loved and not hit. "
Turia is not alone in saying Christians brought with them the concept of the physical discipline of children. Historians back her up through the writings of the first Europeans to arrive in New Zealand.
Dame Anne Salmond says Turia is right on the mark that children were treated extremely well. "The first European missionaries thought they were spoilt, although they kept saying how lovely they were as children, they were being taken around by their dads, taken to gatherings, allowed to speak [on the marae] if they were chiefly children, which you wouldn't see now on the marae."
Samuel Marsden, part of the Anglican Church Missionary Society in Australia and known there as the "flogging parson", came to New Zealand and was surprised that Maori rarely chastised children.
Richard Taylor reported "they have great affection of their offspring, the children are suffered to do as they like, they sit in all their councils, they're never checked".
In the early New Zealand schools missionaries used the disciplinary devices they were used to, often a cane. Children were beaten and strapped for speaking Maori in school.
You often hear people saying Maori were cannibals, Dame Anne says. "That Maori were this, Maori were that, whereas if you happen to be a Pakeha kid you don't hear all the time your ancestors were brutes, that they hung, drew and quartered people."
Colonisation is relevant for another reason. Dame Anne thinks many Maori will be interested to learn that warriors of the past did not whack their children and women.
Some in the Maori community use the warrior image as justification for behaviour that would not have been tolerated in the old days "and I imagine Tariana is also having a go at that. I think what she's trying to do there is get some law passed which from her point of view takes things back for Maori closer to their ancestral ways of dealing with children."
For Dr Fiona Cram, senior research fellow within a Maori research centre at Wellington's School of Medicine, colonisation is important in the smacking debate.
Victorian Christian notions around sparing the rod and spoiling the child are important, with notions of women and children being the man's property and of respect being a right rather than something that is earned from children.
A lot of the people arguing for smacking, Cram believes, are people who have the resources to find alternatives to smacking, but there are children whose parents don't have the resources.
"You can go 'well, why don't people have the resources?' and you know colonisation can be one of those explanations. If you look at those echoes down through history and what happened ... "
