Tapu Misa: Watch out or that treaty guilt will turn to resentment

If you have ever felt truly guilt-ridden, as I'm sorry to say I have, you will know what John Tamihere was talking about when he said, "How many times do I have to be told and made to feel guilty?"

The fact that he was talking about the Holocaust, in his usual delicate style, has obscured the point the Westie MP so aptly made, although perhaps not quite as he intended.

As those of us acquainted with guilt know, it doesn't matter how badly you feel about something to begin with. Unless you can atone in a real and meaningful way and expiate your guilt somehow, the guilt soon turns to resentment. This is particularly true when the guilt appears to have no end.

This is why Holocaust-denial has gained such a following, why so many young Germans are rebelling against what they perceive as attempts to make them feel guilty about the horrors their grandparents visited on Jewish people, and why there's apparently a name coined for what a director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem described this week as "a new form of mental illness" - Holocaust fatigue.

We have a similar condition here known as Treaty of Waitangi fatigue, which is what Tamihere was alluding to, inadvertently, when he compared his feelings about the Jewish Holocaust to the attitude of many in this country towards Maori efforts to redress past injustices through the Waitangi Tribunal.

Those afflicted number in the thousands. In fact, if research carried out by the Human Rights Commission and the Treaty Information Unit is anything to go by, it has reached epidemic proportions.

The symptoms are easy to spot. Sufferers find themselves muttering things like "it's time to move on", "why can't we all just forget the past and get along" and bewailing the existence of the "grievance industry".

United Future leader Peter Dunne has the affliction, which is why he's indulging in the pointless exercise of trying to change the name of Waitangi Day to New Zealand Day. Never mind that we've been down this path before and never mind, too, that this overstates the apparent impatience and grumpiness that attaches itself to our national day (another symptom). Sufferers are apt to see the media-enhanced instances of ill-mannered behaviour - muddied suits, bared bottoms and a little disrespectful jostling - as examples of intolerable race tension, rather than the perfectly natural expressions of democratic protest and dissension. Yes, it's messy and raucous, but has anyone died?

Treaty fatigue is the reason people are convinced the treaty industry has sucked up untold billions of taxpayer money when in truth the total thus far is just over $700 million.

And treaty fatigue is behind Labour's resolve to put a deadline on lodging historical claims and resolving to have them all settled within 10 to 15 years - a deadline that was just as silly and unworkable when National first suggested it before the last election.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with deadlines, although as a friend is fond of reminding me, rushed jobs have a way of coming back to bite you on the bum.

There's nothing wrong, either, in giving the Waitangi Tribunal the resources to get on with the job as quickly and efficiently and fairly as possible, but the indecent haste being proposed here isn't about efficiency and justice. It's about "moving on", and "seeking finality", to quote Helen Clark.

I imagine Maori have about as much use for guilt as Jewish people do. But the fact that the process of righting wrongs (however imperfect) makes some people feel guilty doesn't remove the necessity for it. The treaty process isn't about Pakeha doing penance for the wrongs committed by their antecedents; it's about justice. That's not something we have a choice about, if we want to move on as a fair and just society.

Which is not to say that we can't sometimes be too narrowly focused on historical injustices. A lot of Maori resources, talent and energy have been sidetracked by the treaty process. You could argue, as Tamihere does, that these would be better devoted to solving the problems of Maori youth.

But to suggest that Maori have a choice in the matter, or that the process be halted or rushed simply because people are tired of it is another matter.

As for the Holocaust, American historian Howard Zinn, himself of Jewish descent, has criticised the kind of sensitivity that forbids even using the 'h' word to describe the experiences of other ethnic groups.

In his 1999 essay, A Larger Consciousness, Zinn wrote: "What happened to the Jews under Hitler is unique in its details but shares universal characteristics with many other events in human history: the Atlantic slave trade, the genocide against Native Americans, the injuries and deaths of millions of working people, victims of the capitalist ethos that put profit before human life.

" ... the memory of the Jewish Holocaust should not be encircled by barbed wire, morally ghettoised, kept isolated from other genocides in history. It seemed to me that to remember what happened to Jews served no important purpose unless it aroused indignation, anger, action against all atrocities, anywhere in the world."

By Zinn's measure, and given the international community's lack of action over Sudan, you'd have to say we're still falling a long way short of the mark.