Bill Andersen: Let's have less heat, more light to solve race issues

COMMENT

As the foreshore and seabed debate intensifies so does the need for objectivity as well as the requirement to view the question in historical terms.

Michael Bassett's article finished with the criticism that the Government's handling of the issue was moving "us away from the principle of equality that in the end is the only one all New Zealanders can sign up to".

This raises the question of what inequalities exist in contemporary society, who is gaining, who is losing and why, and what should be done about it.

The first and glaring inequality is the fact that a great number of New Zealanders do not have access to public health resources when they need them and cannot afford private resources that others can.

Education is essentially the same (especially from the tertiary level on) because affordability increasingly relies on the income of the parent or parents.

Then there is the question of varying income levels, and the consequence in housing and diet for low-income earners, with the attendant health problems, particularly for children.

In terms of these inequalities, Maori (and Pacific Islanders) are very disproportionately represented. The sensible approach to achieve "the signing up" by all New Zealanders to the principle of equality would be for more people to address why and how these inequalities developed and how they can be ended.

The inequalities inflicted on Maori were escalated after British colonisers and armed forces confiscated millions of hectares of Maori land in the 1860s, and after the Maori communal ownership of land was broken up by the passing of laws that facilitated "sales" of Maori-owned land.

The loss of their land (the milk and honey of the family) was not only a damaging cultural blow but a regressive step in economic and social terms.

In many ways the Maori people became the victims of colonialism as did the Aboriginal and the native American peoples in Australia and the United States respectively.

Thus Maori became largely the drawers of water and hewers of wood for the settlers, and became the mainly unskilled labour force for the newly developing companies formed from British capital.

This inequality is still present in varying forms and is confirmed by the statistics for health, unemployment, education, prison population and housing.

Maori's long and hard struggle is being denigrated badly through attacks on the efforts of well-known Maori rights activists. Michael Bassett has described their efforts as a "mixture of bullying, blackmail and bloody-mindedness".

Perhaps someone could tell us who were the "bullies and blackmailers" at Bastion Pt and at the Raglan golf course and at the mine site at Waiuku - was it those who were arrested or those whose private interests were being protected by the Government of the day?

Dr Bassett's attacks on the "Maori radicals" are ill-directed and most unhelpful in a period when the realities of the seabed and foreshore debate need to be conducted in a rational manner.

The reality is that the oneness of iwi after iwi and hui after hui clearly indicates that blaming "the radicals" is incorrect and, as such, will cause concern among Maori at a time when more light and less heat is needed.

When a Government sees fit to change legislation or bring in a new law to circumvent a decision by a body as high as the Appeal Court, we have a situation that must involve much public discussion of the key issues - and more consideration about how we can most effectively implement the structure of the Treaty of Waitangi as the founding document governing sound relations between the Maori and non-Maori.

* Bill Andersen is a long-standing trade union leader.