KEY POINTS:
Somebody should have told them. Somebody should have told old Kupe and Cook, "Look chaps, it's all very well setting sail in leaky boats, eyes on the far horizon, heading for the great unknown, but you don't do that, lads.
"You shouldn't look forward. You should look back!
That's what we do!"
And how!! We're the world champions of looking backwards. There's nothing New Zealand does better. Kupe and Cook may have thought it was quite the thing to boldly go where none had gone before, but we won't have a bar of it.
No!!! Our best adventure is packing a nice, safe, low-fat lunch and heading straight back where we've already been.
We've been doing it since 1984 with the Treaty - the only lottery in the world where you don't need a ticket, except the one you got at birth. This crazy, retrospective exercise, largely inspired and generally managed by a hand-wringing, brainwashed, tertiary educated We Shall Overcome, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, middle-class elite desperately looking for something - anything - to fill a spiritual void, has basically bequeathed us a divisive drama, full of angst, anger, frictions and factions.
It's created a mythic nation within a nation, raised expectations that will never be met and provoked a sullen, muttersome sense of resentment, sadly focused on all the wrong people - because this retrospective expedition wasn't launched to satisfy its beneficiaries but rather to vindicate the guilty revisionism of its navigators.
Maori have actually behaved entirely rationally throughout the process. They've quite properly - and sensibly - responded to economic incentives. As anyone would.
Momma mia, if the Italian Government decided it was going to compensate all the descendants of all the Celts who got shafted by Julius C, we'd be frantically combing the archives before you could say, "Bobadecia's your uncle".
But the Italians aren't doing that. Perhaps because they realise that the past is called the past because that's what it is. Or perhaps because they recognise that wars have a very corrosive effect on treaties.
There's not many folk nowadays looking backwards and insisting we honour all those hopeful treaties the rulers of Europe signed before 1914. The shots fired that year instantly made them redundant. And if Parekura Horomia is right when he argues that our history is not peaceful and benign but rather riven and tainted by war, then so was the 19th century judge who called the Treaty "a nullity".
We can't have it both ways. There may be a case for reparations but that's it. And reparations wouldn't suit the backwards brigade. Such an unpalatable acknowledgment of our history would be too much for their tender consciences.
Of course, if they wanted to look forward, they could do something Kupe and Cook might applaud. They could offer to pay those who don't make a Treaty claim.
Since they've got a benchmark, they could trust the rational response to economic incentives and offer, let's say, settlement plus 10 per cent to anyone bold enough and generous enough to forgo the cost and time and punishing re-litigation of old conflicts by choosing instead to look forward, not back.
But it won't happen. We like looking back. We love the rear-vision mirror. It's our true compass.
That's why we've just bought all those trains, lock, stock and funnel - for $640 million or a billion, depending on who you believe.
And, apparently, all us good old, rear-vision Kiwis are positively chuffed we've got the trains back. We think it's great that Michael Cullen's the new Thin Controller.
No matter that we didn't need to buy 100 per cent of Toll when 51 per cent would've been perfectly fine.
No matter that we're now obliged to spend $300,000,000 on new kit. No matter that any increase in rail traffic will, paradoxically, increase the demand for better roads - to truck goods from the hinterland to the track.
Because we're back where we were. And yesterday is such a cosy place.
Meanwhile, Kupe and Cook are in India, talking to the Tata motor company, which is busily developing a French-invented compressed-air engine that will replace the gas-guzzlers we've got in our cars and trucks.
And that's just one of the innovations under way in places where people look forward.
Mark my words. Within a decade, the world's roads will be teeming with vehicles running on air, hydrogen, fuel cells, electricity and, who knows, maybe even that weird stuff you find in your belly button when you've forgotten to wash it for a while.
The combination of a ubiquitous infrastructure and a propulsive revolution will make trains even quainter than they are now. And no amount of sticking up RUCs to screw the transport scrum on the very day you become Brutish Rail will change that.
If you haven't read this yet, it's probably because your paper's late and that's probably because the roads are jammed with angry truckers who've probably decided they've had enough because they probably think our great leap backwards has gone off the rails.
