John Roughan: One-sided history has let the entire country down

COMMENT

All of us, I suppose, have wistful alternative lives, the path we might have taken but didn't. If I hadn't succumbed to the instant gratifications of journalism, I like to think I might have been a historian.

As an undergraduate I loved the subject, loved putting my head in a different time to try to discern how and why things happened as they did. It is hindsight with discipline. Nothing in human affairs is really inevitable and not much that happened can be explained simply by applying today's supposed enlightenment.

History is the quest for truth of another time, which puts its own perspective on the present. Or so I hoped one day at Parliament when I trooped up to the Opposition floor to hear Geoffrey Palmer, flanked by Maori MPs Koro Wetere and Bruce Gregory, announce that if elected that year, 1984, Labour would extend the jurisdiction of the Waitangi Tribunal back to 1840.

By then the tribunal had been nine years in existence but its brief had been limited to new disputes. Even so, its verdicts in one or two cases had disturbed the assumptions of the powerful. Now it was to become a virtual commission of inquiry into colonial events.

I fondly envisaged history-making news. I saw claimants and Crown arguing forcefully, contesting facts with documentary evidence and analysing the motivations and implications of decisions with all the rigour of history's method.

I imagined sittings of the tribunal would be reported for a public whose interest in its past had been rekindled by the realisation that little was as simple as it had seemed at school.

The tribunal's reports, I supposed, would be greeted like court judgments, respected for their balanced consideration of conflicting argument, impeccably reasoned and become historically authority.

So much for what might have been. The tribunal's jurisdiction was duly extended in 1985 but its work has never caught the country's imagination.

It has never managed to be more than a sounding board for grievances. It sits on claimants' marae, greeted with all the warmth and grace that custom insists, accepts presumably the usual hospitality and listens to the local lore.

Its eventual report seldom questions the testimony of claimants who rely largely on oral records and it is hard to recall one that has found against a significant claim.

Long ago governments ceased to wait for the tribunal's findings before starting negotiations for direct settlements. And rulings against government proposals, such as the latest on the foreshore and seabed confiscation, are simply ignored.

The Waitangi Tribunal ought to be the royal commission that Helen Clark now wants to set up to take the heat out of the Brash backlash. Instead she now talks of reviewing its worth.

Had the tribunal behaved as a truly independent commission from the outset, there might have been no backlash. Had it won the confidence of both Maori and Pakeha, racial recognition and concessions might have been better understood.

Yet the tribunal might not be entirely to blame for its one-sided performance. A good deal of the fault, I think, lies with history herself.

She has lost her discipline since I knew her. She has taken on some modern and postmodern fad that pretends there is no particular truth to be found, that there is no longer history but "histories".

She now holds that all we have are stories of the past constructed for the needs of the storyteller in the present, and that all stories ("narratives" in her word) are equally valid.

She doesn't seem to spend much time any more on the raw material of the past, except to sneer at it for racism, sexism or any suggestion she detects of cultural superiority.

She doesn't doubt the reliability of orally transmitted tales. It is all equally valid history, she insists.

When she talks this way I despair for her, and I realise I made the right decision way back then. I would never have passed her examinations the way she changed.

She tells me, for example, that "histories" may be written for many different purposes in the present: "They might attempt to express various moral, legal or political views with an eye to changing or preserving the world in which they find themselves.

"Or they might simply wish to inform others of something that might otherwise be forgotten and become part of that unrecoverable past ... "

No, I cry, to construct the past for the purpose of changing the world is not the purpose of history at all. Call it politics, polemic, anything you wish. But history is the study of the past purely to better understand it.

No two accounts of the past will precisely agree, but if they are history they will should share the common purpose of trying to find the truth of the past for its own sake.

She's not listening. The tribunal has made her prosperous. Historians are in demand these days for treaty research. Unfortunately only one side seems to engage them.

Vigorous historical contests never eventuated in front of the Waitangi Tribunal because governments have had no stomach for the contest.

Guidelines issued by the Office of Treaty Negotiations in recent years state quite baldly that the claimant's history should be taken as read and examined only to ensure it is put into the right category for settlement.

Truth, it appears, is subservient to reconciliation. In fact, truth is essential to reconciliation. Accept tendentious accounts of the past, and nobody is reconciled to the result for long.

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