John Tamihere: National damned by vision of unreal world

COMMENT

We don't know much about ourselves as Kiwis, yet, but we're learning fast.

We're writing our own manual on how our nationhood and mana and sovereignty will be formed and asserted and what principles and relationships will underpin it. Only in the last few decades has our founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi, begun to be woven into our jurisprudence and legislation.

It is only in recent years that our schools have taught us about our own history as New Zealanders and in particular about Maori perspectives of our shared history. We have become more tolerant and understanding of Maori matters, but we still have much to learn and unfinished business to be completed.

The title of Don Brash's speech may be "Nationhood" but Don's vision for our "nation" includes only part of that nation, and that is why his speech signals that the National Party has given up on ever being a party that is truly representative of mainstream New Zealand.

The speech sounds the death knell for the chances of the National Party ever holding a stake in the future of this nation.

Dr Brash's speech demonstrates that National under his leadership will show no hesitation in whipping up racial division if he thinks it might hang on to just a shred of National's ever-shrinking support base. New Zealand is increasingly brown and other non-white shades and increasingly multicultural. Any party that does not move with this simple fact of demographics is doomed to suffer inevitable and ultimately fatal dwindling of support.

It is apt that Dr Brash delivered his speech at the Orewa Rotary Club, the stomping ground of Rob Muldoon in the days when good Maoris (yes, they had an S on the plural then) worked on the railways and in the meatworks and did what they were told, the whole country shut down for the weekends, and the only kind of bread you could get was white.

Dr Brash would like to take us back to a romanticised, reconstructed illusion of that era, but even if he did possess a time machine, it would never happen. That world wasn't real, even then, even if most people thought it was.

This Government's idea of what our nation should be doesn't look to the past; we have our sights set firmly on the horizon of the future. Our vision of a nation is one that includes all, whatever their colour or creed, or whichever boat they arrived on in whatever century.

Dr Brash speaks of New Zealanders being "one people". Yes, we are all Kiwis, and we have much in common, but we also have differences. Differences are not bad; they are merely different. I suspect Dr Brash's nation of "one people" would simply be people just like Don Brash and imagine how dull that nation would be!

We must not let our differences divide us; we must celebrate them as the things that make us unique and dynamic and exciting and that ultimately contribute to our richness.

The treaty is about bringing us together, not breaking us apart, though that is what some would try to use it for. The extremes at both ends of the debate are dangerous and we should not be tempted to listen to them, because this is too important an issue to use for political point-scoring.

Dr Brash speaks of "the dangerous drift towards racial separatism", yet this is exactly the direction in which he is paddling his waka. There is a much more important direction for our nation than that; one that is based on a shared future.

This is not something achieved through ugly words and intolerance. It is something we have to work hard to achieve. It is something that will happen only with the contribution of tolerance, goodwill, respect, and above all fairness, from all.

* John Tamihere is Minister of Youth Affairs, Small Business, Land Information and Statistics, and Associate Minister of Maori Affairs and Commerce.