Tapu Misa: Perhaps Don Brash needs a treaty education course

COMMENT

I could have sworn it was 2004, but perhaps I've been deluded. It's possible that this is not a new year at all but a replay of an old one (I fell asleep before midnight on New Year's Eve, so I can't be entirely sure).

After hearing his utterances on race relations, I'm inclined to think that Don Brash is a little ... well ... behind the times. Never mind the sheer unoriginality of making his state of the nation speech at Orewa (just like that old warhorse, Rob Muldoon, who did it better). It's the return to those tired old solutions for racial harmony that give his policies the look of a party reversing at high speed into the 1950s.

Take his "one law for all" speech at Ratana, indistinguishable from Winston Peters' and not much removed from Bill English's equally meaningless "one standard of citizenship". It's designed not only to make Pakeha feel they're being somehow disadvantaged (exactly how I'm not sure), but harks back to the long-discredited assimilationist "we are one people" mantra, which people like me soon learn carries a caveat: Yes, we can be one people - as long as we outsiders conform and become just like the so-called silent majority, for whom the erstwhile Reserve Bank Governor purports to speak.

I have no doubt Dr Don is sincerely worried about the deterioration in race relations, I just don't think he appreciates how he's adding to that deterioration.

But take it from a fully integrated and culturally fluid member of this society (most of us ethnics are at least bicultural by default): if a harmonious multicultural society is his aim, then this is not the way to go.

Though I can understand the electoral appeal of throwing out the Maori seats, Te Puni Kokiri and the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs; re-litigating the need for treaty settlements under the guise of reclaiming the treaty debate (didn't we settle that at least a decade ago with National's blessing?); and painting inherited and basic human rights as race-based privileges.

I'm not sure either how you can have a vision of a multicultural society in which all people are treated equally under the law and we all have the same rights and obligations, then assert that it's fair to deny due process to South Island iwi who spent eight years mounting a successful legal challenge to the Court of Appeal for the right to have their case heard in the Maori Land Court.

Or how you can be quite so puritanical about the "one law for all" dictum, given the number of times in the past 160 years that Maori have been the subject of special laws that consolidated their lowly place in society.

Ethnic separatism? It exists already, as friends of mine have discovered. Newly arrived from the United States where they have lived for more than a decade, they have come to the disturbing conclusion that they have returned to an increasingly segregated society. The evidence was there in the blighted (Maori) communities and the affluent (white) enclaves they saw in Northland.

It was there in Kerikeri where a belligerent and down-at-heel Maori man railed loudly and resentfully about "f---ing rich Pakeha". To my well-travelled friends, it was the resentment of socially dislocated people the world over who find themselves on the margins of a society from which they feel excluded.

It hasn't escaped them that the underclass appears to be overwhelmingly Maori and Pacific and that there seems to be no apparent point of contact between them and Pakeha. Race, my American friend pronounces, has to be the most important issue facing the country right now. Everything else, it seems to me, is collateral to that.

I argue, of course, that things are not as bad as they might appear, that what they're seeing has less to do with racial hostility and cultural aloofness than harsh economic realities. Those who exist on the margins can't afford the price of cultural togetherness - to live in the same neighbourhoods, send their kids to the same schools or work in the same offices.

Besides, if separatism - in the form of separate language schools and affirmative action - is what succeeds in raising the living standards of those at the bottom, who really loses? It would seem a worthwhile investment in human capital and good for the whole country.

It's a shame that for all his flash education, Don Brash seems unwilling to grasp that. Still, as I've discovered, the biggest barrier in our society is the lack of understanding from the gatekeepers.

Perhaps Dr Brash should consider going on one of those treaty education courses he's so fond of criticising. Far from spreading dangerous and false information, they're teaching New Zealanders how to talk to one another about the most contentious issues of our time - honestly, respectfully and without judgment, something we're not especially good at.

I'm told it has worked wonders at branches of the Country Women's Institute, Rotary and other bastions of Pakeha conservatism. Money well spent, I'd say.

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