Tapu Misa: Seabed and foreshore best left alone

COMMENT

Susan and I have been corresponding since I first started writing this column. She writes, more often than not, to disagree with me. She sometimes chides me for what she calls my "youthful idealism" (it's that deceptive byline photo). I've never met her but I know from her emails that she is a no-nonsense 61-year-old Pakeha grandmother who lives in an affluent Auckland suburb.

I doubt she'd call herself a radical - far from it. I wouldn't class her as a big fan of Maori, either. If anything, she's inclined to be deeply cynical of many Maori and is frankly contemptuous of people who are "in love with anything Maori". I think she includes me in that group.

I think of Susan when I hear people going on about how it's only Maori radicals and lily-white PC liberals who dislike the Government's moves on the foreshore and seabed.

For Susan is most decidedly not PC. She thinks the Treaty of Waitangi "has been abused, misquoted, misused and that the vulture-like lawyers and some greedy Maori who are bleeding New Zealand dry are the only people who have benefited". She thinks Maori should be bloody glad it was the English and not the French who signed that treaty.

Back in the days when cross-cultural education didn't have such a dirty name, she got into one of those Maori education classes. The man who took it, she wrote, was arrogant and abusive and blamed all the ills of the world on Pakeha colonists. It put her off.

When I wrote a while back that Pakeha New Zealand had made little effort to get to know Maori on their own terms, she replied that I had no idea how hard it was a for a Pakeha. Had I ever tried wandering down Kupe St in Orakei? Or Ruatoria on the East Cape? She had, she said. "A white person is met with a very aggressive attitude. But then I have found many Maori to have a very aggressive attitude."

I suggested she go to one of those dreaded PC treaty seminars - and to my surprise she took up the challenge. One Sunday morning she took herself off to the Waitakere City Council's symposium on "human rights and the Treaty of Waitangi". Afterwards, she sent me a long email. She'd learned a few things, she admitted, but she hadn't been entirely sold.

The highlight of her day, she wrote, had been meeting Auckland University professor Margaret Mutu, who has been at the forefront of Maori protest against the Government's foreshore and seabed legislation.

"We both think the same about the seabed foreshore issue. Leave things alone."

I guess that puts Susan in somewhat unusual company - among those "hopelessly misguided" folk and extremist radicals who have failed to appreciate the beauty of the Government's foreshore and seabed legislation. And what a strange collection they are.

Some, like Tariana Turia - who has never exerted herself to appeal to middle New Zealand - and fellow MP Nanaia Mahuta are easily dismissed even within their own party as dissidents and radicals. So, too, Ken Hingston, the retired Maori Land Court judge, who raised the Prime Minister's ire by daring to draw parallels with Zimbabwe, echoing Ngai Tahu leader Mark Solomon, not one usually to spout such extremist views.

Also seemingly easily dismissed is the much-maligned Waitangi Tribunal, whose "primary and strong" recommendation was for the Government to "go back to the drawing board and engage in proper negotiations about the way forward".

That's what people like Dr John Mitchell, spokesman for the Marlborough iwi who started all this off, have said more than once. His group would have been willing to back away from any claims to freehold title and work towards a solution that would have assuaged the fears of middle New Zealand about public access to the beaches.

The tribunal argued that the Government's policy failed to uphold "the rule of law and the principles of fairness and non-discrimination". So did the Human Rights Commission, which warned that the policy was discriminatory and flouted international human rights laws.

Yes, well, they would say that, wouldn't they? Laws, as we know, can be changed when governments find the alternative politically untenable. And goodness knows, Maori have been here before. Not long after the Native Land Court was set up in 1865, Maori attempts to protect their interests resulted in the court's Kawaeranga decision, which recognised an exclusive right of fishery in the Thames foreshore.

The Crown's response then was as swift as now. To forestall other such claims to the foreshore and seabed, it declared that all of the Auckland province below the high water mark was a separate district of the Native Land Court. It then suspended the operation of the court within that district.

It was a neat solution which simply prevented the Native Land Court from investigating such rights. Unfair? Discriminatory? Hard to see it as anything else.

And whatever else the proposed seabed and foreshore legislation does it's hard to see this as being a whole lot different.