the never ending story

waitangi weekend having just finished; there has been some discussion, as there ususally is, on the state of race relations and the place of the treaty in today's society.

one thing that most people seem to have agreed with is that things are going pretty well. the two people who jostled john key have been dismissed by idiots by pretty much everyone-even though the point they were trying to make was valid-that without the protests of the past, there would be no kura kaupapa, no kohanga reos and so on.

key has gotten a lot of goodwill over inviting the maori party into a coalition when he didn't need to. its a good result for national. if maori don't reap the benefit from this, the blame will fall on the maori party for becoming sell outs-not from national because there are such low expectations on them

it is interesting to note how the messaging has changed. national's core belief of self-responsibility seems to be mirrored by maori leaders as self-determination.
phil goff has tried in vain to point out how much labour has delivereed to maori over the years, but this is being depicted as labour ruling with a kind of benign paternalisim, trapping maori into victimhood. one academic on this weeks "focus on politics" noting that labour had promised a lot, but hadn't actually delivered.

the policies that national have delivered have been spun as being beneficial to maori-the 90 day probation bill being presented as a chance for maori to increase getting employed (whether it actually works out that way remains to be seen).

then there were the changes to the resource management act. the maori party objected to the notion of removing the need to take the principles of the treaty into account, but to a lot of maori didn't. when asked why they weren't concerned about overdevelopment, one maori leader responded "now we're the developers, bro"

the proposed tax cuts will not benefit maori, but i heard an interview with one of the ngai tahu elders say that his ambition was to raise maori incomes to a level where they do care about tax cuts.

all of this is, i guess, positive, but isn't there some negative news? well yes, and it all comes back to the changes in nz society.

while there have been several large settlements overr the years, the benefits of these have not filtered (or should that be trickled) down to street level and some people are starting to grumble.

another dimension is that while the treaty is, to a large extent, predicated on a bi-cultural society, nz is increasingly a multi-cultural society. maori tv screened a debate on waitangi day with the proposition "this land is may land". it had three teams debating-maori, pakeha and others. in one of the debates high points, mai chen objected to the nomenclature of her team. she wasn't an "other", she was born and raised in new zealand.

its an interesting point that the first generation of non-pakeha (asian, african etc) children of immigrants are coming of age (if you see what i mean). who this will impact on the sociological future of the country will be interesting to see.