Right, another messy Waitangi Day is behind us. The bunch of local yokels entrusted with organising events at the nation’s focal point couldn’t prevent disgrace.
Today Parliament reassembles. In Parliament the tangata whenua is all of us. It acts for the whole country. Tribes, being mini-nations, cannot.
When will we feel Waitangi Day is our national day? When everyone agrees we all fully belong here.
That is at the heart of the arguments over the Treaty of Waitangi, which Don Brash has now sharpened.
Brash says the Treaty now divides those whom in 1840 he says it united.
He views the Treaty through ideological eyes, those of a classical liberal (which is also ACT’s ideology). To a classical liberal all citizens are equal — but only in the formal sense of individual equality before the law. Group rights are anathema and so are laws or government actions directed at groups. Tribes are groups.
President George Bush’s reach is long, right down to the Tasman and between this country and Australia while he, John Howard and Labour here stay in office.
Bush didn’t make the division. But he has widened it. What is to be done?
First, recognise the differences that owe nothing to Bush.
Yesterday was Australia Day. Friday next week is Waitangi Day. Two more different national days would be hard to imagine: one honouring the inauspicious landing of convicts at Sydney cove, a colony dedicated to savagery, contemptuous of the “savage” inhabitants; the other commemorating the auspicious signing of an deal enabling two peoples to live in the same land, initiated by an empire respectful of “noble savages” and promising peace.
The cabinet meets today for the first time this year. How much different will the cabinet be this time next year?
In four years Clark has made only two major changes: Parekura Horomia into Maori affairs and Paul Swain from commerce to transport. Both were forced: by Dover Samuels’ economy with facts about his past and by Mark Gosche’s family tragedy.
Let’s say you’re 10 and gifted and live in Glen Innes or Wainuiomata. Your gift is not athletic or you would already be getting special encouragement. You are gifted in what your head does.
You do convoluted puzzles fast. You connect ideas that bamboozle adults. You are more than bright. You are superbright, one of a tiny sliver of the population.
The New Year resolutions have gone stale and there’s a risk reality-life will set in before we’re even back at work. So let’s look on the bright side and imagine some good things for 2004.
Let’s first wish American consumers a happy year. On them we depend.
They are running a deficit in their household accounts and piling debt on debt. So are the local, state and federal governments. So is the United States as a whole in its balance of payments current account.
Last June the Appeal Court kicked sand in beach-lovers’ faces. This is the year Helen Clark and Michael Cullen have to make the peace down on the foreshore.
If they fail, expect a lot of splashing around as protagonists for and antagonists against Maori rights make their points. But if Clark and Cullen do solve the foreshore/seabed puzzle, that might prove to be a pivot around which the Treaty of Waitangi will turn.
Tomorrow at midnight we lose an important link with Britain and the colonial past. Any court hearing unfinished then cannot be appealed to the judicial committee of the Privy Council.
It is a landmark event to end the year, historically, constitutionally and symbolically. It is far more important than ministers conceded. They alleged it was just a change in the court structure and denied us, the people, a say by way of referendum.
It’s Christmas: let’s celebrate the good in life. For example, the fall of Saddam Hussein. One tyrant down, a gift to the world.
It’s a pity we can’t add: peace on earth. There is so much more for George Bush and Tony Blair to do, so many more tyrants.
There is even a ready-made doctrine at hand, developed in 2001 by an international commission: that a state’s first duty is to protect its citizens and when a state flouts that duty it devolves upon other states.
Colin James on Hong Kong for the Perspectives pages for 22 and 23 December 2003
A question of democracy
First article
In Hong Kong there are two powerful scents. One is the heady incense of freedom. The other is the scorching smell of a dragon’s breath.
Economic freedom has been Hong Kong’s trademark for many decades, as bargain-hunting New Zealanders of the past know. A few New Zealanders also know its commercial vigour first-hand.