Chris Trotter: The Choice

“INSULATION from the ravages of extreme opinion has been achieved. The settlements have become mainstream.” The words are those of former Labour Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer. The “settlements” he refers to are the Treaty settlements negotiated between the Crown and Iwi.

It is to Iwi, New Zealand’s officially recognised tribal entities, that the responsibility for reinvigorating Māori society has been entrusted. Palmer’s confidence that the process has been walled-off from the “ravages” of democratic interference is important. The critical political choice made by leading Pakeha politicians, jurists and bureaucrats in the 1980s and 90s was to halt the momentum of left-wing Māori nationalism by inserting a layer of elite Māori business-people between the Crown and the economically and culturally impoverished Māori working-class.

Only by fostering the rapid growth of a Māori middle-class could the Pakeha state avoid being compelled to negotiate with social, cultural and political forces with precious little to lose. Forces, moreover, whose lack of a meaningful stake in the capitalist system might encourage its leaders to contemplate sponsoring an entirely different set of economic arrangements.

Mike Butler: Should this treatyist remain a sir?

Prime Minister John Key gave three reasons why former Justice Minister Doug Graham should retain his knighthood, with the first reason his role as Treaty Negotiations Minister. So what was so great about Graham’s work in treaty matters?

Graham went down in the 2008 collapse of the Lombard finance company along with Bill Jeffries, Lawrence Bryant, and Michael Reeves. The Supreme Court last week turned down an application for an appeal against their convictions, but it granted them leave to appeal against their sentences.

Mike Butler: Fishery settlement mischief

Tribal misbehaviour and government favouritism is the outcome of a process that started nearly 30 years ago with a treaty claim by few part-time fishers in the Far North that was expanded by a Waitangi Tribunal ruling, a High Court injunction, and resulted in dividing up the nation's ocean fishery along racial lines. The assertion that the 1992 $170-million commercial fisheries settlement would “get young Maori into the fisheries business” was one of several sanctimonious justifications to obscure the naked opportunism and political weakness surrounding that settlement.

That settlement started off as a claim by Far North tribes for a share of quota introduced by the Fisheries Act 1983 which was an attempt to maintain fisheries at a sustainable level. The claim was on behalf of those who supplemented their income with part-time fishing.