Race is on
As “one-people” barrow pusher Don Brash seeks to upset the applecart, the National Party is working hard to align itself with Maori in the run-up to the election.
As Don Brash seeks to upset the apple cart, the National Party is working hard to align itself with Maori in the run-up to the election.
Like an ageing rock star touring his greatest hits to grey-haired baby boomers, Don Brash is on the road again. The former leader of the National and Act parties is out and about in the provinces on a membership drive for Hobson’s Pledge, the group he formed last year to promote the idea that, when Captain William Hobson said to each Maori signing the Treaty at Waitangi, “he iwi tahi tatou”, he meant “we are all one people”.
Brash claims that Hobson’s words negate the need to acknowledge the rangatiratanga, or sovereignty, provisions of the Treaty and the specific representation they allow Maori in an increasing number of pieces of legislation and regulation.
At a meeting in Waikanae, Wellington’s satellite retirement town, about 100 devotees come to hear Brash reheat his notorious Orewa speech of January 2004. That was when he first argued that the Treaty of Waitangi had become irrelevant.
“We should not use the Treaty as a basis for creating greater civil, political or democratic rights for Maori than for any other New Zealander,” he says. “In the 21st century, it is unconscionable for us to be taking that separatist path.”
He reminds them of its impact; of how the National Party got such a sharp jump in popularity that polling companies rechecked their figures because they couldn’t believe the results and how National increased its share of the vote in the 2005 election to get within a sniff of Labour. “I’ve got no doubt that it was my speech that triggered that,” he says.
During that election campaign, National made play of Brash’s argument with its controversial “iwi/Kiwi” billboards. The hoardings were the inspiration of Wellington ad-man John Ansell, who was in the front row at Waikanae.
You get a taste of Ansell’s views with his 2011 comments that “these guys [Maori] have gone from the Stone Age to the Space Age in 150 years and haven’t said thanks”. But back in 2004-05, not everyone in the National Party was comfortable with either
“In the 21st century, it is unconscionable for us to be taking that separatist path.”
Brash’s speech or Ansell’s billboards.
Some, such as Chester Borrows, who would go on to win Whanganui on his third attempt, gritted their teeth and carried on. “I’m one of the people who got in on the back of Brash’s Orewa speech and I hated it from the start,” he says.
Today, Borrows is the only Pakeha MP on the Maori affairs select committee and is a strong supporter of Harete Hipango, the first Maori woman to stand in a winnable National seat. She will replace Borrows as candidate in Whanganui when he retires at the coming election.
“INCANDESCENT WITH RAGE”
Former Education Minister Hekia Parata, who will leave Parliament at the September election, reacted differently. Parata had been a senior civil servant and an adviser to National Prime Minister Jim Bolger before getting involved with the party in 2001.
While working for the 1984-90 Labour Government, she had been approached to run as a Labour candidate. But Parata was married to Wira Gardiner, who had a long background in the National Party, and she emerged on the political scene as National’s Wellington Central candidate in 2002.
She was comfortable in the party: Bill English was leader and Michelle Boag president. National was looking more like an urban liberal party than the conservative rump it had become under Jenny Shipley.
“I looked at what the values of the leader were and what the values of the party were and I liked what I saw and heard about Bill and Mary [English] and their family and whanau. That was an important part of my decision when Michelle Boag was talking to me about where and when I would run.”
As a student, Parata had been involved in Springbok tour protests, but she had had little involvement in party politics. It was to be a rude introduction. She didn’t win Wellington Central, and she returned to Ruatoria, from where she and Gardiner ran a consulting business. She was effectively out of politics.
Then, two years later, she heard Brash’s Orewa speech. “I was incandescent with rage and resigned my party membership,” she says. Then she tells a story that sounds increasingly familiar as you talk to more Maori National Party members: she met John Key.
Parata had already formed a bond with English, but it was when Key became leader in 2006 that she returned to the party. They had met as candidates in 2002, and he asked her to organise a trip to the East Coast to meet the locals. “We had a long car ride around the Cape and back, talking in between visits, and at the end he asked if I would think about running again.
“As I did with Bill, I really liked his values, his outlook, his absolutely open embrace of New Zealand and its potential and diversity and his lack of any kind of fear or bias about interactions with Maori.” And so she returned to National and entered Parliament from the party’s 2008 list.
NATIONAL’S MAORI EMBRACE
Although Parata became a high-profile minister and left her mark on education, her most important role may have been her relationships with Key and, in particular, English. Whether it was her encouragement of English to learn te reo or the part played by her sister-in-law, Amo, as one of his advisers, the relationship between Parata and her whanau and English has been critical to the embrace by National’s leadership of Maori.
English acknowledges he has been close to the Parata family over the years. But he won’t go much further. Parata herself is happier to talk about the relationship and says that a measure of his involvement was that he came to her mother’s tangi.
English’s ability to connect with Maori appears to come in part from his multicultural family: his wife, Mary, is part-Samoan. “I think it helps,” he says.
But he also points to aspects of his upbringing on the family farm at Dipton that are relevant to his relations with Maori. “There was a big premium on skills on the farm,” he says. “We had local Maori families who were shearers, so there was always this respect for the skilled person and for the family and whanau. So from an early age that was something we were comfortable with rather than thinking it was different.”
His politics are a product of that same background: he is a conservative from a Catholic family and family is important to him. Dipton and the Catholic Church also seem to have played a critical role in defining his relationship with Maori.
Other Catholic National Party politicians such as Jim Bolger and Chris Finlayson talk about the strand of compassion that runs through the Church and influences the way English approaches politics. And, of course, the Church, like Dipton, is conservative.
“We have not only more Maori with whakapapa but also a big caucus of MPs who can get up and waiata.” Already, there’s been a thinly veiled racist letter to the local paper, attacking her candidacy.
“A lot of Maori aspirations are essentially conservative,” he says. That was made clear for him when he became involved, as Finance Minister, in Treaty negotiations. “It was a case of realising one day that the people I was communicating with were like the people I was brought up with in a completely Pakeha world – rural, religious, family-orientated and conservative. That’s the way I was brought up.”
Yet both English and Parata believe it was Key, neither religious nor conservative and not from a rural background, who changed National’s attitude to Maori. “For someone who hadn’t been living in New Zealand, he had an amazingly intuitive grip,” says English.
LEFT BAGGAGE
Key’s absence from New Zealand – he worked overseas for a number of years before entering Parliament in 2002 – meant he was free of the baggage that many politicians were burdened with from involvement with Waitangi Day celebrations and other contentious events. You get a good feel for what it was like when you talk to Winston Peters.