10:15 AM |
Tapu Misa: Goff treading unwarily in race minefield
4:00 AM Monday Nov 30, 2009
Labour leader taking route fraught with risk over repeal of foreshore and seabed legislation
THERE'S nothing quite like race to inflame emotions and generate heated comment (except, perhaps, for that other "r" word, religion), as I'm reminded every time I write on the subject.
My column on Hone Harawira's incendiary email a couple of weeks ago brought a record number of emails - and although the vast majority of them were positive, they showed how little insight many of us have into our own prejudices and in-built biases.
"Examine yourself, Tapu," wrote one, who accused me of coming across as "more bigoted". (I did; I feel fine, thanks.) "We live on different planets," wrote another. (Yes, most definitely.)
Someone once wrote that the greatest advantage of being part of a majority group is the invisibility that comes with being considered "normal". You are, whatever your faults, the way the world is supposed to be. No one expects you to be an ambassador for "your" people, or accuses you of being a disgrace to them when you fire off an ill-considered email in the middle of the night. You're free to be yourself, a flawed human being like the rest of us. Members of visible minority groups can only yearn for that kind of freedom. They suffer a different kind of invisibility, their normalness obscured behind the "otherness" of being different. They stick out for all the wrong reasons, their failures magnified, their successes seen as an exception to the rule.
I don't have room here to go into the intricacies of race relations. Or to discuss why Treaty settlements are a matter of justice, or why we as a nation should want to behave better than a horde of raping, pillaging Vikings, or the fact that Treaty wrongs weren't committed all that long ago, or the entirely reasonable proposition that a people deprived of their economic base by colonisation should suffer inter-generational damage, even if many of them manage to "get over it" and move on.
But it's clear to me from the emails I get that there's a groundswell of goodwill in need of good information and leadership.
It isn't easy to talk about race, nor to break free from it - even for a consummate speechmaker like President Barack Obama, whose determination to transcend racial politics has come up against the realities of 21st-century America. Talk about it, don't talk about it - Obama can't seem to win.
But he at least knows that race is a minefield to be treated with caution. Labour leader Phil Goff seems less wary of the dangers.
It can't be easy to be trailing, apparently unloved and unnoticed, in the wake of a popular Prime Minister, who's enjoying an unusually long honeymoon with the voting public.
Goff can be forgiven his frustration, having emerged from the shadow of one strong leader only to languish in the shadow of another.
Despite the obvious weaknesses of John Key's coalition Government, and the raft of contentious legislation it's been pushing through under urgency, Labour hasn't been able to land a telling blow.
Goff probably has only one shot at the PM's job, and time is running out. Harawira's incendiary email - and popular approval for Goff's visceral overreaction to it - has thrown him a lifeline he seems determined to exploit.
He's now extending that to the Foreshore and Seabed Act and the Maori Party's support of National. It's a route fraught with risk for Goff and Labour. Not only does it drive the Maori Party and National even closer together, it makes Key look moderate by comparison.
Goff's "Nationhood" speech was carefully worded but it was difficult not to miss the sub-text. Labour's rising star, Shane Jones, a former chairman of the Waitangi Tribunal Fisheries Commission which divvied up fisheries assets among 70-odd iwi, was more blunt when he railed against "the crutch of victimhood", and the Maori Party's hiding behind "the fig leaf of race" rather than debating the issues.
But it's one thing to criticise the Maori Party for betraying its grass-roots supporters with its support of the ETS and ACC bills. It's another to renege on a commitment to work with National on repealing the Foreshore and Seabed Act after earlier acknowledging that Labour had mishandled the issue. And to imply that those who believe in just settlements are stuck in grievance mode and "victimhood".
As Scoop business commentator Pattrick Smellie points out, National conceded little that wasn't in its own interests.
"Ngai Tahu's late-90s forestry deal ... valued forests as if they had been converted from forests to dairy land, which is much more valuable until you include the Kyoto Protocol cost of felling without replanting. By the time of the deal, New Zealand was a signatory to Kyoto, so the Government has decided to avoid time in court by agreeing to compensate.
"Not one cent will go to the beneficiaries of the much larger Central North Island Forests settlement from earlier this decade, when an ETS was clearly on the cards and the deal done accordingly. So, yes, the $25 million price tag for affected Maori settlement forests is a lot of money in anyone's book, but it's a lot less than the $70 million-plus Ngai Tahu was after, and it's stopped a long, messy court case ... Enraged whiteys: move on."
Goff says that revisiting the foreshore and seabed issue will reopen old wounds; that it will set Maori against Pakeha - as if it will have nothing to do with him. He's wrong. Just how divisive it proves to be will depend in large part on the kind of leader he wants to be.
Editorial: Goff takes the brash approach
3:59 AM Sunday Nov 29, 2009Spot the difference between the following two pieces of political oratory: First, "Is [New Zealand] to be a modern democratic society, embodying the essential notion of one rule for all in a single nation state? Or is it [a] racially divided nation, with two sets of laws, and two standards of citizenship?" Second, "We can choose our future based on principle and with the interests of all New Zealanders at heart. Or we can have a country where one New Zealander is turned against another, Maori against Pakeha."
The first is taken from the speech by the then-new National Party and Opposition leader Don Brash, to the Orewa Rotary Club in January 2004. The second should be fresher in the memory: it is Phil Goff, the leader of the Labour Opposition, on Thursday, speaking to a meeting of Grey Power in Palmerston North.
The similarity of the sentiments is sobering. The political motivations may likewise be adjudged comparable, since both are utterances of men who want to be Prime Minister. But it's instructive to consider the differences as well.
Brash's comments did not differ strikingly from the established National Party line on race relations, yet, enunciated so explicitly, they resulted in an immediate and unprecedented 17-point surge in public support for National, and marked the starting point of a political ascendancy that almost led to victory in the 2005 election.
Goff's remarks, by contrast, to the extent that they could be described as philosophically coherent, represented a change of direction that is hard to interpret as other than opportunistic. It remains to be seen whether his speech will have the same public appeal as Brash's did, although it is hard to imagine it's making much difference to the party's woeful poll results - Labour trails National by around 25 points - or to Goff's own ranking as preferred prime minister, in which he lags, in some polls, behind Helen Clark, who is neither in the race nor in the country.
But regardless, Goff needs to be called to account for his pronouncements. In his speech he said that National's plans to repeal the Foreshore and Seabed Act were pandering to Maori and would "divide New Zealanders, and set one against another". And he attacked the Prime Minister for a failure of leadership in not condemning the inflammatory and obscene email by Hone Harawira.
In doing so, he displayed a remarkable failure of short-term political memory that would be laughable if it were not so seriously intended. Goff, it should be remembered, was a the third-ranked minister in a Government whose leader refused to meet the thousands - Maori and Pakeha - who arrived at Parliament on a hikoi protesting against the foreshore and seabed legislation, instead dismissing them as "haters and wreckers". If ever a comment could be described as setting New Zealanders against one another, that was one - and Goff's failure to distance himself from it at the time or since has been conspicuous.
More than anything else, it was Labour's dismal handling of the foreshore and seabed matter in particular and race relations in general that led to the birth of the Maori Party and the improbable but apparently robust coalition it has forged with a party once led by Don Brash.
Goff's criticism of John Key for failing to condemn Harawira's "white motherf***er" email is odd, not least because Key promptly called the email "deeply offensive", which seems pretty unambiguous. But Key is not responsible for discipline in Maori Party ranks. If Goff is really arguing that the immoderate outburst of a known coalition partner hothead with no ministerial responsibility is the Prime Minister's business, he should explain why. And while he's about it, he might care to explain why the Labour Government remained silent during the Winston Peters funding controversies last year, knowing that Peters' survival was critical to its hopes of re-election.
The deal that National has done in exchange for Maori Party support for its emissions trading laws - indeed, the laws themselves - may be exceptionable. But Goff's attempt to re-animate the ghost of Don Brash is unseemly at best. His backing away from a bipartisan attempt to heal the damage done by the seabed and foreshore legislation makes it plain that he prizes political expediency above principle and is not above appealing to the electorate's baser instincts. But the country has moved on since 2004 and Goff may come to rue such a transparent strategy.
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pacific islands media association
pima.nius@gmail.com
aotearoa, new zealand
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