An unhealthy disregard for rongoa

In 1999, after several years of discussion and debate, the Ministry of Health and Nga Ringa Whakahaere o Te Iwi Maori developed and published national standards for traditional Maori healing practice.

The work was in response to a 1995 recommendation to the minister of health by the National Advisory Committee on Core Health and Disability Services that: "Regional Health Authorities purchase aspects of Maori traditional healing, to be provided in conjunction with other primary health services, where there is reason to believe this will improve access to effective services for Maori and lead to better health outcomes."

Today's National Party has no room for more effective services for Maori, if they choose not to accept Pakeha cultural models of health delivery.

A Sunday Star Times hack job on rongoa claimed "the government spends more than a million dollars a year on traditional Maori therapies - and has no proof that they work."

Other alternative therapies, such as homeopathy and naturopathy, receive no public money, it says. Maybe, but the government will shell out for other therapies like chiropracty - maybe that's the test. When there is state funding, it is no longer "alternative".

Reporter Greg Meylan's authority that the therapies don't work? New Zealand Skeptics chairwoman Vicki Hyde, who on one hand admits studies had shown some of the traditional herbal remedies used plants containing active ingredients, and in the next breath "questioned whether public money should be spent on therapies which were probably effective only because of the placebo effect".

So what are they: active compounds or placebos? Are the Skeptics saying health is a chemistry experiment? That is a drug company line, not one the medical establishment would accept any longer.

Not to worry though, National's health spokesman Tony Ryall has the cure.

"There's nothing wrong with alternative therapies but the taxpayer shouldn't be expected to foot the bill," Ryall said.

He said his party worked on the principle that medicine should be proven and that policies should be colour-blind.

Actually, his party brought in this funding, obviously convinced the treatments helped some people.

It took years of study and debate to win acceptance in professional and policymaking circles that medicine was not colour blind, and culture influences health. Politicians pandering to prejudice and shallow reporting could roll back those hard won gains.

As for the costs, $1.3 million a year among 12 Maori health providers - a pittance in the wider scheme of health spending. A major hospital probably spends that every year on latex gloves.

Double Act in Maori land grab

Deborah Coddington has yet to make the transition from politics back to journalism.

Her Sunday Herald preview of National Party leader Don Brash’s Orewa Rotary Club speech, headlined "National softens tone on Maori", is more spin than reportage.

"The National Party looks likely to repackage its policy towards Maori, fearing its hard-line stance turned off too many urban voters at the last election. Leading up to Waitangi Day, and his 2006 speech to the Orewa Rotary Club, Don Brash told the Herald on Sunday his party needed to reaffirm the policies he outlined at Orewa in previous years 'in a way that does not make us anti-Maori',"

He denied his party was taking a softer line on Maori issues, saying he was never anti-Maori but opposed to "disastrous affirmative action programmes" and claims that the Treaty of Waitangi was "about two distinct groups of people".

Just out of interest, can we have an example of a "disastrous affirmative action programme". Maybe Coddington the former ACT MP takes its as self-evident there must be one.

As for specific examples, Coddington said Brash was considering putting up a private member's bills to "reform" Maori land ownership so it could be used to benefit owners "in the same way as owning land helps other New Zealanders".

That of straight out of the ACT playbook. Everything comes down to property rights, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The excuse, that "Maori incorporations have complained they cannot sell their land and reinvest the money elsewhere," doesn’t wash. A couple of the larger incorporations have voiced such complaints, but that was more to do with the strictures of the Maori Reserved Lands Act. When they want to and can put up a good enough case, incorporations have been able to get the Maori Land Court to change the status of land, allowing sale.

The problem for the white right is Maori land law looks different, so it must therefore be wrong.

Without going into the historical byways which have led to the current Te Ture Whenua Maori Act, Brash sounds like he is looking to revisit National’s 1967 amendments to the Maori Land Act and set the stage for a grab of remaining Maori land.

That '67 Act, opposed by Maori at the time including those in National, led to huge loss of land from Maori ownership, particularly on the coast. Many a holiday property now going for seven figure sums in the current boom was wrested from Maori ownership during those years. The downstream result of that law was of course the 1975 Maori Land March (even though by that time Labour’s Matiu Rata had reversed many of the worst features of the amendment).

Historical frictions

My holiday reading at the beach was Michael Belgrave's Historical Frictions: Maori claims and reinvented histories (Auckland University Press).

As the back jacket says, this is an "important" book. Belgrave worked for the Waitangi Tribunal during some of its most critical years, so has an insider's understanding of the forces affecting that institution. Since leaving the tribunal he has taught history at Massey University.

Belgrave explains how the tribunal is not only writing history but making history "it is just the latest in a long tradition of judicial investigations of New Zealand's past, dating almost back to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.

He says these periodic exhumations, the "points of friction" in the title, are part of the continual process of Maori and the state regularly realigning themselves. While they have never resolved the problems of Maori marginalisation and resource loss, they have reduced tensions and provided opportunities for Maori communities to grab what was on offer.

Don't expect finality from the current round, but "given the time and cost of the current round of claim and settlement, it is unlikely that a new round will occur soon."

The Waitangi tribunal is required to make practical recommendations about resolving grievances, being concerned as previous commissions were about the concerns of the present. "Interpreting the past according to present values and knowledge, rather than in the context of its own time, makes historians uncomfortable," Belgrave says. For an example of that discomfort, look no further than tribunal member Michael Bassett's shrill minority reports.

The tribunal has little option as its second main role, says Belgrave, is to identify Crown breaches of the treaty, "a concept very much rooted in present interpretations of the treaty."

Tahupotiki Wiremu Rata said the treaty is always speaking. Belgrave has an elegant variant on that concept which is a valuable way to frame the debate: that there is no single Treaty of Waitangi that can be argued through the courts in a legalistic fashion, but "it is a touchstone for debates on the place of Maori in New Zealand society." The concept of "principles of the treaty" first raised on the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act is an attempt to create a modern treaty relevant to policy making in the present.

Since 1840 the treaty has had multiple interpretations, depending on which side of the divide you were on. By mid-last century it had become a symbol of national unity and good race relations, an interpretation which was rejected by Maori in the mid to late 1970s as notion of unbroken Maori sovereignty started to emerge.

Belgrave gets into the nitty gritty of debate with his fellow historians, defending Henry Williams ability as a translator and redeeming the reputation of Kemp, who was made the scapegoat for dissatisfaction over South Island land deals. In fact, Belgrave is sympathetic to the missionaries, who he feels were caught out by forces beyond their control and then ruthlessly slandered by George Grey.

His expositions of four claims - Muriwhenua, Ngai Tahu, Taranaki and Chatham Islands - are an excellent overview, though his wrap up chapter on the settlement process screams out for further exploration.

He rightly sees claims as an assertion of mana, which is one reason they reemerge in different guises from generation to generation. He is also one of those who sees the current round descending into a rehash of the Native Land Court battles of the late 19th century, which is why it is inevitable they will eventually be revisited.

Belgrave recognises there is a Maori sphere of operation which is far more complex than the framework of title and limited rights which the state has tried to confine it. "Patterns of interests were much more complex and variegated than the city state model imposed on Maori would suggest. They were also far more complex than assumed by Norman Smith, the Maori Land Court judge whose influential description of Maori land rights reduced them to a formulaic checklist of take (claims), based on discovery, ancestry, conquest and gift and exercised through occupation. As in other Polynesian societies, customary interests were about relationships, partly rooted in genealogical inheritance, but also reflecting present leadership, and economic and military needs. Boundaries between kinship groups were often flexible and blurred, with intermarriage drawing people into different communities... Little in this was permanently fixed, and groups often could form and re-form, sometimes absorbing others and at other times splitting into new rival groups. All of this fascinated European observers, but it was regarded by policy makers as an impediment to progress and an anachronism, to be discarded just as feudal common law rights to graze cattle or collect firewood on common land had been extinguished by enclosure in British custom."

An immensely valuable book and a cracking good read.