Teaching kids about the treaty won't pay the bills or build up export businesses

Friday 15th February 2002

Waitangi Day came and went with the predictable circus of professional protest and a call by Governor-General Dame Silvia Cartwright for yet more taxpayers' money to be spent on treaty education.

The Governor-General's call is of a piece with the sinister "living document" interpretation of the treaty, which entails public policy being endlessly relitigated until kingdom come with the principal result of ever escalating amounts of revenue diverted to financing the Maori wishlist. The living document is a blank cheque.

In a way it could be a good idea to educate young New Zealanders about the facts of the treaty to remedy the unremitting barrage of politically correct dishonesty they are presently exposed to in schools wherein they are taught that persons of Maori descent have more rights and privileges than other citizens. Broadcast comment by children on the day was quite revealing as to how far this brainwashing has proceeded.

Public outrage over the more egregious impositions of the treaty industry has somehow missed the mark of where the real action is directed - at the captive hearts and minds of the young who know no better. The real war over the treaty is being waged in schools and tertiary institutions.

Despite the Governor-General's plea we can rest assured that millions of dollars a year are already spent on treaty propaganda disguised as education and embedded in the compulsory curriculum. A whole generation of youth being reared believes in the fiction of treaty partnership and the myth of precedence for the tangata whenua.

Matters have become so degenerate that we can have a government minister write in The National Business Review about a mooted tertiary education policy that must take into account Maori as treaty partners and tangata whenua. No minister of the Crown should reveal so much constitutional ignorance as to suggest that his government is a partner with any ethnic group in New Zealand, let alone racialise tertiary education policy.

The minister's comment has let slip that the Labour-Alliance coalition is committed to embedding treaty partnership in public policy and thereby disenfranchising those New Zealanders who are not of Maori descent. Such radical transformation of our constitutional arrangements at least demands a referendum instead of simply being imposed by fiat.

Some of the people who call for ever more money for Maori are well meaning, including in all likelihood the Governor-General. But all this money adds up, whichever way it is siphoned off to Maori causes.

Scattered across different government budgets, the end result is a racialised system of redistribution that probably benefits most the public servants who get paid to do the channelling. While it is a commonplace to remark on the number of welfare beneficiaries the working population has to carry, one could add on top the ranks of the public servants.

In a tiny, remote country of under four million population, the minority of whom are private sector taxpayers and thereby the actual generators of government revenues that the rest live off in one way or another, Dame Silvia's call strikes a jarring note.

Taxes raised to pay danegelds to Maori and their assorted hangers-on divert money from business development, job creation and productivity increase in the part of the economy that all others depend on - the private sector. They represent a surcharge on business activity which imposes a competitive disadvantage internationally on a trading nation that has the tyranny of distance to pay for as well.

It is a shocking fact that in New Zealand under 4% of companies are engaged in exporting, yet we are told all the time that our country has to boost trade if it is to have a future. Our economy is quite high risk because the small proportion of companies that export contains some of the biggest firms in New Zealand and these are mainly involved in the primary sector.

The added burden of buying off disgruntlement at taxpayers' expense is no proper substitute for letting private enterprise do what it does best in its social role of creating gainful employment and thereby providing people a stake in society.

Such cost must also have a measurable effect on rates of return from capital, with implications for the long-term value of locally listed companies and the retirements savings that can be amassed by investing in them.

The treaty will prove cold comfort in retirement.

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