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We are all fellow citizens, and we should share without favour T HE MATAITAI business has certainly polarised opinion, and not just in Moeraki. In Dunedin, Dr Mike Hilton, of the University of Otago, has taken exception to my view of the matter. I am grateful to him for his willingness to debate, and for the pretext to consider somewhat further what I believe to be a thoroughly bad idea.
The key element of Dr Hilton's position is that Maori "did not give away their rights to fisheries when they signed the Treaty of Waitangi". Prior to the treaty, they had "total rights", which, Dr Hilton claims, have now been unjustly lost. This is an interesting argument, much favoured by lawyers, which maintains that everything on New Zealand soil and off its coasts and within its seas was, and still remains, the property of the Maori people - unless they deliberately sold or otherwise signed away any part of it. It is an interesting argument because, if Dr Hilton and his allies are correct, we are in a very much worse situation than most of us suspect. Not only do all the fish in the seas belong to a minority of the population, but so also does the native wildlife - all of it - as well as the lakes and rivers, and anything living in them. None of these things were "given away", or sold by Maori, and so, logically, if Dr Hilton is right, pakeha have no rights to them whatever. Extremists might even argue that the air itself, though vital to us all, is legal only in Maori lungs, a taonga they never surrendered.
There are large holes in this argument - aside from its essential absurdity. The first is a total failure to recognise any difference between personal possessions - which in nearly all societies may quite acceptably be individually owned - and the wider category of a nation's resources, which are held by its inhabitants in common.
The air is one such commons: it belongs to everyone and no-one. So are the public lands, the National Parks, State Forests, beaches, rivers, and lakes, together with the wild animals and plants that live on this common estate. The sea and its fish are a commons too, although here the situation is complicated by the enormous number and value of the fish, far more than required to satisfy each forager's personal need. A surplus therefore is available, which the Government has allocated to commercial use, subject to sustainability.
But it is important to note that the essential element of a commons is still maintained: anyone may take a generous quantity of fish for his or her own use, as a basic entitlement of citizenship. Why, then, should one category of citizen get more?
A second problem with Dr Hilton's position is that it seeks to fix things forever at a specific historical date, in this case 1840. Nothing thereafter is supposed to change, despite the obvious fact that everything has in fact changed completely. Maori, for instance, are no longer the people they were in 1840. They have intermarried extensively with pakeha and now, for the most part, live in a way that is common to all.
Most members of the Moeraki runanga, as it happens, no longer live at Moeraki. Many of them live in Christchurch, and yet Dr Hilton sees nothing odd about allocating these absentees a greater ration of fish than to pakeha people who actually do live, and fish, at Moeraki. His justification for this, he says, is that Maori have been "progressively isolated" by a series of laws from their sources of traditional seafood.
But this is not true. No Maori has been legally debarred from his share of the common larder. Far from it. Maori, through various racially-biased mechanisms (of which mataitai are one), have greater access and a larger share than any other citizen. This is precisely the problem.
Dr Hilton attempts to make mileage out of a presumed cultural need for Maori to provide visiting friends with quantities of seafood: "The mana or prestige of a hapu or iwi is undermined if traditional foods, particularly seafood, cannot be shared with guests." Why this situation should be any different with pakeha, who also traditionally eat seafood, is not explained. Hospitality, as Dr Hilton seems to forget, is common to all our cultures. The whole idea of different rights for different people is anathema to democracy and the provision of extra rights on the basis of race is a working definition of racism. Dr Hilton, it would seem, is willing to overlook this as long as the level of racial preference is small: "a modest compensation"; "small, very localised seafood resources". But racism, no matter how minor, is racism nonetheless, and big racisms are far more likely to take hold and grow where small ones are officially sanctioned.
Dr Hilton, of course, denies that mataitai are racist. He insists that I "can no more argue the establishment [of mataitai] is racist than [I] can claim the ongoing settlement process is racist". Yet, in the very next line, Dr Hilton can advise that "of course mataitai are intended to grant special rights to Maori". I have no doubt at all that Dr Hilton's motives are pure. But it seems to me that he is badly confused as to what constitutes racial justice. With the best will in the world, he would open the way to an iniquitous system that will fester for generations.
There is no need for this. We are neighbours. We fish. And if we are decent people, we will share the pot without favour.
....Dave Witherow is a Dunedin armchair philosopher and environmentalist |
