Helen Clark is reportedly seeking "finality" over the Treaty and wants to set a deadline for lodging historical Treaty claims. As I've said before, I think this is a mistake. The Treaty settlements process is primarily about justice, and sometimes if we want to get it right, it takes time. Setting an arbitrary date after which no claims will be accepted runs contrary to this purpose, and is inviting future governments to use it as a bureucratic excuse to deny justice (as was transparently the goal of ACT's "by next tuesday" policy last election).
This does not mean I am opposed to final settlement, or to having a timescale in mind by which that settlement should (all going well) be complete. But above all, I want it done properly. Otherwise, as with the government's foreshore and seabed legislation, it will simply come back to haunt us.
And it goes without saying that if Helen Clark wants Treaty claims settled quickly, she should start by properly resourcing the Office of Treaty Settlements and the Waitangi Tribunal so they can meet the expected increase in caseload. Without that, then this policy is just so much hot air.
4 comments:
Labour has taken a definite and refreshing lurch to the centre right here, with wholesale adoption of a National/Act policy.
It appears Labour has little ideological backbone but devises policies on the basis of polls and expediency. The left must be so incredibly frustrated.
Posted by Anonymous : 4/03/2005 11:18:00 AM
The think I notice here is how frustrated the right gets when the left moves right.
Posted by Genius : 4/03/2005 01:29:00 PM
Graham: very frustrated. And OTOH, given the MMP environment, I'd expect any such hard deadline to become a casualty of the post-election coalition-forming process. Which may in fact be the entire point: creating a sacrificial policy which they can "reluctantly" bargain away, allowing them to both retain another policy and play martyr to the public. But the fact that they would even consider doing this over Treaty issues speaks volumes about how far they've shifted...
Genius: well, it leaves them nowhere to go, ideologically speaking. Which is why they sometimes seem to be turning on themselves.
Actually, that's not quite true: they could outflank Labour on the left. But this is simply unthinkable to national's neo-liberal rump...
Posted by Idiot/Savant : 4/03/2005 03:24:00 PM
I think a final date for claims is a good idea, because the Treaty problem is never going to go away.
I understand we want the process to be as fair as possible, but we're never going to be able to rule out the possiblility of somebody else wanting to claim in the future.
If people can feel like their ancestors were unjustly robbed of their land, surely in the future there will be people who feel like their ancestors (the people of today) were unjustly compensated for those past injustices?
Posted by Anonymous : 4/06/2005 12:38:00 PM
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