Speech Notes:
Two Ticks for Clio: Reflections on NZ Politics and History
The Michael King Memorial Lecture
university of otago, Dunedin

It is a convention that memorial lectures should begin with a quotation from the person being remembered and honoured or a reference to the context of his or her work. This, of course, is to demonstrate that the speaker has actually read something in that respect. This is a requirement which is peculiarly appropriate when a politician – in New Zealand not always the most well-read of the human species – is the speaker.

Michael King occupies a very special place in New Zealand historiography. Even more than James Belich has, he managed to connect with a broad audience and, in so doing, enhanced a general awareness of New Zealand’s past, especially as it relates to our present.

In that he perhaps followed in the footsteps of Keith Sinclair as a popularising historian. But whereas Sinclair’s quintessential Kiwi was both obviously male and seemed somehow to metamorphose immediately out of its British chrysalis as it disembarked on these shores, King’s New Zealanders were a diverse and slowly developing group, seeking an unknown destination, yet to be reached but perhaps already discernible.

King was thus very much in the landfall in unknown seas tradition. Sinclair was more of the touch down on a well-known footy ground. In that, King reflected the uncertainties of the baby boom generation, raised in immense security and therefore seeking to escape from it, while Sinclair came from the generation raised in insecurity and therefore seeking its opposite. But of course, their differences also represented a generational change in the nature of New Zealand.

Be that as it may, King’s great popular success was to make a real fist of trying to explain the history of the emergence of a bicultural nation out of a colonial society intruding itself on an indigenous people. He was, arguably, less successful at developing the multicultural theme which has become so much the reality of New Zealand over the last quarter of a century or so.

The importance of King’s work should not be underestimated in the context of popular understanding. With history declining as a subject at upper secondary levels – and long since largely disappeared as a recognisable discipline at lower secondary ones – the ability of at least some of our historians to connect with the general public is a valuable one.

This is particularly so because of the weakened impact, influence, and interaction of the academic world upon and between the political and governmental one in the last couple of decades.

That may seem an odd statement given the general trend of politicians, on average, to have higher levels of tertiary qualifications than was the case, say, fifty years or more ago.

But that, of course, is to commit a number of errors. It confuses qualifications with learning, a mistake no historian of the early Labour Party, here or in Britain, would make. It also confuses the acquisition of qualifications with respect for those who taught them.

Most of all, it ignores the increasingly self-enclosed professionalisation of the government policy agencies, which call less upon outside advice. The academic world, for its part has retreated more into internal debate. As a result, the worlds of government and academia have become more separated than might have once been. I have to say this seems particularly so of economic policy, especially where academic views either remain rigidly neo-classical or hark back to a lost Keynesian golden age which, like all golden ages, never really existed.

To some extent, and here I venture dangerously well beyond my competence and knowledge, it would seem to me that the nature of history as a discipline has also changed significantly over the last twenty-five years in a way which makes it less immediately recognisable to the practising politician.

What I mean by this was brought vividly home to me when, as a result of one of my many moments of slightly hubristic weakness, I agreed to talk to a seventh form history class about economic and social aspects of late Tudor and early Stuart England, something I once knew a little about.

I began to search the university websites for what courses were being taught on the period so that I could try to get the odd reading list to try to do a quick update.

What I found was that a period and an area, which was once a staple of university history offerings had, in that simple form, pretty much disappeared. What struck me further was that many such courses – England in the Industrial Revolution, America in the Period of Reconstruction and so on – had disappeared.

Instead, at least at the upper levels, the courses are dominated by thematic papers. Some were tied to a place or time – Feminism and Professional Sport in Victorian Caversham say – but these are often quite broad.

In other words, and to be somewhat more properly respectful of what is clearly a process of disciplinary evolution, history has become less concrete and rather more conceptual in its overall approach.

This was all slightly worrying for someone who abandoned at the end of a B.A. the insecurity of the alarming abstractness of pure mathematics for the comforting concreteness of history (which was, even better, accompanied by lovely lashings of vituperative debate). Even more so because it raised the awful spectre that historians are gradually turning into sociologists.

Luckily some now completely forgotten event in government meant I never had to front up to the seventh form concerned and my fading memories of the causes of the Great Inflation (which in fact averaged out to being at the bottom end of the current Policy Targets Agreement between myself and the Governor of the Reserve Bank) were not called upon.

The point I am slowly lumbering towards making is that politics is very largely about the concrete. It is about specific issues involving actual people in specific places. It is at least as much thrust upon politicians as it is chosen or determined by us. It is a neverending kaleidoscope of new issues, new challenges, and new ideas. Yet, like Aristotle and Plato, the same recurrent dichotomies, the same recurrent patterns of challenges and responses keep appearing and reappearing if dressed up in very different forms and garbs.

Perhaps that is one reason why traditionally a significant proportion of people with a serious interest in history have been interested in politics or even become politicians. It is not just that history is still often about politics (particularly in its broader sense) but that an interest in and appreciation of the concreteness of history easily leads into the concreteness of politics.

Thus in my own party in the last generation we have had Bob Tizard, Jonathan Hunt, Michael Bassett and myself plus Helen Clark and Phil Goff from history’s modern cousin, political studies. And despite the later Neville Phillips’s famous quip about the collective of New Zealand historians being the land of the long pink cloud not all have been Labour – our very own (or is it disowned?) Michael Laws springs to mind not to mention Rob Eaddy, formerly Jim Bolger’s assistant and now Peter Dunne’s Chief of Staff.

Of course, in emphasising the concreteness of both history and politics I realise I may be treading on any number of toes. With respect to politics I have always been impatient with those who demand some rigid overarching philosophy, or what in my business is more commonly called a big picture or vision, as opposed to a broad set of principles and values.

There are a number of reasons for that. The first is maybe, for all I know, peculiar to New Zealand. That is that the very word “vision” has been captured by a small group on the far laissez-faire right. Any view of life which does not conform to an agenda of endless deregulation, privatisation, shrinking of government, and encouragement of inequality is condemned as lacking vision. In my own view, those who thus claim a monopoly of vision totally lack perception, especially the perception of reality (including the experience of history).

It is particularly galling to be told, time after time, that the first three quarters of the twentieth century, which saw perhaps the largest gains in real incomes and standard of living, accompanied by the largest reductions in inequality in this and many similar developed countries was somehow all a giant error of both practice and theory. Indeed, if one is to believe the acolytes of the Institute of Economic Affairs and its many offshoots it all began to go wrong as long ago as about 1830 (which I would argue is about when the first glimmer of light appeared for the great bulk of the population).

This is where the historian or the historically aware politician is most likely to part company with the dominant ideology of the last quarter of the century. It is not surprising that very, very few of those propounding such views have any serious grounding in history. And, in so far as they do, they remind me of the cruder members of the Marxist school. Not only do they also subscribe to a form of economic determinism but the explanatory model can be applied across any time or place with only the names and dates changed. I always used to think that under the Marxist model the poor old bourgeoisie spent so long rising that they must have felt like a historical loaf that never quite got baked.

Moreover, the second reason I remain suspicious of the application of the concept of vision to politics is related to the first. Those who support the neo-classical laissez faire vision show both a contempt for facts (and, therefore, pragmatism) but also a lack of concern for the damage to many people’s lives the imposition of their theories cost. In New Zealand the cliché “no gain without pain” was but one of many trite phrases used to cover an unnecessary lack of humanity in the application of policies which were, in part, no doubt necessary.

We also need to remind ourselves of the gigantic evils inflicted in the last century by people who, if they had anything, certainly had vision. Pragmatism, a sense of human fallibility, a knowledge of the historical difficulties of effecting improvements, are all virtues inconsistent with the imposition of grand plans, whether it be for a thousand year Reich, the creation of a new Socialist utopia, or any of the other mass delusions of the twentieth century.

Before that comment triggers some outraged headline let me say I am not trying to compare the Business Roundtable with the Nazi Party or the Soviet Communist Party. But what I am saying is that all can be seen as part of the broad spectrum of neo-Platonist believers in ideal forms as opposed to we muddled neo-Aristotelians lacking an integrated vision and purpose.

I suppose I remain strongly wedded to a broadly pragmatic interpretation of history consistent with a social democratic political tradition because it makes sense of my own background and study of history in a way that no other approach does.

Over four generations it is the story of the rise out of the somewhat disreputable poor, through the respectable working class, and on to the professional middle class. That led me to study for my master’s thesis poverty in late nineteenth century London. I found the streets my maternal grandparents lived in as very young children classified in the first great social survey ever undertaken as “very poor, bordering on the semi-criminal.”

Out of that background my maternal grandfather, as a reservist in the British Army, managed to get himself captured in one of the first battles the British fought in World War I. While in retrospect this might seem a happy event, given the improbability of surviving four years in the trenches, its timing was unfortunate. Since my mother was born on 15 August 1914, for the first six months of my mother’s life my grandmother did not know if my grandfather was dead or alive.

After the First World War my grandfather became a staunch member of the Labour Party and worked for London Transport. And, as part of the trends of the twentieth century, my mother won a scholarship to grammar school, qualified as a shorthand typist and married my father, a tradesman spectacle framemaker.

I was the second child, born in February 1945, and born at home because my mother was suspected of having T.B. and was therefore excluded from hospital.

After my paternal grandmother died we emigrated to New Zealand in 1955. My father found his trade did not exist in New Zealand so he took a job assembling fluorescent lights. And, following and improving on my mother’s record, I proceeded to go to Christ’s College on a scholarship and then became the first member of my family to get a degree. This was in a joyous world of full employment in which a working class boy could go to university with no career in mind, switch majoring subjects at the end of three years, and end up Deputy Prime Minister, having peaked, of course, as Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Otago.

I’ve gone into that little personal story in some detail because it illustrates I believe what I was trying to argue before, as well as two key themes of our history over the last hundred years which remain the two key themes of the party I represent in Parliament.

The gradual and often uncertain progression from poverty to affluence (ignoring the final, unusual stage) is, I think far more typical than the dramatic, heroic rise from poverty to great wealth beloved of those of a different persuasion. The latter is all too often the mask for the reality that the best way of getting really rich remains choosing the right parents.

More importantly, I think that little personal story illustrates the crucial importance of the twin concepts of security and opportunity to the social history of the last century. The two are sometimes seen as opposites, with one stifling the other. Thus opportunity kills security, security kills opportunity.

Nothing could be further from the truth in the great majority of cases. What kills opportunity is not security itself but security without challenge, security which prevents people growing, innovating, questioning. But I would argue vehemently that a small isolated nation that must thrive on its wits needs a base of security to provide the confidence to take risks. It is achieving the balance between security and opportunity which is one of the challenges for New Zealand politicians, not destroying one in the vain hope that it will make it easier to realise the other.

But there is a third sense in which that personal story relates back to my introductory remarks about Michael King. The Christchurch I grew up in from age 10 was often said at the time to be more English than England. It was certainly more monocultural than even the Britain of the late 1950s, let alone that today.

Apart from the Dutch migrants, people were overwhelmingly of stock that came from the British Isles. Indeed, they were overwhelmingly what the Americans would have called WASPS. To all intents and purposes no Afro-Caribbeans, practically no South Asians, practically no Pacifika, a tiny number of East Asians, and very, very few Maori. Much of Michael King’s Penguin history, if it could have been read at the time, would have seemed some sort of bizarre fantasy, not a story about New Zealand. For a person growing up in Christchurch in the mid-1950s New Zealand was still aspirationally a better Britain even if, like my family, the tap water came from an artesian well and sewage disposal was by way of the weekly nightsoil man, a distinct step down from the amenities of working class North London.

And, in case what I have just said about Christchurch in the 1950s was the result of some false memory or boyish lack of awareness I checked the 1956 Census data. Out of a population of about 143,000, ninety-nine per cent were of European origin. 850 people, 0.6 per cent, identified as Maori. Just 108 were non-Maori Polynesian.

Of course that was much less true of some other parts of the country, as King would point out. Areas in the Far North, the East Coast, and elsewhere remained dominated by Maori. Somehow not just the South Island but much of the North Island managed to ignore that fact. Yet with the beginnings of the great Maori migration to the cities and of the Pasifika migration driven by our need for cheap factory labour this was all starting to change very rapidly indeed.

And that has created, not just for historians, but also for politicians a whole new set of challenges and issues which we still struggle with. Twice that has been a factor in very closely fought elections – in 1981 and 2005 – where the metropolitan votes have demonstrated somewhat more comfort with diversity and the provincial votes rather less. On both occasions I have to note that Dunedin reaffirmed its status as a metropolitan centre.

For historians the challenges are ones of understanding, of a broadening of empathy and comprehension, and of an ability to draw the strands of an extraordinarily disparate set of stories for such a small nation into something like a unified whole. Compare, for example, the lot of the New Zealand historian in that respect with that of the historian of two similar-sized countries, Norway and Finland (or even Ireland despite or perhaps because of its great religious divide which ironically provides an integrating theme for much of its history).

Surely that is the reason why the naïve assumption of the proponents of proportional representation that it would lead to the emergence of a more consensual style (and content) of politics has so far been completely unfulfilled. They confused cause with effect – an easy consensus is the product of more uniform societies. And as those societies have become less uniform so consensus has begun to break down. All proportional representation has done in New Zealand is to allow greater expression of our diversity and disagreements – something which the two party system masked. Again I cannot help but feel that a better understanding of the nature of historical processes would at least have avoided such an obviously fallacious argument gaining credence.

It is this diversity, this great multicultural tapestry covering a small nation, which presents the current generation of politicians with their greatest challenge. Not, dare I say it as Minister of Finance, sustaining a higher rate of growth in Gross Domestic Product (challenging enough though that is). The fact that King’s general history barely manages to encompass this diversity beyond biculturalism is an indication itself of the size of the challenge.

For politicians the challenge comes in many different ways. The challenge is probably greatest for the Labour Party, for our support base encompasses a wider range of the various groups in New Zealand society. Dr Brash’s many different attempts to define “mainstream” all had the connecting theme that they would have been more appropriate in the Christchurch of the 1950s I grew up in than New Zealand today, particularly metropolitan New Zealand.

This challenge, the challenge to build a nation encompassing a variety of cultures, world views, and ethnicities, requires both the pragmatism I referred to earlier, the ability to recognise and articulate practical solutions to real problems, but also a fundamental set of values and principles consistent with there being an effective response to that challenge. This may seem to contradict what I earlier said about so-called vision. But the difference is real and crucial to politics. Vision has come to mean ignoring realities, ignoring the views and needs of others, and driving towards an absolute truth perceived by only a few. In the end it is the hallmark of the obsessed.

Values and principles in a pluralistic democracy are a much more subtle blend of respect for the views of others, where they are consistent with the preservation of that democracy; the ability to exercise empathy (how sad, therefore, that so many of Adam Smith’s modern disciples ignore his first great work and, therefore, misunderstand his second); a clarity about the aims in view but flexibility about the means; and an ability to be honest with oneself and others. A clear set of values and principles – in my case social democratic ones – provides a strong guide to action but not a rigid template since what may be appropriate and effective in one place or time may not be so in another.

It is, of course, the social democratic terminology which is the most problematic in the New Zealand of 2005. The term itself, I admit, is slightly quaint but I can still find no other that will suffice. “Liberal” is a word so much used and abused that is about as useful as the word “iconic” has become. (For example, “iconic landscape” seems to mean something nice to look at while you have a picnic). “Socialist” has been destroyed by some of its most awful adherents. Whatever term one chooses to use, the fact that remains is that the political tradition of which I am part primarily grew out of attempts to promote the social and economic interests of the new industrial working class of the nineteenth century.

But at best that can only be part of the modern social democratic tradition. What is now the old industrial working class is a shrinking proportion of the population. Social democracy has thus expanded to take in the interests of wide ranges of the professions, especially those in the state sector; the elderly; those with disabilities; and ethnic and other minorities. Those for whom, in short, the power of the state exercised intelligently and effectively is crucial to the exercise of security and opportunity.

This is why the key ambition of the opponents of social democracy has been a consistent programme of reducing the effectiveness of the state by reducing the resources available to it. And, as social democracy succeeds, it tends to breed its own enemies who see greater gain from such moves in the short term without wanting to see the atrophying of the state which is the long term consequence. The old saw about walking to the polls to vote Labour in and driving to them to vote Labour out still has some resonance.

The more difficult problem for the social democratic tradition is keeping together such a disparate coalition of forces. It is easy to describe parts of the agenda as “political correctness” and therefore peel off more traditional components of the coalition. Thus, for example, the promotion of gay rights is seen as “social engineering” whereas attempting to force gays to at least act as if they are heterosexual is not (perhaps this could be regarded instead as “physical engineering”).

In New Zealand particular issues arise out of the place of Maori within that broad coalition. Even at the last election, with the rise of the Maori Party, the overwhelming majority of those on the Maori Roll voted Labour.

It is far from clear that the majority of those who voted Maori Party at the electorate level did so solely or even primarily on the basis of the foreshore and seabed issue, even though this was the occasion for the formation of the party.

But I want to finish with the foreshore and seabed issue because to me it sums up a number of the themes I have touched on this evening. More than any other, is the issue which has highlighted the challenge we all face in moving beyond the monocultural past that mainstream New Zealand did inhabit through Michael King’s bicultural New Zealand and on to a hopefully successful multicultural future. A future in which we are all at ease with our own and others’ pasts and recognise the ongoing meaning they have.

But by way of introduction I should note that this was not the first time I had to take the lead role in what was an issue fraught with divisive overtones in part, at least, based on race.

In August 1987 I became the Minister of Social Welfare and inherited a bill in front of a select committee which was to become the Children, Young Persons, and their Families Act 1989. The original Bill had arisen out of one of those recurrent moral panics around child abuse (including child sexual abuse) which have usually taken one of two opposed polar forms (both wrong).

The key point was that the Bill had emerged very much out of the professional child care advocates, including paediatricians. It was structured around those professionals making judgments about the existence of abuse and having considerable powers to effect the removal of children from their families. It was suffused with the notion that the judgments thus made were infallible. As one leading practitioner told me, he could always tell whether abuse had occurred. As a father whose second daughter had been born well above average weight and whose Plunket graph therefore went sideways for the first year (an infallible sign it seemed of failure to thrive) I was a little sceptical.

More crucially, it was clear the Bill was deeply opposed by many Maori (and, indeed, significant groups of social workers suspicious of medical hubris). This was demonstrated, as it sometimes is with Maori, by deafening silence as much as by noise.

After a great deal of listening and thinking I determined that the Bill should be completely rewritten and structured around the concept of family group conferences effectively convened by the frontline social workers. A balance was struck which was threatened by massive underfunding of the relevant government agency in the 1990s but which has since been restored. The extremists on both sides – those who think child abuse (especially sexual abuse) is largely the invention of man-hating Marxist lesbians and those who think it is rampant in many households (especially those which are not nuclear pakeha families) were sent packing to write books and occasional magazine articles. The centre did, for once, hold.

The foreshore and seabed issue was not so easy. Already the facts have been substantially lost in a welter of ex post facto wisdom and rewriting of both history and the law, not least the legal decision which occasioned the need for a policy response.

The Court of Appeal was asked to consider a number of issues. In the end it determined that it needed to answer only one. That was whether the assumption of sovereignty by the Crown, and subsequent legislation asserting Crown ownership of the foreshore and seabed, had eliminated any Maori claims to customary rights. (Strictly speaking that was not the question asked but answering that one was crucial to what was determined).

The existing case law in New Zealand, dating from the 1960s, held unequivocally that such extinction had occurred. But this case law ran strongly counter to that in other comparable Commonwealth jurisdictions which held that for extinction to have occurred there had to be specific provision to that end. Thus while it did not follow that any customary rights still endured, that was a matter still to be tested case by case in the courts since no such specific statutory extinction had occurred.

In arriving at this conclusion I am sure the Court of Appeal was correct and the seemingly settled case law wrong. The Court could simply have found that the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court to consider common law (ie customary) rights had not been removed. Instead, the Court arrived at the somewhat bolder conclusion that, therefore, the Maori Land Court had the right to consider claims, and if satisfied with those claims, declare areas of foreshore and seabed to be customary land under the 1993 Te Ture Whenua Maori Act.

The Court was at some considerable pains to emphasise that in its view such claims would be difficult to prove and that they were likely to be successful only with respect to small, discrete areas of foreshore and seabed.

It would be fair to say that qualification was ignored, buried indeed, within a matter of hours of the decision being released. In part that was because of the implications of the second part of the Court’s ruling. Had jurisdiction been limited to the High Court then two consequences would have ensued. The first was that the tests to be applied would be the fairly rigorous and reasonably well established common law tests. But by enabling the Maori Land Court to deal with the issue under the 1993 Act the tests became less clear. The very real prospect of areas of foreshore and seabed passing into freehold ownership was opened up (since this is a relatively simple procedure under the 1993 Act once land was declared Maori customary land).

The great historical irony in this, of course, was that this freeholding provision had originally appeared in the 19th century Native Land Acts as a means of making it easier for Maori land to be alienated into settler ownership. Thus was pakeha New Zealand hoist with its own petard five generations later.

The media instantly sensationalised the Court’s decision. Very quickly the headline “Maori May Own Foreshore and Seabed” became an assertion by Maori that they did and always had done and a fear on the part of most of the rest of us that even if that was not true the Maori Land Court was going to find it was. The switchboards of talkback radio lit up and, as usual, most of the hosts ensured that any rational voices, Maori or pakeha, were lost in the noise.

For the Government, the situation was an impossible one. Already the Treaty settlement process was causing deep concern amongst many pakeha, despite the fact that it was proceeding in a largely smooth fashion and Maori claimants were usually showing remarkable moderation. Now the nation had all but convinced itself that very large chunks of the foreshore and seabed were about to pass into private ownership. Maori were pleased, by and large. Pakeha were in a state of incipient revolt, by and large.

The issue was further complicated by the differing views of what ownership meant. For pakeha, it did imply the ability to buy and sell, to exclude and to exploit. It raised deep atavistic feelings about who we are as a people and what pakeha believed (rightly or wrongly) they had escaped from in the old world. It was like some new Norman yoke being imposed (even though it is Maori who in this case actually come closer to filling the historical role of the Anglo-Saxons).

For Maori, ownership was more about a mutual relationship of belonging between the people and the land. What I found emotionally scarring about all of this was that the Government ended up trying to seek a way of crystallising the actual status quo, as it were, on the ground while many Maori considered that we were engaged in another raupatu or land confiscation.

The Government could have left things to the Maori Land Court. But, in the intensely heated atmosphere of the time that was not a real possibility and those who still argue so are refusing to recognise the depth of pakeha anger and alarm. Moreover, such a process would have been dragged out over many years creating massive uncertainty about the legal status of foreshore and seabed. It certainly created an opportunity, but with no security.

In any case, it is absolutely clear that Parliament in 1993 did not intend the consequences which the Court of Appeal has discovered buried within the Act. And where that is the case Parliament has never surrendered its right as sovereign to amend legislation if it considers fit.

And so it did after a long and tortuous process. (The other option, an appeal to the Privy Council, was not seriously considered as the Government was in the process of abolishing such appeals).

Initially, the Government had focussed on the concept of the public domain as being the best means forward. Simultaneously, discussions were held with some Maori with a specific stake in the issue. But as these tended towards a system of co-management across the entire nation with a subsidiary focus on the benefits to Maori out of the ability to commercialise customary rights they were, in the end, abandoned.

As discussions continued and ideas were refined the fundamental, if unstated, principle of the legislation was to preserve the practical status quo while providing a formalised and codified framework within which customary common law rights could be explored.

That meant four key features:

• a clear statutory assertion that the Crown is the legal and beneficial owner of the foreshore and seabed on behalf of all New Zealanders
• a statutory right of access
• a codification of the common law with respect to customary usage rights and
• negotiations for appropriate redress where a group would have been able to assert full customary title referred to in the Act as territorial customary rights but was now prevented from doing so.

Applications have now been made to the Maori Land Court. At the same time negotiations are proceeding with Ngati Porou and Te Whanau a Apanui which I believe will be successful. They will demonstrate that there can be real substance to the Crown’s recognition of areas where there are enduring and ongoing Maori interests in the foreshore and seabed while preserving the rights of the population at large (including it needs to be said, Maori who are not tangata whenua in those areas).

The political process to achieve this outcome was a fraught one. The National Party early on determined that its interests continued to lie in playing the race card and claiming the legislation gave everything to Maori. The Maori Party was formed and claimed it took everything away from Maori. United Future’s support ceased with the abandonment of the term “public domain.” Act both played the race card and stood on the integrity of property rights. The Greens tended to follow a line akin to the Maori sovereignty argument. This left New Zealand First whose support was essential and amongst whom Dail Jones, in particular, played a very constructive and well informed role.

Only time will tell whether the solution arrived at in the Foreshore and Seabed Act will endure. Much will, I think, depend on the outcome of the current discussions and pending Maori Land Court cases.

No other issue in recent times has so deeply revealed the divisions between the world views of New Zealanders. No other issue has so clearly demonstrated the difficulty of providing an ongoing framework for the relationship between a rejuvenated tangata whenua and the enormously disparate groups of people that comprise the rest of us.

For a working class boy from North London, culturally and professionally steeped in British history, to be the Minister responsible for trying to put together a workable solution to a problem created by the application of common law to the ownership of New Zealand’s coastline says something about the journey we are still on as a nation. All I would claim is that I tried to bring to it an understanding of history, a historian’s sympathy for different but equally valid views, and a social democratic politician’s desire to ensure rights are widely exercised and enjoyed. Two ticks for Clio, perhaps. Because for a historian it is always perhaps, never black and white.