The only good thing about the Dirty Politics furore is that it squeezed the oxygen out of even less savoury issues in the election campaign.

The attack on so called “race-based policies,” for example, promoted by NZ First, Conservatives and ACT and a Whangarei-based group I’d never heard of called C4C that places media ads calling for equality; confusing Governor Hobson’s words “we are now one people” with the Treaty of Waitangi.

New Zealand used to be a bicultural nation, they tell us, then go on to assert with breathtaking ease, now it’s “our country” and we’ve become  a “ multicultural nation of equals”.  

The common themes is this unlikely coalition are abolition of Maori seats; sidelining the Treaty of Waitangi and anything else that gives Maori “special treatment”  and legal privilege, which in the ACT leader’s mind, is as good (or bad) as that enjoyed by the old French aristocracy.

That last comparison will come as a surprise to Maori living on the poverty line, but it’s the sort of silliness that surfaces around this time at every election. If there is a lull in the blogger wars before we vote, and the race-based rants resume, we need to have some arguments to counter the accusations.

And they are not so easy to find, as Maori Television’s Native Affairs programme discovered when it tried to sort out Dr Jamie Whyte. He shrugged off the Treaty contract that we all live under because he simply doesn’t respect the status of the Treaty as our founding document, enshrined in our laws.

Maybe he doesn’t know that status was established by the Court of Appeal over 30 years ago, in the form of a “partnership” between tangata whenua and all non-Maori who live here.  

That partnership has some special conditions, like every contract does. While we all deserve the same respect, dignity and access to the protection of the law, there are prior considerations in every relationship that come from our history, different abilities and circumstances.

These protections are spelt out in the Treaty, just as seriously as the protection of our status as British subjects (now New Zealand citizens). It’s the Treaty that gives them legal force.

But they also have a moral and spiritual force. And Anglicans above all carry the weight of that – because it was our missionary forebears who not only helped to write and translate and print and distribute the Treaty to Maori. They sold it as a covenant of biblical proportion, and the mana of both parties depended on it being honoured.

The power of that Treaty covenant to bring healing and reconciliation when it is finally honoured, seems to be greater than ever.

Witness the recent events at Taneatua with the settlement between Tuhoe and the Crown. There are few chapters in our history as bitter and divisive, but now the management of Uruwera is to be shared and the “special conditions" became a formula that politicians of all stripes left the hustings to celebrate with Tuhoe.

One day, but not any time soon if the current political climate continues, New Zealand might have a written constitution along the lines suggested at the conference convened by Sir Paul Reeves a decade ago. Some people hope it won’t happen soon because they know any constitution will have to further enshrine the principles of the Treaty.

Anglicans don’t have to wait. We already have a constitution, 22 years old, that guarantees the special place of Maori.

Perhaps that is why our archbishops in their pre-election pastoral letter urge voters to consider which party best faces the challenge of being called into community. Not any old community, they argue, but one that takes account of “the special relationship between all our peoples brought into being by the Treaty of Waitangi”.

Where do you find that community? Hopefully, on a good day with a following wind, in the sort of church we are, thank God, and in the sort of country, pray God, we are becoming.

Bishop John Bluck lives at Pakiri, Wellsford.

bluck@vodafone.co.nz