Waitangi Day observance next in Wellington

Press, 4 December 1985, Page 3

Waitangi Day observance next in Wellington

Wellington reporter The official Waitangi Day observance will be held next year in Wellington, the Minister of Lands, Mr Wetere, announced yesterday. He said it would take the form of a function reflecting the diversity of New Zealand society and focusing on the theme of peace. He said he hoped communities and organisations would answer the challenge the Government gave them last year and organise appropriate activities in their own areas. The change of venue was deplored by the Opposition

spokesman on Maori affairs, Mr Winston Peters, who said it marked the end of what was the only real “national day” New Zealand had. He described it as bureaucratic, unjustified, and insensitive to the wishes of most of New Zealanders, both Maori and European. “The fact that a group of radicals sought to use the celebration for their own ends was not sufficient reason to ignore the majority,” he said. “Waitangi was a birth of one nation of two peoples. While cultural differences

have been preserved, both cultures have for decades acknowledged its significance,” Mr Peters said. Mr Wetere said he did not know what the reaction would be to the decision but that he had consulted the Tai Tokerau people and that they would probably hold their own local ceremony at Waitangi with the help of the Waitangi Trust Board. He was short on details for the Wellington observance but keen to emphasise that it would have a multi-cultural flavour. "I would like to think that since signing the treaty,

there have been a number of people who have come to this country and helped build it,” he said. Whether the military would play a role had yet to be worked out, Mr Wetere told reporters, but he was able to confirm that the Governor-General, Sir Paul Reeves, would attend the Wellington service. The capital had been chosen, he said, because it was the centre of power where the decisions were made. Mr Wetere was guarded in his replies to questions until he was asked if he

expected the change to dampen the antagonism that has marked previous Waitangi Day observances. He then said emphatically that New Zealand, probably for the first time, had a Government which was moving to redress the grievances surrounding the treaty and that this had produced a change in attitudes toward it “You don’t have people going round talking about ripping it up or burning it,” he said. “Our people are now saying the treaty has mana.”