On a quick run through the report it is very much as expected.

Eddie Jury J has had another opporunity to set out his idealised reconstruction of Maori ‘law’ and his mystical conception of a nation state governed by the anointed from two races in eternal cultural competition and practical negotiation with each other over the application of power.

He of course recognises that the Court of Appeal’s Ngati Apa view of the the common law rights Maori inherited with the British law they signed up to under the Treaty would never get Maori a fraction of what his mystical view would offer. So he invents a new set of customary rights which have apparently been under subterranean evolution for 160 years.

He also recognises that even the most naive pakeha politicians and commentators will sense that there is little future for a country engrossed in endless hui over the scope of rights inherited by ethnicity.

So he wraps it all in mystifying abstraction and says lets set out on ‘conversation’.

What else did the government expect when they accepted the Maori Party request for such a partisan inquiry.