By: Mike Hosking | Wednesday, September 05, 2012 8:02 AM

Well of course they’re after the wind. Why wouldn’t they be? If you’d just watched a government back pedal on their biggest policy platform because of a decision by a non-binding tribunal, then you’d be dreaming up all possible scenarios as to how you can milk the natural environment for all it’s worth. I would have thought wind was an obvious contender. Don’t laugh, sunlight will be next.

It’s not the wind or the sun that’s important, it’s the monetising of it. You take the sun and you make solar power. You take the wind and you run it through turbines. If the Government can listen to the Waitangi Tribunal on water then that’s what’s called in law a precedent and if a precedent is set, you can’t just pick and choose what you react to and what you don’t.

You heard in this morning’s show how they’ve dealt with this in Colorado. Wind there is a property right, or at least wind energy is. You own the land, you own the wind. Other states, in fact more states than have dealt with wind rights, have dealt with solar rights. That’s right, they’ve legislated for the sun. So none of this is as mad as many of us might be thinking it is. However, unless I have read the American situation wrong, none of their laws deals with this stuff retrospectively and that’s what makes us different. None of it deals with the issue in terms of race and that what makes our approach dangerous.

We have opened an historic Pandora’s box in which there seems no end and no limit to what sort of bizarre and long standing connection you can as a Maori make to any number of aspects of your life. Do you have a connection to the sea? If so, what is it? Is grabbing a couple of shellfish enough? You’ve used water, haven’t we all. If you used water then presumably you’ve been breathing all this time as well and that will have involved air. I am drawing a longish bow, but not that long.

We are in dangerous territory. Land is one thing. The broad concept of righting past wrongs is not beyond the realms of compassion and reason. But we appear to have arrived into the area of the ‘Fanciville’, of the make believe. Instead of closing it down we’re indulging in it.

This government is being held to ransom over water. It should never have got to this and not only is it not being stopped, they’re coming up with new ways to make it worse.

Photo: NZ Herald