| Thursday, July 19, 2012 9:10 AM

For the Government the row over water ownership is a glass half full.

State Homie John Key's played Maori like a finely tuned Stradivarius, finishing with a Tschaikovsky concerto, arguably one of the hardest violin pieces to play.   Even for a master it takes some thinking about but the end result is never in doubt.

Think of how the urgent meeting of the Waitangi Tribunal, which winds up today, began.    The Maori Council which can't have a claim but most certainly can argue the case declares Maori should own the country's water now that 49 percent of it being used by our energy companies is about to be hocked off.

As they were working themselves into a frenzy, The Homie makes some comments that he must have known would have been taken the wrong way.

The first was that the Beehive doesn't have to abide by the recommendations of the Tribunal which to any reasonably informed observer was stating the bleedingly obvious.   So too was his claim that Maori were after mula, which given they've said they're are after compo is hard to argue with.

Then he turned the heat up this week saying the Maori Council's claim was opportunistic, again hard to argue with, and that they don't represent Maori in general, which is true.

And just to rub salt water into the wash The Homie said if they were really serious they would have mounted a similar case when Contact Energy was sold in 1999, which is a fair point.

Put all this into the great big melting pot and you've got a boiling cauldron which suits the Beehive burglars down to the ground, which is also the subject of many claims.

But's it's shifted the focus away from what the burglars know is an unpopular policy, selling off state assets, which two thirds of the punters oppose.

We're now talking about money grubbing Maori, forgetting about what the Beehive would prefer us to forget, that is until it's time to buy shares.

And Maori, well they're left with a glass half empty!

Photo: stock.xchng