To my mind, they also lie at the heart of the race issue.

As individuals, every one of us plays a role in the nation's wealth through our own productive work, and the income it earns. To do that successfully, we all need the right opportunity, motivation, incentive, and know-how. Otherwise we don't have what it takes to make a positive contribution. That undermines our own personal well-being, and it undermines society.

The Maori people have been through at least four different phases since the first European settlement. Up to roughly 1850, they played a leading role in coastal shipping, farming, flour milling and a lot of other economic activities.

They took to the opportunities offered by European ideas and technology the way a duck takes to water. They were dynamic members of a growing community. From 1850 through to the mid-1890s, a rising European population thought it had better rights to the income involved. Maori fought and lost that battle. Europeans rifles and European diseases pushed them off their land, and out of those activities.

Colonial institutions justified that by classifying Maori as second class citizens of an inferior race.

From the mid-1890s to the 1940s, however, the Maori people moved into a new era of reconstruction and hope. They produced political leaders who became national figures. They established a viable rural society. It didn't give them big incomes but it had cultural identity, and cultural strength. They had economic independence. It worked pretty well.

New Zealand got a world reputation for good race relations. The Maori people began to thrive again. Their population doubled in that period. It doubled again between 1945 and 1966.

That triggered the next phase. Their rural economy could not give those people a decent standard of living. They were forced, by the thousand, to move into the cities, to look for better things.

That migration broke the ties of young people with their tribes and their own culture. They had none of the work skills that help you in a big city. Neither their parents nor their country schools had given them the right survival gear.

Simultaneously, from the mid-1960s, the New Zealand economy began to fail in its task of healthy job creation. You can read the outcome of the next couple of decades in the statistics on Maori exam results, incomes, unemployment, crime, and social welfare dependency. This time round, the problems were not located somewhere in the rural outback: They were bang in the middle of New Zealand's biggest cities.

We moved into phase four from 1975 on. A lot of Maoris started saying "this is too much of a bad thing." They could not accept their fate. Maybe they rediscovered some of the spirit they showed a century ago in their wars against the redcoats. Anyway, they rebelled. They dramatised their situation by undertaking land marches. They started holding Hui to regain their cultural identity and work out an agenda. Some of them banded together in gangs of tough guys.

They examined past grievances. They started using the courts. The extremists said they were the rightful owners of the country and its real name was Aotearoa not New Zealand. One way and another, they showed us that the Maori people were not going to go down for the count and stay down.

Some of the things they said and did were pretty mad, probably just as mad and unfair as what various Europeans used to say and do, back in the 1860s and 1880s. But, in a funny kind of way, the rest of us have some cause to be grateful for that. Nobody wants a future where Maori are confined to slums and ghettos, more prone to disease, worse educated; more imprisoned than anyone else and far less employable. The time had come for us to do something practical to stop the rot.

Now I don't really care whether you want to look at the problem in an altruistic way, or a purely selfish way. We end up with much the same conclusion. If a cure is not found, bad race relations will destroy our ability to co-operate effectively to run a better economy and a better society.

If you want to be strictly selfish, it is a problem that can end up costing New Zealand an arm and a leg. Billions of dollars we could have used productively over the years will be wasted dealing with misery, disease, social welfare bills, court costs, unemployment, the whole mess of social disruption that attends world-wide on neglected and mismanaged racial problems.

It is worth spending thought and spending money to fix the race problem. The difference between that mess and 300,000 Maori people putting their shoulder to the wheel to help lift New Zealand out of the mud is not one we can afford to ignore.

A few very simple things are important. One of them is fairness. Okay, the Maori people have problems. A lot of white families don't have much income or education. Like Maori children, their kids enter the world at a handicap. They deserve a hand just as much to get at least one foot on to the rungs of the social ladder.

Their problem is not different in kind, and often no different in degree from the one Maori families face. They do not deserve to be penalised because their ancestors got here later than Kupe did.

Any government has an equal duty to all of its citizens. In both cases, disadvantaged children deserve something extra from us if that will turn them into satisfied citizens leading constructive lives. We are starting to see it happen now in the dramatic development of Maori Te Kohanga Reo and in the ever-growing demand for better child-care and pre-school facilities for all our children. Those early years are the most critical years in anyone's life. They are the soundest investment in the education system.

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