Introduction E nga iwi o te motu, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa 1 The problem with a presentation of this sort is to know where to start. So much has been said by so many for so long.  The Treaty of Waitangi has spawned a vast scholarly industry of great variety.  It is a literature of some distinction and it is unique to New Zealand.¹  It is hard to know which Treaty prism to look through in order to distil insights of any value.  Treaty of Waitangi jurisprudence as it has developed  in  New  Zealand  by  now  has  become  a  big  field  of  near  Byzantine complexity.  And that is just the law as it is. Debates on what the law ought to be seem to me in political terms to have become unmanageable.  The politics of the Treaty  has  become  a  battlefield  upon  which  people  have  become  increasingly reluctant to tread.   2 It is not necessarily helpful to refer to my own political experience in the Treaty field. Although there were a lot of important Treaty policy measures created by the Fourth Labour Government, in political terms it was another country.  There was  no  MMP  and  MMP  has  transformed  both  the  political  and  constitutional landscapes   in   New   Zealand   in   ways   that   remain   in   many   quarters   little understood.  In its latest iteration MMP has given us a Maori party represented in Parliament.    While  it  is  too  early  to  divine  what  effects  this  may  have  on  the Treaty and its place in New Zealand society, it is bound to have some. The Policy Place we are at 3 To  arrive  at  a  balanced  appreciation  of  where  New  Zealand  is  now  located  in relation to the Treaty of Waitangi it is necessary to see where we have come from in public policy terms and where we might go next.  I shall share with you now the conclusion I reach from this analysis. Clearly we cannot go back, even if we knew  what  going  back  means.    We  cannot,  or  so  it  seems  to  me,  pretend  the                                                 1   Michael   Belgrave,   Merata   Kawharu   and   David   Williams   (ed)   Waitangi   Revisited: Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi (Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, 2005) is  the  most  recent  book  and  it  contains  some  excellent  contributions.    I  have  also  found delightful:   JGA   Pocock   The   Discovery   of   Islands,   (Cambridge   University   Press, Cambridge, 2005).