Treaty does not exist, ignore it and remove all traces of it from the New Zealand statute  book.  Not  even  the  most  muscular  solutions  that  have  been  offered  in recent times go so far. Neither can we re-write our own history. Our history is our history; we can argue about what happened and what it means. But New Zealand as one of the world’s oldest continuous democracies has a long history of dealing with the Maori people. How New Zealand performed as a state in respect to its indigenous peoples is a matter of public record.   4 But what we should do now in policy terms is another issue. I am struck by the impression  that  while  we  cannot  go  back,  there  is  no  widespread  will  to  go forward either. We are suspended in a place from which there is neither advance nor  retreat  readily  available.    This  may  be  no  bad  thing  looked  at  in  the  larger view.  There has always been an ebb and flow in the attitudes towards the Treaty in New Zealand.  It started life here as something of a sacred compact, only to be dismissed 37 years later as a “simple nullity”; much later came the phrase that the “Treaty is a fraud”; then that the Treaty is the Maori Magna  Carta.  We should remember,  however,  the  Treaty  is  only  part  of  the  framework  for  Maori-Crown relations and for Maori-Pakeha relations. 5 The great modern advances for the Treaty began in 1975 with the establishment of the  Waitangi  Tribunal,  a  decade  later  its  jurisdiction  was  widened  to  deal  with claims  back  to  1840.  References  to  the  Treaty  in  legislation  began  to  be  made followed by block busting litigation in the State-Owned Enterprises case of 1987,² where  the  Treaty  began  to  be  enforced  in  the  courts,  but  only  because  it  was referred to by Parliament in legislation. Then were added direct negotiations with the  Crown  concerning  Treaty  grievances  and  the  Maori  Fisheries  Settlements. Then  there  were  the  policies  of  devolving  responsibility  in  the  social  areas  to Maori organisations and measures to protect Te Reo Maori.  These were, in their day, massive advances in protecting the interests of Maori under the Treaty. All this  happened  under  first-past-the-post  Parliaments  and  there  was  a  significant measure of accord among the two main political parties of those days as to the essential components of the policy.                                                  2   New Zealand Maori Council v Attorney-General [1987] 1 NZLR 641.