In the oft-rerun film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays a hapless weatherman caught by a blizzard in the small town of Punxsatawney, Pennsylvania, to which he has travelled to unearth weather predictions - according to the folklore-inflected behaviour of a small burrow-inhabiting animal.
He finds himself trapped in a recurring scenario in which he relives the same day over and over.
The pilgrimage to Ratana Pa, 20km south of Wanganui, by politicians of all parties, but especially those of the Labour Party, has become akin to the groundhog day of New Zealand politics: a combination of hope, symbolism and mythology, repeated annually. It marks the beginning of the new political "season" but today, in reality, signifies little else.
The Ratana religion and political movement is named after the self-styled prophet, faith-healer and politician Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana, born in the latter years of the 19th century and who died in 1940. While his religious movement grew in strength through the 1920s, it was towards the end of that decade that Ratana moved increasingly into the political realm. In 1932, Eruera Tirikatene became the first Ratana MP when he won a by-election for Southern Maori and sided with Labour, who had consulted the Maori leader when devising its Maori policy.
When Labour won a landslide victory in the 1935 general election, and the Ratana movement took a second seat, Ratana and Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage met and sealed a historic alliance between the two movements. In 1943, the alliance captured all four Maori seats and Labour went on to hold them until 1993. The import of this was that, in effect, Labour spoke for Maori and it could count on Maori support at the ballot box.
Inroads were made into that seemingly impregnable partnership in 1993, then in 1996 New Zealand First appeared to demolish it altogether, winning all the Maori seats. Since then, against increasing odds in the fracturing MMP environment, Labour has strived to repair the relationship and regain its former sway, to little avail. The formation of the Maori Party in 2004, gave Maori voters another choice. Then the siding of that party with National in 2008 brought many former Maori Labour supporters into the Government's ambit. The defection of Hone Harawira from the Maori Party to form Mana has broadened the choice further, as has the inclusion of Maori candidates on the Green Party list.
The strongest contemporary link the Labour Party has to the Ratana movement, with its estimated 60,000-odd members, is its new MP, Rino Tirikatene, grandson of Eruera Tirikatene, who won theTe Tai Tonga seat in November.
It can only be assumed that the continued fuss attendant upon the pilgrimage to Ratana is down to tradition and political theatre, an opportunity to strike a pose and try out a few lines - a dress rehearsal for the resumption of Parliament and Waitangi Day to come. This week, Prime Minister John Key used the occasion to trumpet his party's record of success with Maori initiatives, contrasting it with Labour's, and to stress the importance to National of education, health and welfare reform.
There were, however, few figures to accompany the blandishments, and no meaningful reiteration of the devastating record, under both National and Labour, of Maori unemployment, imprisonment, poor health and failing education.
Labour's new leader, David Shearer, on behalf of his party, assumed the mea culpa pose, which seems to becoming his mantle: Labour must do better in its relationship with Ratana, he said, inviting the movement's leadership to visit him and the party at Parliament. He needs to do better than that, and if his opponent uses the occasion to dish up a serve in his direction, he should learn to return it with interest smartly - if he is to win the respect of supporters and opponents alike.
Otherwise, the occasion this year was as predictable as it has become in recent others. Even its symbolism is dissipating, and the question must be asked how long the political will continue to participate in what has become something of a charade, replete with posturing, a nod here and there to Maori-Pakeha relations, and sentimental obeisance to establishment an increasingly mythologised and politically irrelevant figure from the past.
