In contrast to the Dom Post's Tracy Watkins, the NZ Herald's John Roughan is rather critical of Clark's failure to engage with Waitangi. He is also more positive about John Key's engagement,
Helen Clark's failure to engage with Waitangi has been the greatest disappointment of her premiership. You can see it in the face of her supporters. They're saying, "She should be here".
You can hear it in the tones of television reporters. They have felt the spirit of the place and the vacuum where inspiring leadership should be.
Wednesday was probably her last chance to meet the challenge, and she avoided it, making forays from her hotel to safe locations where she answered media questions with snide comments about John Key's embrace of Maori agitators.
He clearly senses the importance of what happens there. A leader who handles Waitangi well reaches to a depth of unity in the national soul, beneath politics and protest. Those can happen there at any time in the celebration and they needn't matter if the Prime Minister preserves the dignity of the office.
Helen Clark thinks the dignity of the office is preserved by her lying low. At least that is the excuse she gives, I don't believe that is the reason. I think it is a deficiency in character, an insecure pride that renders her unable to bring herself to do what she knows should be done there.
It's a deficiency commonly seen in highly educated people. They fear to be humbled, seeing no possibility of dignity in it, or they might emerge with greater respect and even affection.
Worse, they lack a sense of grandeur that cannot be easily discussed in intellectually respectable terms. I'm not sure Clark can be accused of this. A Prime Minister who has gone out of her way to observe military anniversaries and lent her office to the promotion of literature, culture and heritage must have some spiritual awareness.
You needed that dimension to appreciate the dawn prayers in the meeting house at Waitangi in the years before she spoiled them.
