It is Treaty time of the year again, and I must say that last night on RadioLIVE we had one of the most interesting round table discussions about the fundamentals of the Treaty as I have ever been part. Aside from a couple of moments of personal abuse from contributors whose thinking patterns appear to be locked in the eugenics mind set of 1930s fascism, calls were considered and challenging, but we appear to be having difficulty getting over the idea that there is a “colour bar” in this country.

I use the term in the way it was applied in apartheid South Africa and racist USA back in the fifties when the colour of one's skin was the defining feature of segregationist policies in both those countries. In New Zealand it is best represented by the notion that we can somehow be proportionally ethnic, as in 10% Scottish, 40% Irish, 12% Maori, 8% Jewish and 40% English, a concept that looks even sillier when it is written down in this way.

The champions of this idea, the European Nazis, were its most ridiculous protagonists: 8% Jewish was enough to have you packed off to concentration camp to die in 1938, with no concession for the other 'racial' proportions in your 'blood'. There were no benefits in being 'majority Aryan', but if you bought into the racist ideas of the time and wanted to survive you could hide your 8% and pretend to be Aryan enough to survive until sanity resumed.

That was pretty much as it was in New Zealand in the fifties, for those who cared to notice, and there are plenty of New Zealanders today who think that the way to harmony is the Nazi way – by pretending that the truth of your cultural heritage is to be denied. The problem with this approach is that it is exclusive, in that it eliminates the richness the human culture offers us all, and undermines our identity.

It may be a truism that you need to know who you are to know where you are going, but the nature of this country demands that we must accept that we are all Tangata Whenua of New Zealand. We are also Tangata Whenua of the various places in which we were each raised (some of us overseas) and in which we now live. The Treaty of Waitangi makes that clear for us all. Ngati Kahu, Ngapuhi, Ngati Porou, Ngati Awa, Te Arawa, Kai Tahu, none of these people were Tangata Whenua of New Zealand before the Treaty, any more than the English, Irish, Portuguese or Chinese were.

If you want to be cryptic about it, if the word Maori means 'normal for here', then Pakeha are Maori, because you won't find Pakeha anywhere else but here.

Looked at this way, there is no Pakeha-Maori divide, but there are plenty of local people, such as Ngati Hine or Ngati Kahu who are arguing with the government over injustices done to them and their families by that government. These are not Maori-Pakeha conflicts, they are people-power conflicts that are as common amongst Maori of European descent as they are amongst families who claim descent from local Tangata Whenua. Ngati Kahu's claim to land at Taipa is not a 'Maori land dispute', as the media would have it. It is one group's argument with the government over being dispossessed illegally.

It is about time all New Zealand's Tangata Whenua realised that we are in this together, which means we need to see each other as the same people – different parents, for sure, but the same inside.

Keith Stewart presents 'Taste Life LIVE', Saturday nights from 8pm on RadioLIVE