In the ongoing saga of Destiny Church et al's "Defending the Legacy" march, Transit New Zealand has delivered a knock-out blow to the planned route organisers. It now appears that the march will be unable to procede over the Auckland Harbour Bridge as planned. As guardian of traffic and pedestrian safety, Transit New Zealand and the Police have refused to sanction another mass march on the bridge's pedestrian route, on the grounds that the seabed and foreshore hikoi imposed dangerous strains on the bridge infrastructure, and it could not insure marcher safety. But you let the hikoi over, whined Destiny. Yes, but if we'd had prior visual (and engineering?) confirmation about possible structural damage, we wouldn't have, replied Transit New Zealand and the Police. (To allay scurrilous pro-march comments about Transit and Police objectivity, I suggest that they might want to consider publishing any engineering data that they do have about structural defects in the current bridge design that have guided their decision. As do our readers, I trust their institutional integrity, but it would silence any further grandstanding from Destiny Church and their cohorts). Destiny fumed about closure of bridge access, whingeing about march planning details. Tough. Public safety considerations have to take precedence over ideological imperatives of a sectarian grouping. Anyway, Tamaki is rolling in it. Why not just rent water traffic and ferry the marchers over? We promise not to resort to submarine warfare, even if we are a Vast International Lavender Conspiracy. Although Tamaki and Peter Mortlock got irate about media criticism and implied resort to civil disobedience, Tamaki might have ulterior motives. Granted, he has said he isn't into civil disobedience, but there's the matter of his bragging about Waitangi Day speaker status (which turned out to be hokum). Oh look, clip-on ethnicity! He's suddenly remembered that he's tangata whenua - so is he trying to use brinkmanship to culitivate a 'bad boy' spun image, in order to appeal to younger, more radical Maori, or others incensed at the current seabed and foreshore legislation? After all, one can talk the talk, without actually walking the walk. Happily, though, it seems that most of the Maori electorate has matured since the days of New Zealand First and Winston Peters. It has learnt that Maori leadership ethnicity alone doesn't guarantee that a political party is sufficiently dedicated to indigenous rights, which explains the current popularity of the Maori Party. Destiny Church and its puppets don't fool that constituency at all- Tamaki is more interested in fundamentalist co-belligerency than speaking up for Maori collective interests. Kapa haka teams aren't enough. Will Big Bad Brian resort to aquatic transportation? Perhaps he can use that several thousand-buck yacht of his to ferry over his flock? One hopes that this won't mean more penury for his poorer parishioners. Finally, could Big Bad Brian and the boys tell us why the New Zealand march refers to a legacy? What legacy? And why is it named after Eddie Long and Bernice King's "Reigniting the Legacy" march, if he doesn't want to go spinning around Martin Luther King and his legacy of nonviolent civil disobedience? After all, Tamaki doesn't come from a Taranaki iwi, so he can't be talking about Te Whiti and Parihaka, can he? Craig Young - 6th February 2005