Te Arawa Lakes Settlement Bill

GERRY BROWNLEE (Deputy Leader—National) Link to this

Firstly, it is disappointing that we are progressing with the Te Arawa Lakes Settlement Bill when many people who would have wished to be here to make a contribution to it are unable to be here, because the Government has chosen to accommodate itself with quite an unscrupulous use of the Standing Orders.

The bill is controversial in some ways, because it enables a transfer—or re-transfer—of the ownership of the lake beds to the Te Arawa people. At the very outset of this bill we were confronted with a considerable amount of misinformation about the process that had taken place in the early 1920s. During the course of discussions in the Māori Affairs Committee we were prepared to accept that what we had been told initially was wrong. The problem at the start was that when the 1922 settlement was concluded—and that settlement had been going on for quite some years, but was interrupted by World War I—the final deal was done between a lawyer from Auckland who, I understand, represented Te Arawa but was not of Te Arawa; a lawyer from Wellington who, I understand, represented the Crown but was also not of Te Arawa; and the Crown’s agent in the settlement, the Minister effectively involved, Sir Apirana Ngata, who was also not of Te Arawa.

So an imposed settlement was put in place. Te Arawa were to take some £6,000 a year as a gratuity, paid perpetually. They were to receive a number of fishing licences for the lakes, without charge. But the ownership of the lakes was taken by the various councils or embodiments that at the time had responsibility for waterways and other such things. So it was evident in the select committee process that there was always a question about who owned those things. If the issue had to be settled like that in 1922, then quite clearly the presumption must have been that Te Arawa owned the lake beds. That was quite a revelation for us. It was quite an interesting position to come to.

Then we looked at the proposal that was on the table. The first part of the proposal was that the annuity payable to Te Arawa was to be terminated and replaced by a cash sum of some $10 million. In our view that it is probably the best thing to do, because nowadays £6,000 is $12,000 and no one can do much about looking after anything these days with that amount. But $10 million gives people a chance to move forward. Given that we are discharging a perpetual obligation, it is not an unreasonable thing to do for the New Zealand taxpayer, and it is a fair thing to do for Te Arawa.

Then we thought, what about the ownership of the lake beds? There the matter became difficult. Te Arawa, although represented in the process by the Te Arawa Māori Trust Board, is an amalgam of many hapū and many whānau. Interestingly, 18 submissions were opposed to this bill, and only two or three were in favour of it. Most of those submissions came from Te Arawa themselves. If we are to look at getting past the difficulties of 1922 and the imposed settlement, the first thing we would have thought was that the settlor party would at least be united about what it wanted. We looked further at that, and found that in other settlements a rūnanga structure has been put in place, where all of the interests had a seat on that rūnanga structure and could therefore have a say on the way that the particular transferred asset or cash settlement, or whatever it was, was used for the wider benefit of the settlor party. In this case, the trust board does not have a representative of all of those hapū groups. So we had the situation where groups were coming to the select committee and saying they were not part of the trust board, but forever and a day a particular one of the 14 lakes has been theirs.

So before we even start talking about the issues that arise around the airspace, the water column, and all the rest of it, essentially we have a conflict inside the group known as Te Arawa about whether this claim should be settled in this way. And all I am asking people today is whether that sort of conflict is not exactly why we are here today, trying to sort it out. How can we take the 1922 legislation, say that it was no good, it was not fair, it was imposed, it was put upon these people, and, therefore, we have to do something about it, and then just go through the process to do exactly the same thing again?

If people were to look at the mandating process for this particular lakes settlement, they would find that the census will record that there are some 40,000-odd New Zealanders who say they are Te Arawa. But only 9,000 people participated in the vote to ratify this particular settlement, and, of those, only 4,000 returned their ballot. So 10 percent of the group known as Te Arawa are participants by choice—and not all of them are in favour of it—in this settlement. No one in this Chamber can comfortably stand up and say that this settlement is full, final, and fair.

Let me concede that the fair part of it always depends upon the settlor party accepting the settlement. That is why the select committee itself is constrained in these bills. It cannot just go off and negotiate something different. It has to accept what the Office of Treaty Settlements comes along with and says is the deal. So it becomes vitally important that the deal is done with the right people. If anyone who wants to stand up and tell us that he or she is 100 percent convinced that those people who came to the select committee saying that they are being dispossessed by this settlement are of no consequence, then let that person do it. But I do not think it is fair to successive generations that we make a hash of this process, because where the effort is made to ensure that the right structure is in place—not imposed, but chosen by the people who are settling—then we achieve extraordinary successes. We can point to those all round the countryside.

DAVE HEREORA (Labour) Link to this

I take this opportunity to take a call on the Te Arawa Lakes Settlement Bill. I will just make a few comments in relation to the comments of the previous speaker, Gerry Brownlee, surrounding the position of the Office of Treaty Settlements, its impact, and how it affects—