Turei Metiria: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Turei Metiria: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 21 February 2007. Volume:637;Page:7556. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora Mr Speaker. This Government through its now land-grabbing agency the Office of Treaty Settlements is embarking on a further theft of land from traditional Maori owners. I hope that the Minister in charge of Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Minister Burton is listening to this because this is a serious issue for both the claimants and the integrity of the Treaty settlement process which is designed to provide justice and redress to those Maori iwi and hapu who are wrongfully bereft of lands that were taken from them. Ngati Kahu are now fighting to stop the sale of Rangiputa Station which is owned by Landcorp but which had a section 27B memorial placed on it in the late 1980s. Those memorials are placed on land owned by State-owned enterprises in order to identify them for return to Maori owners in Treaty settlements. It is the only system available for the protection of those very significant and often very valuable properties currently owned by State-owned enterprises. But the memorial process is failing to properly protect those lands because the Office of Treaty Settlements is giving Landcorp permission to sell them off and that includes Rangiputa Station. 
It is 20 years since the memorial was placed on the title to that station and Ngati Kahu are finally very close to finishing their Treaty settlement negotiations and getting that station back. But the Office of Treaty Settlements in its utter failure to protect or advocate for the interests of the claimants has allowed Landcorp to sell off a property that was and remains the major purpose for the settlement claim in the first place. The Office of Treaty Settlements has even failed to help Ngati Kahu when they looked for financial support from joint-venture partners in order to try to secure this land. 
Paul James the director of the Office of Treaty Settlements is reported as saying that he approved the sell-off because although those memorials are designed to protect Maori lands State-owned enterprises should still be allowed to trade in those assets. 
Hon Mark Burton 
: But there is still a memorial on it! 
METIRIA TUREI 
: He has basically refused to protect those assets for Ngati Kahu in favour of the Government making a huge profit from the private sale of valuable Maori land. The Minister keeps saying a memorial is still retained on that land but the land is being sold. Currently a large part of the land is being sold for $4 million. That sale is going ahead and the Office of Treaty Settlements is doing nothing to protect that land from sale so that it can be returned to Ngati Kahu which is what they have wanted for many many years now. Some commentators have called the process by which those lands are sold off an “exit profit” derived by the Government as part of its settlement process. 
Part of the reason for the failure to protect this property and make sure it does go back to Ngati Kahu is that the Office of Treaty Settlements has severely restricted the value of the settlement to them to only $8 million. Therefore Ngati Kahu cannot afford to buy the station from Landcorp and still retain any hope of providing financial security for their people into the future. The Office of Treaty Settlements often argues that those amounts are negotiated between it and claimants but that is frankly not true. I have seen a large number of settlements where the Office of Treaty Settlements turned up to the table with a figure and that figure was not resiled from during the whole process of the negotiations which can take many many years. 
This case highlights also the absurdity of relying on the Office of Treaty Settlements to deal fairly and in good faith with claimants because the benchmarking policy does not recognise the cultural value of land nor the changes in the economic value of land over time. The fact is that Rangiputa Station is very valuable and is increasing in value. But claimants’ settlements are benchmarked against settlements that were made 10 years or more ago. That means there is no means by which the benchmarking process recognises the changing value of land nor does it reflect the current economic conditions. The benchmarking policy is a process that rips off the later—and often the smaller—claimants who have come 10 or 15 years after the early claimants at the end of a settlement process. For those claimants the settlements are the only means for them to gain financial security and to have their traditional lands returned to them. 
The settlement process is supposed to be a fair and just process; it is more clearly simply about the Government getting away with as cheap and easy an offer as possible. It certainly is not the claimants’ fault that their settlements take so long and therefore the value of land increases so significantly. That fault can be laid squarely at the feet of the Government and the Office of Treaty Settlements because they use the delaying tactic to bully the claimants.