Delahunty Catherine: New Zealand Mission Trust Board (Otamataha) Empowering Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: New Zealand Mission Trust Board (Otamataha) Empowering Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 07 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17595. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker.Tēnā koutou e te WharePāremata. I would like to start by acknowledging the member in charge of the New Zealand Mission Trust Board (Otamataha) Empowering Bill Te Ururoa Flavell—tēnā koe Te Ururoa—because every time somebody brings something like this before the House it is an opportunity for others. Quite a lot of complex mahi has gone into many of the bills including this one and it is great to have got to this point. I acknowledge the other speakers so far because I think it is an importantkōrero that is very interesting. I also want to acknowledge Ngāti TapuNgāiTamarāwaho andNgāiTūkairangi because all of thesehapū have had strong interest in the Te Papa lands through mairānō.I would like to acknowledge the Māori Affairs Committee. I sat on the select committee for only brief periods of time. I did not get to go to Tauranga Moana—which I would have loved to do—to hear thekōrero firsthand but I want to acknowledge the select committee because I felt that there was a lot of really genuine commitment there to try to resolve the issues and to go back to the people of Tauranga Moana who are associated with this bill and find solutions. The select committee was not trying to tell them what the solution was; the select committee was trying towhakamana them if you like to make their own solution and that is never simple. In some ways it is particularly complex because we are using parliamentary instruments through law and a select committee etc. to attempt to resolvehapū issues that are about whakapapa and ahikā and relationships with land. We are using instruments that are not really designed for that purpose. There were and are traditional ways of resolving these things. But at some point something had to be done and so the Māori Affairs Committee has done something with the best of intentions and to the best of its abilities.As others have said we are in the context of the 150th anniversary ofPukehinahina—the Battle of GatePā—and the raupatu of Tauranga Moana. It is very interesting to think about those times and to think that we hope to do differently as Jonathan Young has just said. In order to do that I think we really need to be honest about the driving force of the history here and we have to recognise that the evangelisation of the heathens which was the driving force of the Church Missionary Society missionaries was—essentially from the context of the individuals it may well have been conducted with deep conviction and goodwill from their perspective but in the end it was a paternalistic and colonial mind-set which did harm.What is interesting about the Church Missionary Society is how much land it got out of it. All rhetoric aside the Anglican Church has done bloody well out of colonisation and in actual fact it has not been that keen to give it back. It has been quite a noticeable struggle with a number of the churches that they have acquired wealth power buildings and status at the expense of tangata whenua and it is only through these challenges that some of them have been forced to look in the mirror at their own behaviour. I enjoyed hearing about Alfred Brown and his conflicted contradictory emotional landscape but what I feel is that with the hindsight of history this was paternalistic. This was fundamentally racist because there was no respect for what I believe is article 4 of Te Tiriti o Waitangi which is the principle ofritenga.So it depends on whether you acknowledge “Te Tiriti o Waitangi” or whether you are talking about “the Treaty” and that comes up in many bills. But it is equally true in the Ōtamataha bill because actually by 1852 the articles—not the principles that have been invented by lawyers since but the articles—of te Tiriti were beginning to be undermined through a series of acts raupatu and legislation from 1852 onwards that undermined the goodwill that was present in that short and more cooperative era after1840. So it is definitely important for us to understand this and to recognise that this bill does take small but positive steps.Each one of these moments is important. Maybe it is a series of bills before this House but in the end for the mana whenua it is very important that we do this right and that in doing this right we acknowledge the actual history of marginalisation and raupatu that is represented here and that although the Church did not give the land to the military for settlers to develop the Church kept it for itself. The Church argued that it was doing this to protect the interests of the so-called natives but in fact it protected its own interests. When the chips were down Alfred Brown sided with his own people—understandably—and he sided with them to the detriment of the people whom he said he was there for and would make a total lifelong commitment to stand alongside. That is the difference between power with and power over because what actually took place in Tauranga Moana was the crude exercising of dominance. It is great now that finally in 2014 we have got to the point where there has been a renegotiation of what happened in terms of the Ōtamataha mission. It was a mission all right but it was not a mission that actually benefited the tangata whenua or the mana whenua.I think that one always has to ask the question as to who has benefited from these processes and clearly the churches have benefited and clearly the settlers have benefited. But again we were in a difficult place while discussing this because conflictinghapū claims are outside the realm of understanding and experience of many of us. This is not so for Māori members of Parliament but for those of us who are not Māori members of Parliament it is quite difficult to know how to act with authenticity integrity and good faith around issues that are beyond our understanding and yet that is sometimes what these bills require. They require that we take decisions about who is going to get what and again that does raise for me the issue of the contemporary context being as equally fraught as the context was in 1852. We are still in a very fraught era and that era requires us to have more than just new legislation. It requires us to have new education.It is interesting that the Constitution Conversation that has taken place in this country in the last couple of years talks about te Tiriti education. Clearly I think it is obvious that we do not have a robust te Tiriti education system. We do not have many people understanding the principle of contraproferentem which is the principle whereby the only Treaty that should be accepted as the fundamental one is the one that was signed at Waitangi in Te Reo Māori. That is what the international principle of contraproferentem means. It means that the indigenous version as understood by the indigenous people is the legal te Tiriti. If you acknowledge that then it is pretty clear that the Church Missionary Society and others were not in the spirit of te Tiriti.So it is good that we stand here today and that the member has brought this bill through the House and that the select committee worked so positively with it. We welcome this bill but we do remind everybody that if we are going to talk about Te Tiriti o Waitangi—the articles—let us go back to what international law and tangata whenua know particularly those who have read the bookNgāpuhi Speaks which outlines that tangata whenua have been trying to deal with the culture of immigration and settler issues since 1808. Since then they have been havingkōrero about that. We need to hold true to Te Tiriti o Waitangi to the articles of the Treaty and to acknowledge the painful and difficult history that took place at Ōtamataha and many other places.We recognise that the Church did not develop the land in the same way in the sense that it did not become private property. The huge issue that we have with many of the Treaty settlements is that so little land is available because of private property. It hasbeen a very good strategy since the 1850s—to bring in private property and prevent people from being able to get their land back—but we really need to acknowledge that the churches need to be more generous and more responsible for what they have done. They have made a lot of money out of Māori land. It is time to recognise that this country is not a huge continent. It is a small country. Every inch has a story. Every maunga every awa every piece of whenua has a history and we need the courage to work through issues of justice as we are trying to do today. Kia oratātou katoa.