Brownlee Gerry: Foreshore and Seabed Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Brownlee Gerry: Foreshore and Seabed Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:621;Page:17045] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 The points that Mr Prebble made— 
Clayton Cosgrove 
: Old Lazarus! 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: It is interesting to hear Mr Cosgrove quoting the Gospel. It must be the influence of sitting next to Mr Tamihere. The point that Mr Prebble made was to say the least an interesting one. It takes us back to new clause 29 “High Court may find that a group held territorial customary rights” which refers to groups that had it not been for the passing of this bill or for the foreshore and seabed having passed into Crown ownership might have been able to claim a territorial right. The Minister in the chair Michael Cullen may want to tell us what are the limits and constraints on that. Surely most Maori communities around the countryside would at some time have been on land contiguous with the foreshore and seabed—certainly some inland we know that. Many around the coastline have not been there for many many years. In my own city of Christchurch I can think of those sorts of communities but when the Canterbury Association ships arrived in 1850 and the Deans’ lease was renegotiated and became a lease deal many of those communities moved. Had they not moved then clearly they would have held according to this bill the territorial right to those seas. I simply ask what the constraint is that the court is under when considering applications under clause 29.  
Hon Dr Michael Cullen 
: Contiguous now. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: Although Dr Cullen says: “Contiguous now.” the point is that the bill is saying that had those groups held the land they would not have lost the territorial title. Surely there has to be some better answer than that it applies only now. It may well mean that those iwi groupings and small hapu around the country are able to go back many many years to a time when they were in possession of those properties.  
I need to make a few comments about new clause 12 because when I last spoke on this bill we were debating up to that clause. There has been a lot of discussion this afternoon— 
Hon Dr Michael Cullen 
: It’s called reasonable continuity. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: It indicates that we have a long way to go in debating this part. It has taken about an hour to get from clause 12 to clause 34 and we have some considerable distance to go before we get to Part 3.  
My real point is that a number of people have asked this afternoon what clause 12 is all about. Essentially it is about empowering the Government to do deals in treaty settlements in order to see the transfer of foreshore and seabed ownership passed to Maori. We might well decide that this is the Tainui clause or the Hauraki clause—two groupings that the Government is currently negotiating with. [ 
Interruption 
] The Minister of Maori Affairs has confirmed across the Chamber that that is exactly what the purpose is. The Minister is able to tell his people to go along with this bill because where it counts the Government will do a deal with them and will pass over the ownership of those seabed and foreshore areas in the rohe. It is quite a simple thing in actual fact.  
I do not think the other parts of this bill are really adequate enough to fully distinguish in the public’s mind the difference between a territorial customary title and a customary right. It seems to me that the two have been confused not only by commentators but particularly by the Government throughout the passage of this bill. Indeed I think it was around the issue of customary rights that ancestral connection hit the rocks. It has been moved out of this bill and the proposal has come forward that it be placed into resource management legislation.