Franks Stephen: Business of Select Committees — Appointments 
Franks Stephen: Business of Select Committees — Appointments 
[Volume:614;Page:10560] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 I rise for the ACT party to signify that we will oppose this notice of motion and move an amendment to it—the amendment being to omit all words after the reference to the United Future party. The purpose of the amendment is to ensure that this special committee does not usurp the role that members on it must play in this House. This motion proposes that the committee can meet at any time while the House is sitting except during oral questions during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House despite the Standing Orders. 
The Standing Orders are there for a purpose. They are there to try to ensure that select committees do not take away from the House its role as the debating chamber. People who want to do a diligent job and do what they can on a committee may fail to perform their duty in the House or be present when important matters they may be debating are at issue. We have to move this amendment so that the committee while it undoubtedly will be set up—because the Government has obviously done a deal with the Green Party— 
Pita Paraone 
: Same as the GE moratorium! 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: Probably the same! When the committee is set up we will do our duty on it but we believe that the House should be very very cautious. Indeed it should set itself against the suspensions of the Standing Orders that would mean it becomes a separate little chamber and that those involved in it effectively have to drop out of the rest of their activities. Those who are involved on it may become a group equipped only to move around and from what we understand to become almost the first stage of a roving commission digging the Government out of its hole. 
That is what this committee is for. The committee is set up because the Government does not want to give a proposal not on the fisheries settlement but on the next one—the seabed and foreshore. The Government wants this committee to take the heat. In about 6 months’ time the Government wants to be able to say to the people of New Zealand: “Don’t look to us. It was Parliament that came to this weird conclusion.” The Government does not want to have on its hands any kind of clear recommendation or clear advice. 
So although we will play our part because as parliamentarians we believe we will have to when this committee is set up we oppose it. We see it as a way of avoiding responsibility. We see it as a way of trying to duck the hardest issue this Government is facing at the moment. The Government wants to make sure that if it can possibly achieve it it can hang on to the reputation of its Maori members who will deserve no reputation by the time this is over. Those members should insist the Government comes out with a very clear simple statement of principle. We should not condemn New Zealanders to a year of dissention and confusion. Those members will be hiding hoping that this committee takes all responsibility and public attention away from them. 
Although it is true one would have expected something like this to go to the Maori Affairs Committee ACT is also concerned this is an acknowledgment that this House has started to treat the Maori Affairs Committee by composition in a way in which it treats nothing else. We do not have medical matters dealt with by committees comprising doctors. We do not have farming or agricultural matters dealt with by committees comprising only farmers; nor should New Zealanders expect the Maori Affairs Committee to get to the stage where it comprises only Maori and where other members no longer feel that the committee can be trusted to deal with an issue that has the interests of Maori and the interests of all other New Zealanders including Maori at odds. That committee should be set up and chaired in a way that means we all have confidence that it is objective and approaches things from the perspective of what is best for New Zealand. This is an admission that the Government cannot trust that committee. It cannot trust that committee not to end up covering for its MPs in the event of the failure to settle that will come out of this. We cannot trust it to be objective so we are setting this up. 
I think that Mr Tu Wyllie put it very well this morning when he talked about the first task for this bill. I have not heard a better statement of what it should be about. The establishment of property rights is the primary task—the establishment of seabed and foreshore ownership in a way that is consistent with and respects the law that New Zealanders inherited when the Treaty of Waitangi was taken on by this country. That is in relation to article 2 concerning property rights. It is very very straightforward. It should not be a big task but the committee will need all the time the Government is trying to give it by the suspension of the Standing Orders because the Government expects it to go about as a lightning rod taking all the heat the Government should have taken for its failure to ensure the law was clear enough. The Court of Appeal should not have come out with its odd decision in the first place. When it did New Zealanders should have known exactly what the response would be. 
The warm-up task will be to look at the proposal from the Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Commission for the settlement proceeds. That commission produced a bill. The Government has rewritten it using absolutely naive language. Just on a quick look through I see things as primitive as references to company law terms. The Government has rewritten it and now the Government wants this committee to try to dig it out of a hole while at the same time asserting that the committee does not have an authority to modify the bill significantly because it is part of a settlement. 
ACT will not consider itself bound by that. ACT does not accept that that is a proper role for this Parliament—that is the rubberstamping of treaty settlements. A settlement that was done 10 years ago has now been modified substantially and abused to create a slush fund for Mr Tamihere and his urban mob. ACT will not consider that this bill is a matter of simple ratification. [ 
Interruption 
] The lost tribe! One cannot settle a grievance or do justice by creating a fresh injustice—by taking away from people who were wronged and giving to people many of whom have never been wronged; indeed who helped the Crown in the wronging.