Potaka TamaTAMA POTAKA (National—Hamilton West): Thank you Mr Chair. As a former student of these matters—and a practising lawyer and manager of a Resource Management Act (RMA) team—I've had some great challenges in understanding the RMA framework and working through it and it's been a process of evolution particularly with terms like kaitiakitanga" which weren't in the legislation until the 1991 RMA legislation.It's taken some 30 years to get a little bit of jurisprudential evolution of how those terms should be interpreted and they've still got some uncertainties in RMA practice. You know particularly in a place like Auckland—which our colleague Simon Court mentioned before—you've got 19 iwi many of whom have different practices or protocols in relation to the exercise of their kaitiakitanga. There's sometimes an overlap and there's sometimes a contrast and RMA practitioners along with developers have to manage those contrasts and those overlaps.Well in this legislation as drafted—the draft legislation—not only do we have kaitiakitanga; we have now introduced these other terms: mana kawa mātauranga and tikanga. Minister Parker you've referred to the nexus between clauses 5 Te Tiriti o Waitangi clause; and 7 the "Iwi and hapū responsibilities in relation to te taiao" but one of the challenges that you face when you put in words and phrases like "mana" and "kawa" and "mātauranga" is none of those three terms actually appear in Te Tiriti o Waitangi and deliberately mana was excluded from the drafting of Te Tiriti o Waitangi because it was of such a depth and breadth that it was inappropriate hence we have a different type of term and that's known as "tino rangatiratanga".So when we start opining on that term "mana" you've got a breadth and a depth that some people think it might mean "power" but it has multiple faces and so we don't get a sense from reading this drafting whether or not we are talking to mana whenua mana moana mana atua mana tangata mana wahine—which I get reminded of at home on a regular basis—and my personal favourite mana rangatahi. When we draft words like "mana" into legislation like this it can take quite a number of distinct pathways which may not have been intended by us as legislators and it certainly won't be interpreted easy by those that sit on the judicial benches. Again the potential for judicial review just on that term alone is significant.Now tikanga: tikanga has had some gravity in the interpretation of the common law and it has been referred to in a couple of pieces of legislation like the RMA and I think also the wānanga sections of the Education Act tikanga and mātauranga Māori. But again they create all sorts of interpretation possibilities which we can be curious around but without further clarity or interpretational guidance within the legislation I fear given the context in which I've operated and as a person who continues to hold a practising certificate that it gives too wide a berth to the judiciary and to practitioners and also to random men and their Māori to run decision making down to doing nothing.One of the questions that I'd like to pose to the Minister is: what is your definition of kawa—because there is no definition of kawa in this drafting—and how does kawa distinctly differ from mana and tikanga? I think with that sort of question if we get a credible response we'll be in a far better position to say actually this is looking really interesting and it's something we can interrogate further."