Kedgley Sue: Historic Places Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Kedgley Sue: Historic Places Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:631;Page:3528] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 I would just like to draw attention to two amendments that the Green Party has proposed to the Historic Places Amendment Bill. The first one as the previous speaker pointed out is an amendment to clause 19 to require a person who is representing Maori on the Historic Places Trust to be Maori. This bill proposes that a person who represents Maori on the Historic Places Trust no longer has to be Maori. The Historic Places Trust the Maori Heritage Council and other submitters opposed this but the Government Administration Committee chose to ignore their submissions. What this really does is set a new precedent for what is Maori. This precedent once established in this legislation could extend throughout legislation in New Zealand. No justification or reason for this redefinition of what is Maori is given. We can only assume that it is part of the post-Orewa backlash. The implication is that non-Maori can advocate for Maori issues just as well as Maori can. This is like saying that we no longer need to have women in various positions—that we can just have men as long as they have a bit of an understanding about women’s issues. 
As many have pointed out the submitters said basically that in order to be Maori one needs to have whakapapa. The Maori Heritage Council said that whakapapa is the foundation of Maori identity as tangata whenua and that it is crucial that the relationship between Maori and their historic and cultural heritage is retained. The Greens agree with that so we think this is really just a new and completely unjustified redefinition of what is Maori. In fact the bill comes up with an entirely new definition of who is Maori and who is not. Maybe all Pakeha could be on the Maori roll in the future as long as they have a knowledge of what is Maori. 
The other amendment is to clause 16. Under this bill the Historic Places Trust board would be given discretion about whether it would impose an interim protection order when it is publicly notifying a review of a change of category—say from category 1 to category 2 status. We are concerned that giving the board this discretion could effectively amount to a loophole that would mean that in the future the board would not have to impose any interim protections or injunctions. So we have a very small but important amendment that states that the trust would have to issue a protection order unless it put up a very good reason as to why it would not want to do that. This would mean that it would not be absolutely necessary to require a protection measure for historic places undergoing a category review but that if the trust did not do that it would have to give a good reason for doing so. This amendment eliminates what could effectively be a loophole and says the trust has to put up reasons when it will no longer provide protection measures for historic places. 
We need to remember that in this bill we should really be doing a fundamental review of the Historic Places Trust. We should be asking ourselves why so much of our heritage has been bulldozed while the Historic Places Trust has been in place. Why is the trust so toothless? Why have entire sections of our country been bowled while the Historic Places Trust has wrung its hands and apparently done nothing? Really we should in this bill be giving the trust some teeth and some strength in order to really protect our heritage. It is unfortunate that the bill does not do that.