Turei Metiria: Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Turei Metiria: Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:670;Page:17334] 
METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 The Green Party has a number of amendments on the table to the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill. Just for those who maybe cannot hear what is going on in the Chamber Tau Henare is very grumpy because his party will not let him speak on the legislation because National and the Maori Party want it to proceed very quickly. So instead of speaking and taking the call like the mature responsible members of Parliament who want to debate the issue he is shouting at all of the members as they speak. It is a sad indictment on the way National and the Maori Party have whipped their members such that their people who are knowledgable about the issue such as Tau Henare who was on the select committee are not able to speak on it and it is a real shame. It leads to a great deal of shouting which I am sure members of the public can hear through their radios and televisions. 
However the Green Party has a number of amendments to the bill and we would like to discuss those in a rational mature way as opposed to shouting a lot. The amendments deal mostly with the test because this part of the legislation deals with the tests for customary marine title and for the protected customary rights. In Labour’s Act these were called territorial customary rights and customary rights I think. So they are effectively the same two sets of rights that Labour had but they just have a different name. The protected customary right is the right to engage in an activity on the land. The customary marine title is a greater set of rights based around the idea that the iwi might have had proper customary title determined by the court. So those are the two sets of rights in this part that Maori can access if they go to the courts and if they do their negotiations with the Government. 
The amendment the Green Party has put up is essentially to delete those tests. We do not believe that it is right for the Government to set the tests for how Maori should be able to claim or prove either their customary rights or their customary title. It is our view and has always been our view that the courts are the ones who should be setting those tests. The reason for that is that the Crown has an interest in keeping the bar for those tests very very high. It was certainly the case under the previous Labour Government and is under the National Government that Governments tend to look first at their economic interests in the retention of their political power before they look at issues such as justice and what is right. I think we have seen that over this issue with both kinds of Governments we have had. The economic interest of Government has been in keeping the ownership in control of the mineral resources of the marine and coastal area. We saw that last time when applications for mining came to a halt during the foreshore and seabed debate and deliberations and were then ramped up massively after the bill was passed when the Crown had acquired ownership of these areas for itself in legislation. Since then there have been a great number of applications for marine and coastal mining in this area and that continues. Again in this bill we have the Government doing the same thing—acquiring for itself using a legal fiction to make sure it retains control of those areas. 
That is one of the interests that has gone into the nature of these tests—how high the bar should be set for Maori to prove their customary title if it interferes then with the Government’s economic interests. On the other side are the political considerations as well. We do not believe that the Government should be setting those tests because they have an interest in keeping that land for themselves for political and economic reasons. It is actually fairer and more just for the courts to determine these tests in our view. The reason we considered that—and I know that my colleague Catherine Delahunty spoke about this earlier—is that the courts do not have those same political and economic interests. Courts do not do things perfectly either; we have seen lots of examples of problems. But their primary concern—at least structurally—is stability of justice making sure that justice is met. They will also have the ability to look wider than the Government is prepared to. One of those areas for example is looking at the history of colonisation in this country. The Waitangi Tribunal reports have set out year after year how land has been unlawfully taken by the Crown been utilised had structures built on it had things done to it and been kept out of Maori hands.