Shearer David: Hamilton City Council (Parana Park) Land Vesting Bill — In Committee 
Shearer David: Hamilton City Council (Parana Park) Land Vesting Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:670;Page:17099] 
DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert) 
: 
 I want to pick up on what my colleague Phil Twyford was speaking about in relation to the purpose of the Hamilton City Council (Parana Park) Land Vesting Bill which is set out in clause 4. I will address the issue he has just brought up. He mentioned the aspect of the value of Parana Park being historic as well as recreational. We have covered that issue quite a bit particularly in respect of whatever passive recreation constitutes for the park. I imagine that passive recreation constitutes something along the lines of non-organised sport—something like people going to the park for a picnic and playing with a frisbee rather than playing a full-scale rugby game or soccer game or whatever else. But there is an important point here which was subject to some debate and certainly a division emerged amongst the submitters on the bill. 
The Hamilton City Council favoured having a recreational reserve over a historic reserve. I will just touch on the council’s thinking because I think it is important. The council’s submission looked at the various classifications of the park. It looked at the possibility that the park should be classified as a historic reserve and thought that it had some merit for it to be classified as such but on further investigation the council believed that the powers under the Reserves Act 1977 for a park to be a historic reserve focus on the historic values of the reserve and the council felt that that did not adequately address the park’s recreational role. Therefore the Hamilton City Council submitted that the recreational reserve option was strongly favoured and I guess from its perspective we can see its point. 
However I think some of the submitters disagreed. Phil Twyford touched on the tree issue and on the number of very old and historic trees in the park some of which as he mentioned could have been planted by George Parr himself— 
Phil Twyford 
: They were—definitely were. 
DAVID SHEARER 
: They were definitely planted by George Parr back in the 1860s. If we look at the park in relation to history the park is on the banks of the Waikato River and for the people of Tainui it has extraordinarily special significance in terms of its position and location by the river. It is right beside the Rangiriri area as well which is also of huge importance. 
I will touch particularly on two submissions that were presented by Laura Kellaway during the course of the Local Government and Environment Committee hearings on this bill. She stated that “Historic parks”—and she made the differentiation between historic and recreational—“are special places that by capturing features relating to the community’s past give insight into how the community was formed. This land now known as Parana Park can do that on many different levels” and she went on to specify a number of them. 
I mentioned the issue of the special significance of the park to Tainui but right throughout history from George Parr onwards we see that Parana Park has special significance. The debate on the purpose of the bill clause 4 that took place in the select committee as to whether the park should be a recreational reserve or a historic reserve is very very significant. It is certainly significant to those people who submitted on the bill. I wanted to get on to this issue because Laura Kellaway said: “In essence Parana Park is a historic place as described in broad terms under the Historic Reserves Section 18(1) of the Reserves Act and under terms of the Historic Places Act 1993.”