Turei Metiria: Te Arawa Lakes Settlement Bill — In Committee 
Turei Metiria: Te Arawa Lakes Settlement Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:634;Page:5356] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 I will take a brief call to comment on the Supplementary Order Papers on this part. The Greens will support the Government’s Supplementary Order Paper. We do not see any problems with it; it makes perfectly good sense to include the reference and issues around the Protected Objects Amendment Act. In terms of the Supplementary Order Paper from the Maori Party we agree entirely with three of the amendments and will be supporting them wholeheartedly and one we will not support. I will just explain what we are doing. 
The one we will not support at this stage unless something changes quite soon is the omission of the Crown stratum from the legislation. The reason is that I am still very uncertain that by enabling Te Arawa to have ownership of the water body that does not then provide some kind of legal responsibility over the quality of the water or what happens to it. Unless I feel very certain that no further legal issues might arise from that ownership I think it is better to leave that out at this stage. I know that it is controversial and I understand entirely the desire to return the water body to Te Arawa but I am just concerned that I do not have enough information about the legal consequences of doing that. 
So the Green Party will not support that Maori Party amendment. But we completely support the other amendments particularly the change to clause 13. At the Maori Affairs Committee I asked officials from the Office of Treaty Settlements why they were including Lake Opouri in the settlement and why they were giving it to the main group instead of to those who had provided to us in the select committee a vast array of information about the lake’s legal ownership and the trail of it. Those people gave us incredible information and the officials said that the Office of Treaty Settlements owned the lake now that it was negotiating with the main group and that it was going to give the lake to them. That was it! There was no recognition at all of the history of the struggle of this family and its hapu to have that lake returned to them even though they had a significant and detailed paper trail showing their legal ownership over time. 
I thought the approach from the Office of Treaty Settlements was disgusting. It simply was not interested in pursuing the matter and making sure there were ways of dealing with the ownership issues around specific lakes for specific hapu. There were other ways of doing it. Hapu groupings could have been set up. If there were a number of hapu who had connections with the lake a mechanism could have been provided for them to have more control over what happened to it. That would have recognised everybody’s rangatiratanga and made the whole process so much easier. Also it would have meant that those who were directly or more closely associated with a particular lake could have had that mana recognised. But there was no system for doing that and it was obvious that the Office of Treaty Settlements had not bothered to explore ways of doing that. 
It has meant that this particularly hapu who have a paper trail showing their ownership and their struggle to get that ownership recognised are once again dispossessed of their property. The whole point of treaty settlements is to reverse that dispossession. It is a crazy situation that arises out of a settlement process that does not understand what it means to provide restitution to the victims of a historical wrong. The process is actually set up to provide the Government with the easiest possible way out. It is a process that looks good from the outside and gets complaints from the public for being too generous at 1 percent return on the lands that were lost. The Government wins—it looks great for the Government—but Maori miss out again and again. 
The reason we are very pleased to support the amendment to omit clause 15—the full and final settlement clause—from the legislation is that it is a lie. It is not full and final. That is the point. It cannot be full and final until there is a decent process that really and truly recognises what is happening for iwi and hapu in their struggles to get these settlements through. This settlement claim is nearly 10 years old. It is now nearly 10 years since Te Arawa went to the tribunal. They have been fighting through this process for 10 years. They have had to spend thousands and thousands of dollars and it has taken hundreds and hundreds of person hours. People die in the process of trying to get these settlements through. And that is considered fair? They are supposed to be happy with what they have got and every generation from now on is supposed to say: “Well that’s it. It’s full and final. It’s what the legislation says. It’s fair in the circumstances. That’s all right.” It is not OK.