Turei Metiria: Foreshore and Seabed Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Turei Metiria: Foreshore and Seabed Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:621;Page:17088] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 The Greens are opposed to this whole provision and we have put forward a number of amendments to the bill to get rid of it. It is not that we do not acknowledge and understand that the community as a whole has practices and activities in place that it considers are really really important and wants to enable those to be protected. The fact is that there are already mechanisms to enable protection of those sorts of activities. We do not need to abuse and redefine in this deceptive way the customary rights of the indigenous people to whom this bill is supposed to be directing itself. It is a misconception and a complete deception to say that those who have come here after the process of colonisation and who are not indigenous to this land are entitled to customary rights. A customary right is a legal concept that applies to the indigenous people. It means the rights that they held in their customs the rights that they exercised and the things that they did before colonisation occurred. The customary rights provisions in the common law are a protection mechanism for those practices once colonisation has occurred.  
To then say that all people in the country are entitled to those rights is wrong. It is wrong in law and it is wrong as a concept. In fact it distorts things for the community which wants to have its special activities protected. It gives the community false hope. There has already been enough palaver coming from New Zealand First and Labour about the undue expectations Maori have of what they could get in the courts. Clearly the officials have said and even the bill itself acknowledged when it first came to the House that no one will get these. No one will qualify for them because they are so ridiculous. People will think they can get access to the courts. They will spend money trying to do this and it will be a waste of time because in effect the customary rights are useless. No one will be able to get them.  
This part is a smokescreen of equality in order to hide New Zealand First’s complicity in the theft of Maori land. It unjustly raises the expectations of the community which does want to have its needs met. But there are existing forms for this. For example the Historic Places Trust will purchase and assist people in purchasing property that is considered to be significant for the community as a whole. There is no structured Maori form of the Historic Places Trust. No organisation is provided for in the way that the Historic Places Trust is to purchase and protect sites of historic or cultural significance for Maori in this country. The Historic Places Trust forms a really important part of the structure of protection and is there for the community as a whole.  
In this bill there is some—slightly corrupted in my opinion—form of protection for Maori customary rights. But New Zealand First wants to further corrupt those and steal the protections to make them apply to everyone when in fact those protections already exist.  
Another clear example in terms of the importance of these things is the white crosses on highways. The Greens were the first to come out and defend those crosses on the highways and to say that Transit had no right to take them down. It was unjustified and incredibly mean because those areas were significant to the people who placed those crosses there. They were spiritually significant. Those areas do not have a physical manifestation for the people who placed the crosses there. They are spiritual for them and it is important that they are recognised accepted acknowledged and understood by the whole community. They form an important tool for the community as a whole and they need to be protected. We have been the first to say that they should be.  
But these are not things that customary rights can be claimed for. There are other forms of protection that Parliament and other structures can provide to enable those kinds of values to be enshrined in our culture. The provisions that are set out in this part which New Zealand First has been so intent on making sure are there are symbolic at best. New Zealand First recognises that it will be very difficult for people to get these rights. It recognises at least in some part that the provisions are likely to be symbolic and provide the veneer of equality. Yet when asked to support the entrenchment clauses to protect the foreshore and seabed from sale into foreign hands New Zealand First refused. It refused because it did not want to support something that it considered to be only symbolic. Yet it has spent important and scarce negotiating time with the Government to put forward provisions in law that are nothing if not symbolic and useless.