Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Well thank you very much Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT on what is a very special day. We want to support the Ngāti Rangitihi Claims Settlement Bill as ACT has always supported these bills. The reason for that very simply is that we believe very firmly in due process the rule of law and private property rights. We acknowledge that in the case of Ngāti Rangitihi and many other iwi up and down New Zealand over two centuries we haven't done a particularly good job in following due process respecting the rule of law or protecting private property rights. Bills like these go a tiny way to redressing that. I note in the legislation it tells us that there are around 5000 people who are claimants of this settlement. There's around $11 million that is being transferred in terms of value and if you put that together it's simple mathematics: it's around about $2000 per person. That may sound like a lot of money but actually it's important to remember it's for eternity and it's for some fairly large injustices over time.People sometimes say these Treaty settlements have transferred so much money to Māori; why can't Māori stand on their own two feet? To put it in context if you were to take for instance healthcare spending that's about $4000 per person per year in New Zealand; education about $3000 per person every year. This Treaty settlement for Ngāti Rangitihi is $2000 per claimant roughly for ever. I just want to put that on record not to in any way diminish the settlement—it's very important—but to answer some of the criticism I sometimes hear that these settlements have transferred large amounts of resources. Actually what they've done is restored respect dignity and mana to people who have lost a lot of that by a failure to uphold the rule of law and due process over a long period of time and given some compensation in terms of some of the value lost.I also note that 92 percent of the claimant community ratified this agreement. Now hailing from Ngāpuhi I can only imagine or dream of such near unanimity amongst an iwi but it's not a bad example to be followed. Clearly it shows that a good process has been gone through and a process that goes back many many years. It was only in 2015 that a mandate was given to actually start negotiating this particular settlement but the real process started many many years before that.So I see this as a very positive initiative. I think it's something that ACT is very pleased to support and I think it is something uniquely New Zealand that we have dealt with quite serious conflicts and differences and managed to resolve them in a way that has been done mostly for the last century or so at least entirely legally with respect for due process and the rule of law. That is a real achievement for all New Zealand that we've managed to settle differences that way.I would say I believe that some of the settlements that have come to be in recent times have blurred the lines between private property that is owned and introduced co-governance over areas that many New Zealanders consider to be collectively owned. An example of that would be the collective redress in Tāmaki-makau-rau of 2014 which introduced amongst other things co-governance of Auckland's volcanic cones by the Tūpuna Maunga Authority. Now since that legislation was heard I've heard Chris Finlayson the then Attorney-General and the Minister responsible for many of the settlements done under the previous Government say actually he regretted some of those arrangements. It certainly created a lot of difficulty with the governance of the maunga and the common use of them and many of the people that use them have been unrepresented and there's been a lot of friction in the set-up of that organisation. But that caution is with an acknowledgment that we are arriving at the end of a long settlement process and so we're not going to allow ourselves to oppose this piece of legislation for Ngāti Rangitihi for example because there is a worrying drift towards Treaty settlements that rather than restoring property rights and giving back what is rightfully owned are actually creating ongoing co-governance arrangements which may lead to more difficulty than they solve in the long term.With that caution I think it remains only to say that we think this is a wonderful day for New Zealand. We're really pleased to see Ngāti Rangitihi after a long process get this settlement passed into law by this Parliament and we hope that the provisions in it the resources transferred and the arrangements put into law will allow a platform on which Ngāti Rangitihi and their mokopuna for many generations to come will be able to build the mana and success of the people in that place. Thank you Madam Speaker.