Flavell Te UruroaPart 1 Amendments to Maori Purposes (Wi Pere Trust) Act 1991Hon TE URUROA FLAVELL (Minister for Māori Development): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Kia ora tātou katoa i tēnei ahiahi. Ka nui te mihi ki a tātou. Can I just acknowledge that there was a need I suppose to take the debate apart. It was my view if I can just talk to the Māori Affairs Committee that the amendments that were proposed in the paper were relatively minor in significance and that we had general agreement. But be that as it may I will leave that there because we have voted on it and we will move on. We will go through those bits and pieces as we get there. This is an omnibus bill that amends basically the Māori Purposes (Wi Pere Trust) Act of 1991 to improve the governance and operational capability of the Wī Pere Trust and to correct a minor technical error in the Māori Trust Boards (Transitional Provisions) Order of 2012. The trust that we are talking about is the Wī Pere Trust. It was set up in 1899 to administer the estate of Wī Pere who was a prominent East Coast MP in his day. Of course he was setting up this trust for the purposes of his whānau and the beneficiaries. It later became a statutory trust and we have made some amendments to the trust deed. I will talk to those shortly but will also add that we have added on a couple of Supplementary Order Papers which I will talk to as well while we have the opportunity which as the Speaker has outlined is able to be done in this process. As the bill states this is all about improving the governance and operational capability of the Wī Pere Trust. It removes ministerial involvement from the trust's governance which is something that the trustees themselves asked for. Currently the Minister for Māori Development appoints the trustees for the trust and can remove trustees for misconduct. However we are passing that responsibility back to the trust. This bill establishes a new trust board structure providing the trust board with autonomy to make decisions for itself and amend its accountability arrangements back to the beneficiaries. The bill also enables the trust to hold general title land supporting the trust's economic aspirations to do more with the land if it so wishes increasing the trust's economic development activities while reinforcing the protections of Māori freehold land. The bill clarifies the trust's succession arrangements through the provision of lineal descent from Wī Pere to succeed to beneficial interests and the bill also clarifies the jurisdiction of the Māori Land Court and the High Court. I will also be introducing these Supplementary Order Papers; there are three of them which have been mentioned earlier. They are to do with providing in three places—the first one is to do with the Māori Television Service. That is talking about making technical amendments to the Māori Television Service (Te Aratuku Whakaata Irirangi) Act 2003. That needs to be tidied up to remove references to Te Pūtahi Paoho an entity that will no longer exist actually when Te Ture mō Te Reo Māori Act 2016 is enacted. That is pretty straightforward. It is addressing the fact that we have an entity in place it will be out of existence and therefore we are adjusting the law to deal with that—relatively minor in the scheme of things. The second Supplementary Order Paper is amending Te Rarawa Claims Settlement Act of 2015 with a new Part 1B. This Supplementary Order Paper provides certainty as to the mandated iwi organisation commonly known as an MIO its status for Te Rarawa enabling Te Rarawa to manage its fisheries assets on behalf of the iwi and make contributions from those assets to various marae. I will talk about that a little bit more later on. The third Supplementary Order Paper is amending Te Ture Whenua Maori Act of 1993 in a new Part 3 later on. This Supplementary Order Paper amends inequitable and in some cases unachievable financial reporting requirements for Māori incorporations inadvertently introduced through what is called the Financial Reporting (Amendments to Other Enactments) Act of 2013. So as you Mr Speaker in your statements in respect of how we have ended up in this position of having to go clause by clause—basically these are relatively minor and not controversial issues to be addressed and I look forward to what people have to say from there.