Jones Shane: Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill — In Committee 
Jones Shane: Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:657;Page:6494] 
Hon SHANE JONES (Labour) 
: 
 Kia ora ano tatou. Mr John Carter who is sitting next to you Mr Chairperson made reference to the fact that there is an absence of content in the speeches that we have been offering on this side of the Chamber in the Committee stage of the Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill. That is gross. That is not only wrong but unfair. 
I will start with the boundaries. There is no rhyme or reason why the people of Rodney have been put through a roundabout of emotional turmoil while National addresses its own constituency agendas as it tries to draw the boundary in Rodney. There was no principle there. It suited that party to ransack the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance to suit its own political petty short-term objectives. This side of the Committee has not done that. This side of the Committee has acted in so far as the royal commission goes with great integrity. 
I put on record that the references I have made to mana whenua being unworkable and an assault on established democratic standards are revealed in that wretched Supplementary Order Paper put forward by the Maori Party that says that everyone has to first declare his or her whakapapa. Something akin to a genealogical unit would need to be set up to establish how much of someone’s genealogy belongs to a particular mana whenua tribe. Those issues do not belong in civic space; they belong in the space of the marae. Complicated democratic procedures ought not to be entangled with matters that have to do with marae entitlement customary ancestry and the affairs of tangata whenua. 
Simon Bridges 
: So all your colleagues who have been going on about it all week have been wrong? 
Hon SHANE JONES 
: We are hearing there from the man who was regarded as a cultural truant when he attempted to speak at the mana whenua tangata whenua Maori subcommittee on representation. It was evident that that young man who has senatorial pretensions in Tauranga is the self-defined prodigy of the National Party. He boasts in Tauranga with his senatorial ambitions that every day he does something it is worth 20 years of Winston Peters’ life of service. Of course we also find every time that young man comes to the Chamber that he does not rant; he pants. He runs from mirror to mirror so we know exactly how he was regarded on this issue of being Maori. If I were regarded as and called a cultural truant I would go back to kohanga reo. 
I come back to the issue of mana whenua. It is a legitimate aspect of Maori identity. We in the Labour Party however did not feel that it would address the entirety of the Maori population living within the area of Auckland. That I say to Mr Carter is a very important point of principle. We could have taken the soft option and agreed with the Maori Party and operated on the politics of apologia but we took what was a very hard but tried and true option. That is that if a person belongs to a Maori iwi and he or she is on the Maori roll then that person is entitled to vote not only if he or she is from Ngati Whatua or Tainui and not only if that party is doing secret deals with the big iwi so that funds could be gathered for the next election and the basic working-class Maori could be sold out on climate change. We did not take that route; the Maori Party took that route. Those members are the ones who have favoured the putea table over the kitchen table. 
It is not correct for the Minister in the chair to say there was no principle or kaupapa. We do not want to turn mana whenua debates into a new gravy train or grievance mentality as to which hapu which marae or which tribe ought to be sitting at the council table. We wanted on the basis of citizenship those Maori who are entitled to vote for their parliamentary Maori representatives in this Chamber to have the same level of entitlement in the area of Tamaki-makau-rau Auckland. The perversity of the Maori Party’s mana whenua argument is that Pita Sharples himself would not have been able to be voted into this Parliament. That occurred to us a long time before it occurred to the Maori Party members but it probably suited them and the Maori National Party members who came up with such a complicated model that it was designed to fail. There is a massive point of principle here and I will debate that principle on every marae in this country. We are here for te iti me te rahi—all Maori voters of Auckland not the favoured privileged few who might have marae in Auckland urban areas. Kia ora tatou.