Delahunty Catherine: New Zealand Mission Trust Board (Otamataha) Empowering Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: New Zealand Mission Trust Board (Otamataha) Empowering Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 25 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13721. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. He mihi ki te Whare. He mihi nui ki teNgāti Tapu meNgāiTamarāwaho o Tauranga Moana.Tēnā koutou. I would also like to acknowledge the member Te Ururoa Flavell who brought the New Zealand Mission Trust Board (Otamataha) Empowering Bill to the House.This is an important day and it is great to have a process whereby this issue can be progressed given the way that it has struggled in other forums and how important it is to the people of Tauranga Moana. It is a beautiful area of the country full of natural resources but regrettably not shared with the original tangata whenua who are still struggling for basic justice today.All of my colleagues in the House today have clearly outlined some of the fascinating history around this very good example of what I would call the three “m”s of colonisation: the military the mass and the missionaries. Those three “m”s have had an important role in the colonisation process and are intertwined deeply in our history.The purpose of the missionaries as described in this bill was the evangelisation of the heathens. They managed to get to Aotearoa to carry this out in the 1830s and they were sincere in their belief that what they were doing was going to be beneficial. At the heart of the missionaries—and I have read a number of the diaries of the Williams families and other missionaries—was a deep-seated belief that they were superior and a deep-seated belief that they were bringing something that people who had not heard this message should hear but also that they were superior. That superiority created a lot of problems for them. It goes right back to Henry Williams and the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi where Henry Williams who was a fluent Māori scholar took an interesting approach to articles 1 and 2.However this bill is more specific than that. It is not just about Te Tiriti; it is about what happened in Tauranga Moana at Te Papa and the Tauranga mission station. I read last night some of the life of Alfred Brown who was the missionary who came in 1838 3 years after the mission was established after he had converted a very famous rangatiraWīremuTamihanaTarapīpipi of Waharoa. Alfred had an interesting life and was very sincere but he also purported to have purchased this land from thehapū and as others have said his understanding of “purchase” was deeply framed by the Western individual property rights view rather than the understanding of what customary rights reciprocity and land is actually about for the people of that place. So Alfred’s role in the Tauranga mission station is fraught with contradictions as are those of many missionaries around Aotearoa at the time.Alfred was involved in attempting to minister to the wounded and the dead at the battles of GatePā and TeRanga and he did attempt to be impartial it is said but it is also suggested that he lost the trust of the local Māori people not only because of thisŌtamataha land issue but because he was deemed to be associating with the enemies. So he was as many missionaries were in an invidious position where he had a particular set of goals that he failed to carry out. His aims he said were to protect Māori from European influence and convert them into perfect Christians which is deeply contradictory given that he was a European trying to convert them to a European view of the world. Such is the complex world of the missionaries.The missionaries in Aotearoa—not necessarily Alfred who was quite moderate in his acquisitions compared with some; for example the Williams family—acquired vast quantities of land and along the East Coast they still own that land. They certainly benefited alongside the military and alongside the mass who migrated in obtaining wealth power and privilege. It is only right now that this bill begins to redress some of that.The Green Party is very pleased to support this bill. We think it is high time after this very long battle that these people thesehapū should actually get complete authority and control. But as our first speaker said already the land has been unutterably altered. There is a hotel on it. They will get the financial redress which is a great thing. However they will never get what they lost and it will never be returned in the state it was when they lost it. Money is always helpful but mana is also important which is why although the Waitangi Tribunal was very clear they then had to go through a long process to get to this point that we are at today.It is really important and I am quite sorry I am not on the Māori Affairs Committee. I think it is a privilege to hear these stories. It is a privilege to be presented with this information by tangata whenua coming to this Parliament. I know that they will get a good hearing at the select committee. I have faith that this bill will actually take these people to a better place. I look forward to the wider issues that the Hon Nanaia Mahuta referred to in terms of the settlement of Tauranga Moana. We fully support this bill so that the mass the military and the missionaries can no longer dominate anyone’s land in Aotearoa.