te Heuheu Georgina: Ngati Tuwharetoa (Bay of Plenty) Claims Settlement Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
te Heuheu Georgina: Ngati Tuwharetoa (Bay of Plenty) Claims Settlement Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:625;Page:20216] 
Hon GEORGINA TE HEUHEU (National) 
: 
 Part 4 deals with cultural redress which this Parliament will have become familiar with. For those people who might be listening it is part of a package of redress options that the Crown usually negotiates with claimants. There is usually some financial redress property redress and cultural redress. 
I want to mention an issue that the National team has raised in a number of debates not just on this bill but in other debates on bills that are currently before Parliament and also in the debate on the Ngati Awa Claims Settlement Act that was passed into law 2 weeks ago. Statutory acknowledgments essentially give some preference in various ways to various sites in a particular tribe’s rohe and give recognition to the fact that customarily the tribe exercised certain rights—they lived in certain places and gathered food in certain areas. This acknowledgment is an attempt to recognise those customary practices. 
The issue that has been concerning the National Party over recent months is the sets of narratives that accompany recognition of these statutory acknowledgments. I think our colleague Pita Paraone has referred to this already this evening. The tribes rightly are required to show their connections with various rivers mountains hills and land sites. That is a proper thing to do and those recognitions are acknowledged in the deed of settlement. But I think there is an issue about that recognition becoming part of the bill. To demonstrate this we were presented with a schedule that recounted how the geothermal resource came from Hawaiki to Tongariro in my own area. Suffice to say that schedule did not find its way into the bill that is now before us and for good reason in this case because Ngati Tuwharetoa Bay of Plenty gave a recitation of the coming of fire so to speak from Hawaiki to Tongariro which in some respects precluded Ngati Tuwharetoa my own people from telling their story as to how that geothermal resource came to exist in Aotearoa. Thankfully Ngati Tuwharetoa Bay of Plenty were persuaded that their acknowledgment and the recognition of their relationship with the geothermal resource could just as easily be accommodated by its recitation in the deed of settlement and therefore it did not find its way into the bill. 
These acknowledgments are made up of a mixture of mythology and history but very often it is mythology. That does not make it wrong but it does present a problem. 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: It shouldn’t be part of the law. 
Hon GEORGINA TE HEUHEU 
: Yes it does present a problem for us as legislators as to whether we should be incorporating those sorts of stories and mythologies into the law. Increasingly National is of the opinion that if it is not necessary to put it into the bill itself then why should it be in the schedules? It is not so fatal as to make us vote against the settlement legislation but Parliament should be careful as to what it puts into the law.