Whaitiri MekaMEKA WHAITIRI (Labour—Ikaroa-Rāwhiti): Tēnā koe otirā ngā mema o Te Whare nei tēnā tātou katoa.[Thank you but at the same time my acknowledgments to us all members of this House greetings.]I am pleased to take a call on the New Plymouth District Council (Waitara Lands) Bill and can I too first acknowledge Mayor Judd and his fellow councillors who are here in the gallery. I also want to acknowledge the Minister for Māori Development the Hon Te Ururoa Flavell particularly for his comment around supporting this bill going to the Māori Affairs Committee. I am a member of the Local Government and Environment Committee. It is a very very hard-working select committee but I do want to acknowledge that although this bill is not a Treaty settlement bill it is still addressing very fundamental parts of every Treaty settlement that we have in this House which are land loss and how land was taken. If we look at the history in this case I am reminded of my own iwi of Rongowhakaata in Gisborne in the 1860s when wars were declared on the locals in Gisborne or Tūranga-nui-a-Kiwa in about 1865. When I was reading this particular history of Taranaki I could see an absolute resemblance to my own in Gisborne. A million acres was taken. Our land battle over there was called Waerenga a Hika and in Taranaki it was Pekapeka. We have got to acknowledge and understand our own history and those wars because at that time there was a need to get more land for our settling communities and I am pretty sure that this House had a role in that. So let us fast forward. We are now in 2016 and of course the land that is in question here resides with the council but we cannot overlook the fact of the history of how the council came upon that land. So here we are debating and I support this side. We will go to a select committee and we want all the stakeholders—and they are numerous and they have been covered by previous speakers in this House. There are the leaseholders there is the community of Waitara there is the city council and of course there are the hapū of Waitara itself. Yes we are dealing with the Treaty settlement bills through a separate process but they are actually indivisible because we are talking about whenua and we are also talking about a history that happened to a particular people in this country—namely the hapū of Waitara. By simply saying Well we addressed your issues through the Te Ātiawa settlement. This is a completely different matter." I think we are overlooking and I think we are being naive. I do want to acknowledge that when I read through the purpose of this bill I can see the concessions that have been made by the council in trying to set this joint committee up which will have both Te Atiawa representatives and the council on it and I want to acknowledge that. But I do believe that we have to actually allow the hapū the community the councillors and everybody else the right to have a say on what this actually means. That is why I wanted to make a contribution around looking forward and supporting and acknowledging the member for New Plymouth Jonathan Young for bringing this bill to the House—and honestly like everybody else has said it is like a can of worms and I want to acknowledge everybody's attempt to try to address it from the council to the local people to the local member and to my own colleague Adrian Rurawhe here. It is a can of worms but that is New Zealand's history. That is New Zealand's history. It is a can of worms and we cannot put up that can of worms and think that we can deal with it in a linear way. There are interrelated relationships and our history is tied up in this bill—this bill reflects a part of our history that led to a whole lot of hurt and a sense of loss of identity. If we through this House can enable the healing of that history by giving all those parties a fair shot then I think we have done our job not just as parliamentarians but as legislators. So with that short contribution I really do hope that the member takes on board the comments by the Minister for Māori Development and supports this bill going to the Māori Affairs Committee simply because of the tikanga around awhi and manaaki—and supports those hapū particularly to come forth and share their story about the impact of this as well as all the other vested stakeholders. Kia ora tātou."