Williams ArenaARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. This is an exciting bill. Nothing in the contribution of the Hon Scott Simpson told us what was exciting in it. So let me inform the House about this bill which is designed to unlock—Hon Scott Simpson: If it's so exciting how come it took so long?ARENA WILLIAMS: —serious potential within the Māori economy—the $68 billion Māori economy Scott Simpson. It's an exciting time for the Government to be able to help the owners of these fishery assets which make up between 30 percent and 50 percent of the Māori assets owned in New Zealand to reach their potential to ensure that we have modern governance arrangements for iwi and for Māori asset holders to engage and to actually have rangatiratanga over their assets for people like me who are members of iwi to be closer to the decisions made by iwi about how those assets are used and how they are used to generate income for the benefit of those members—things like education grants things like social wellbeing grants things like iwi housing programmes that mean so much benefit practically for our communities especially rural communities like those in the Coromandel the electorate of the Hon Scott Simpson.I'm so excited about this. I'm excited because it's time for the Government to make these changes which have been waiting since 2015 when we were not in Government. There has been extensive work that has gone on with iwi to make sure that these changes are going to be fit for purpose and are going to unlock the potential of those Māori assets and we are comfortable now that we have got to that stage and this is why we need to progress it.I can assure all members of this House that the Māori Affairs Committee of which I'm the deputy chair is ready and willing to receive this piece of legislation. We've cleared the decks. The only other piece of substantive business that we have on is a briefing on Māori climate adaption which I would welcome all members of the House to come and sit in on tomorrow morning. But this piece of legislation will be a priority.Let me take the House through some of the issues within this bill that we will be focusing on when we have the privilege of engaging with the submitters on this. The first in my mind is the component in this bill that the Te Kawai Taumata electoral college system for appointing Te Ohu Kai Moana directors is removed and replaced with a new electoral system enabling iwi to directly appoint and remove Te Ohu Kai Moana directors on a one vote one iwi basis. That change and the policy intent of that change is to ensure that members and people who have an interest within the iwi more broadly are closer to the decisions that are made about their assets. We want to make sure that as committee members we are comfortable that that change to the electoral system of those directors means that they are essentially appointed by the people who they are serving—that the people who they have in their mind as their work being of benefit to is always those members on the ground for whom they generate these profits and for whom they are acting as kaitiaki of these assets for in the future. We'll be drilling into those questions.The second for me is Te Ohu Kai Moana's surplus funds within this piece of legislation being distributed to iwi in accordance with a percentage specified for each iwi in column three of Schedule 3 in this bill. It's important that the committee gets a good understanding of what the different options are there for the legislative tracks what the different arguments were and how the consultation process brought iwi to the table and heard those concerns around how those surplus funds should be distributed. The third is that this bill would enable major transactions for Aotearoa Fisheries Ltd to require 75 percent of iwi majority as the voting threshold. The committee will need to be sure that that 75 percent threshold enables the kind of decisions that need collective buy-in to be made while at the same time not prohibiting those decisions from being made unnecessarily. With Te Ohu Kai Moana no longer playing a governance role in Aotearoa Fisheries Ltd the change is required to make sure that iwi can take that over. And the policy intent here is that again iwi are making those decisions iwi have rangatiratanga over it but also that members of the iwi are closer to that decision-making process.And the fourth thing is that Te Ohu Kai Moana is enabled to allocate distributions to any entity that has charitable status and is nominated by the mandating iwi organisation. That is intended to allow Te Ohu Kai Moana to distribute funds directly to charitable entities within the mandated iwi organisations or post-settlement governance entity structures without being liable for tax. It's important for the committee to consider from submitters the kinds of corporate entities that have been created since the 1992 settlement and then the 2004 Act because those kinds of arrangements have changed and developed since that time. During the first settlements in 1995 those settlements often used the charitable entity as the parent entity and had other subsidiaries around a group structure. Nowadays many corporate iwi structures use much more heavy-duty corporate structures but will have a charitable arm which they need to make distributions to from their fisheries assets. So the committee needs to be sure that this change enables modern governance entities to be able to receive those distributions and that we're futureproofing it for whatever might arise in time if we make changes to things like limited partnerships and look-through companies.The fifth thing that the committee will be considering is the process in itself. To engage in a process like this the Government has gone through extensive consultation work. Te Ohu Kai Moana has done an incredible job of bringing people to the table and we will be interested in how that work has been done.With that I just want to reiterate my call for members of this House to come to the Māori Affairs Committee—you will love it. It is a place where things are discussed collegially where we share ideas and where we interrogate legislation put before us—it's great; come along.