Jones Shane: Te Roroa Claims Settlement Bill — First Reading 
Jones Shane: Te Roroa Claims Settlement Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:637;Page:7854] 
SHANE JONES (Labour) 
: 
 A tena koe e Whakahaere nei i o tatou korero i roto i tenei ahiahi. Me mihi ano ki ahau ki nga huanga i ahu mai nei i roto o Waipoua i roto i Te Roroa ki roto i Te Tai Tokerau ka tau mai ki roto i tenei Whare hei matakitaki i tenei pire e whaia haeretia ana i roto i nga kokorutanga o te Whare nei. Na reira e te whanau nau mai piki mai kake mai haere mai. 
[An interpretation in English was given to the House.] 
[ 
So greetings to you Madam Speaker in our debate this afternoon. Of course I must also acknowledge the relatives who came here from within Waipoua Te Roroa and North Auckland to this House to observe this bill being bandied about in the nooks and crannies of this House. So to you the family welcome clamber up draw up welcome. 
] 
Given that these discussions sit upon the pages that record our nation’s history in this legislature first I want to name Mr Ned Nathan who is a fantastic celebrated member of the Maori Battalion. He was severely wounded on the island of Crete and was cared for by the partisans and eventually married off to a Cretan woman belonging to the family who saved this great leader of the Tai Tokerau. He was a man who was present at and witnessed the death of the greatest Ngapuhi warrior ever in World War I and World II Harding Leaf. 
I want that man’s name Mr Eruera Nathan to be mentioned because he retired back to Northland in his senior years and took up the challenge left behind by his grandmother Pipiwharauroa and the elders of the Te Roroa tribe who had all drifted off into the mist. He decided he would make it his life’s work to settle the historic grievances surrounding the Waipoua Forest and two particularly important sacred sites Whangaiariki and Manuwhetai which lie under the shadow of the ancestral mountain of Maunganui located on the west coast of Tai Tokerau. We need to recite our history when we affirm the qualities underlying our settlements so that children in the future are able to bear witness to the fact that this generation sought to do the best it could to honour the aspirations of the people gone on. 
I mentioned two sacred sites Manuwhetai and Whangaiariki. They had the misfortune of being located in property that at one time was owned by Mr Allan Titford. I take us back to the late 1980s when the Labour Government of that time wrestled with how to protect those sites that had disappeared into private ownership. I my own mentor—my whanaunga Hone Harawira—and Reverend Maori Marsden went with the Te Roroa people and blessed a pouwhenua which was really a signifier of history and the affection with which the elders of Te Roroa regarded those two sites. Unfortunately that pouwhenua fell victim to vandalism. 
 But I recall very clearly that when the pouwhenua was put in the ground the lizards the caretakers in Maori lore of that which is sacred came out of the ground. In addition to that this settlement as my colleague Mr Dover Samuels has said will never completely erase the sense of sadness and grievance because this generation is fiscally incapable of redeeming the entire bill of colonisation. But Te Roroa live in an area that has grown in significance as we as a country treat more carefully and respectfully our scarce resources. I refer here to the Waipoua Forest which holds the taniwha rakau the great kauri trees remnants of a fantastic past that Aotearoa saw. Those attract visitors from afar and they also attract many New Zealanders. 
So this claim as it is settled cannot and must not be conceived just in fiscal terms. It implants the name of Te Roroa on the faces of our formal written history. It recognises their ancestral connections and it leaves them with a small and hopefully carefully husbanded resource of $9 million to $10 million with associated concessions so that they can take this taonga this putea and grow a base that will allow this small tribe to grow in pride rekindle its culture and recover its history because Maori history is located in great spades in the area of Te Roroa. We the northern members of this House—including my whanaunga there Tau Henare—descend from the eponymous ancestor Tohe. Tohe gave his name to Ninety Mile Beach—Te Oneroa-a-Tohe—and he perished at Maringinoa slightly north of Maunganui Bluff. These areas are within the ambit of the Te Roroa claim and it is pleasing to see that heritage respect for history and a desire to bolster identity by affirming the qualities that cannot be captured with money lie at the core of this claim. That work will outlive us the current members of this House. That is what makes Treaty settlements worthwhile doing beyond the inevitable squabbles about the adequacy of land and the sufficiency of money.  
Te Roroa derive their name from a saying: ano ra te roroa o nga koroi i te kahikatea—there lies the length of the koroi and the kahikatea—a people who were hardy pursued by their Ngapuhi relations and their Ngati Whatua relations. Indeed the greatest battle between the Ngapuhi tribe and the Ngati Whatua tribe prior to the arrival of muskets was at Moremonui the site where the Te Roroa people are currently based. On one side Taoho the undisputed leader of Ngati Whatua and on the other Dover’s matua Hongi Hika and Hongi Hika’s father and uncles. This is the stuff of which New Zealand’s indigenous identity is made. It should be recited and recollected as we move forward—not only as we put the settlements into place and our history behind us but as we celebrate that history so that the new identity of Te Roroa is something that enriches the overall identity of Aotearoa. 
I commend the work that will be done by the select committee. I hope they go where I went with Doug Kidd in 1991 when this report was actually issued. I had only just returned from the Kennedy School in the United States when Doug Kidd asked me to go along with him for the presentation of the report to the Te Roroa people—where our kaumatua Lovey Te Rore had a heart attack by the front door. He was rescued inevitably by one of the medical students there. These are the things of our history. 
In addition it is sad and there are areas for improvement because our settlements are taking far too long. They take too long because of the difficulties of mandate on our Maori side and also because we need to find a more efficient way of using the resources of not only the iwi but the Government itself. When Treaty settlements compete for resources there is an inevitable compromise. However ka nui enei korero mo tenei wa. 
[ 
This is enough for now. 
] 
I stand to acknowledge the work of the Te Roroa people few though they may be and all of the elders who initiated this work who have now gone on. I wish to the mokopuna and the tamariki “God speed.” Kia ora tatou katoa. 
Bill read a first time.