Abel SteveSTEVE ABEL (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. In the heart of the rohe of Ngāti Tara Tokanui is the Waihou River and that river has a particular significance in the history of colonisation of our land not just for the Hauraki and the Waikato but indeed for the whole nation because in 1769 when Joseph Banks and James Cook anchored off what became Thames and took a longboat up the Waihou what Banks recorded in his journal was essentially a plan for how the lands could be acquired how they could be cleared of their forests how they could be drained and how they could be farmed. It was a plan for colonisation.When both Banks and Cook saw the magnificent kahikatea forests of the Hauraki Plains they were deeply impressed by them. Banks said that the immense quantity of Woodland which was yet uncleard but promisd great returns to the people who would take the trouble of Clearing it … Swamps which might doubtless Easily be draind and sufficiently evincd the richness of their soil by the great size of all the plants that grew upon them and more particularly of the timber trees which were the streightest cleanest and I may say the largest I have ever seen— … I may have seen several times single trees larger than any I Observd among them but it was not one but all these trees which were enormous … we rowd for many miles between woods of these trees to which we could see no bounds. The River Thames"—as Cook named the Waihou River for political reasons to convince England that this was the right place to colonise—"is indeed in every respect the properest place we have yet seen for establishing a Colony;". We know that from 1865 shortly after the occurrence of the invasion of the Waikato the confiscations of the land began in the Hauraki as well. The land was taken. It was acquired by hook or by crook and as Philip Steer said "If a lesson emerges it is that nature's death occurred not only by grand confiscations and conflagrations but also by innumerable small bureaucratic concessions and oversights."Those magnificent forests where Ngāti Tara Tokanui had their livelihoods—those forests were dense with native birds that were snared for food. The koroī berries as the berries of the kahikatea were named by Māori were harvested by the skilful ascending of the sleek trunks of these enormous trees. The kahikatea is the largest native tree—not the kauri but the kahikatea—and for context these trees are so ancient ecologically they are 160 to 180 million years old which is to say the kahikatea tree came into existence before there were even birds on Planet Earth. It is the pterodactyl that would have originally eaten the berry of these trees and who were kaitiakitanga of this magnificent natural heritage of Aotearoa? It was Ngāti Tara Tokanui and the other iwi around the nation who also had such magnificent forests. Within a few decades they were almost entirely cleared. If you travel across those Hauraki Plains those green flat drained plains with their dairy farms you may see gentle little pockets of beautiful conical trees in areas of swamp. Those are the regenerating echo of what was there. Those are young trees but are 100 or 150 years old at most. Those huge ancient forests were primarily burned. In 1882 when refrigeration was invented much of the remnant was cut down to make butter boxes for export of our butter and our dairy products to Britain. Indeed the Bagnall family set up a mill for harvesting the kahikatea trees to make the butter boxes. In the years between 1909 and 1917 alone the remains of kahikatea were reduced by 63 percent. In 1913 a royal commission was asked to determine how areas of New Zealand still remaining under forest should be dealt with. It said "As is well known the soil of the white-pine swamps when drained and the trees removed forms one of the richest agricultural land which when grassed is [extremely useful] for dairy farms." and thus the remnant of those magnificent forests were milled. The Bagnall brothers' riverbank mill at Turua cut down the trees and the descendants of that family would lament their loss. In 1937 a woman reported in a newspaper article "Where the Village slew the Forest" about a grand and noble forest that it was "the beginning of the end for the feathered world that inhabited its depths." and in 1984 in her book about Turua Shirley Bagnall wrote of her deep sorrow at "the death of the trees that had taken such ages to grow".I tell all this because one of the untold stories of colonisation is the massive destruction of nature—the massive destruction of the extractive industries that were brought by the coloniser. Those industries destroyed the actual livelihood of tangata whenua Māori the traditional life and culture and the means of food acquisition and propagation that had sustained those iwi for many years and here in the Hauraki Ngāti Tara Tokanui are a glaring example of it. Also when the goldminers came they poured the cyanide into the Waihou River so it is accounted that 300 iwi lost their source of water. These are the impacts of this sort of extractive and destructive colonisation aside from the injustice of the very theft of the land—the utter destruction of the ecological structure of it. This is a loss for all humanity I would say—those magnificent forests—but it must be such a bitter loss for the iwi who were the kaitiaki of those forests. I note that Andrew Little said that the Crown will apologise for confiscating large tracts of land as well as for the policies and laws that were designed to dislocate Ngāti Tara Tokanui from their land to erode their tribal structure—and rightly that is a just apology for a terrible loss—and also I would add to destroy the ecological basis of the society and the culture of the livelihood of those people. So we support this settlement; it is never enough. It is irreplaceable what is lost. We do not as Te Pāti Kākāriki—as we have articulated before—support the idea of full and final settlements. It seems in a sense to be adding a final insult to injury to suggest that they should be full and final. If we are to have a just basis for society and our land it must be based on a recognition of the history of the means of our presence here as tangata Tiriti. It must be based on a reciprocal recognition of the right to self-determination of tangata whenua Māori of upholding of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and of a seeing and a sighting and a knowing and a remembering of the history that has befallen the people—the proud indigenous people—of our land. So in that regard we commend this bill to the House. Thank you Mr Speaker."