Horomia Parekura: Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill — In Committee 
Horomia Parekura: Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:670;Page:17429] 
Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA (Labour—Ikaroa-Rawhiti) 
: 
 Tena tatou. I roto i te tu nei kei te mihi kau ana ki toku whanaunga e noho atu i roto i te mahana o te Turu Kaiwhakahaere o te Whare. Tena koe. Kaore e mau atu i te maka korero mo i a koe engari mo wetahi i roto i to ropu me ratou ma e maka atu i roto i aku. Tena tatou.  
E mihi kau ana ki nga ahua katoa mo te ture nei mo ratou ma e kore i konei mo ratou e whai kaha i te hikoi tahi atu i te tai i Poneke mai i te wahi o Te Oneroa-a-Tohe kaha atu ratou i tera tau. E mihi kau ana. Na te pai hoki kei te tae tata atu tatou ki te oti o te ture nei ahakoa te whakaaro wehewehe i roto i aku mo tenei take. 
[ 
Greetings to us. As I rise I acknowledge my relative sitting in the warm seat beside the 
 C 
hair of the House. Greetings to  
you 
. I do not have anything critical to say about you 
 
 but I do about some in your party 
 
 and other members. I certainly have something disparaging to toss at them. Greetings to us.  
I commend all aspects  
of 
 this legislation I commend those who are not here and those ones who have found the energy to march together to Wellington from the Long Beach of Tohe. They were resolute last year. I commend them. It is wonderful that we have nearly completed the debates on this legislation even though my views on it differ 
.] 
I was surprised that the member across the other side of the Chamber Paul Quinn dared to suggest that my parliamentary colleague was his taina. I have always known that whakapapa great as it is from the maunga Mauao and I thought he was the taina. “Taina” is “junior”. In the sense of the titling of the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill it certainly smacks of “juniorism” in terms of the suggestions that this bill will be the be-all and end-all. It could be the “Hullabaloo Bill” or the “How to Pull the Wool Over the Maoris’ Eyes Bill”. 
We need to go back in retrospect and remember that the issue arose of making sure things went to the court. My learned colleague David Parker is dead right. There is a cost to all of this. It is like our youngsters who get into the trap of recidivism. This is just like it. If they sin once under the age of 20 they sin six times and they get taken to pieces by the legal beagles and those who snuffle in that trough. I hope that will not happen here. In the essence of codification let us be sure who pays for it and how it is done in relation to all the relevant issues in the parts we have discussed. 
There are wide-ranging notions in this legislation. Time will tell how we get through it but let us all be honest and frank enough to say that that will be work over a period of time. For the sake of the member opposite I tell him that I have no intention of leaving this planet any earlier than him. It is outrageous that he should get so dull as to start talking about that. That is how lopsided the member and some of his colleagues have got. They try to define what time we should leave this planet. It is bureaucracy gone mad! That is what this bill smacks of. The Maori Party has tried to couch it and it has just become over-endowed bureaucrats. 
The Prime Minister said in 2003 that he was going to get rid of the Maori seats so I was trying to encourage the Maori Party members to change their vote. As soon as this bill is through next week he will get rid of the Maori seats. The difference in this vote is the four Maori seats. This bill is supposed to support the Maori seats. 
The member also mentioned Wi Parata. Parata is a great name. I have some whanaunga who are named Parata but Wi Parata was from another boundary. He said: “For you may take the land but all you have is the shadow. The land is Maori and the soul of Maori is the land.” That is what Wi Parata said in one of the early challenges. If the member quotes one statement he should remember the better statements. That statement was one of his better political statements and that is what this bill should be about. 
Where I come from it is paradise. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Where’s that? 
Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA 
: It is paradise—Mangatuna Houri. It is a great place; beaches abound. Seals still come up on the bank and bathe and there is kai moana and all of that stuff. 
The issue is that no matter what the law provides for we have always allowed people access whether they are Pakeha whether they come from the ACT Party whether they are Samoan or whether they are the local whanau. I was down at the Mohaka River the other day and I asked this guy how long he had been there for. He said he was retired and had been there for 2 months. He said the Maoris had been letting him go there for 40 years. It is not suggested in this bill that Maori are as advanced as that in intellect in niceties in good behaviour and in hospitality to people who want to visit. 
I make the point that in some iwi the contiguousness of the land to the takutai moana gives them a real strong inherited right which most of them have managed well. They do not need anyone to come along and tell them how to behave and why they should do that. That needs to be highlighted and remembered as we go along in this development. 
Hon Dr Wayne Mapp 
: You are effectively supporting the bill by that statement. 
Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA 
: No Mr Mapp it is different up north—people flog the whenua and all of that. In some areas where there is a congruity of the land to the takutai moana it is as a result of Maori hospitality not the hospitality of the court or overseas people. It is the hospitality of those generations who have inherited that right through whakapapa and living there and that is really important. 
There is a bit in the bill about hangi stones and launching the waka. I do not know who put that bit in there. But anyway I was listening to my colleague David Parker the other night. We have to be explicit about what will help in this matter. The Minister for the Environment the Minister of Corrections the Minister of Women’s Affairs and Ministers for everything else have a say on this issue. There needs to be some serious balancing. People need to go through the sense of the legislation. In some areas now at Christmas time when we celebrate the “Great Being” and whatever else Maori like to have a hangi but the Resource Management Act says they cannot light a fire. What is the use of having hangi stones if one cannot light a fire? The point is this: there are contradictions in the law and they cut over tikanga and tuku iho. Darren Hughes likes having hangi at Christmas. He is well practised in it. But the tikanga as versed in the Resource Management Act says we cannot use those hangi stones and that it is no good. 
I remind the Minister today— 
Rahui Katene 
: The Labour Government could have done something about it during its 9 long years. 
Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA 
: We did great things. We kept the unemployment rate at 5 percent. It was not running at 27 percent. We made sure petrol prices were where they should be. We made sure people could pay their bills. We made sure people had a job. We made sure Maori Television started. We made sure the distribution of health services to preschoolers was really great. It was a great 9 years. 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: That member voted for it . 
Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA 
: And that member voted for it. She knew that we were good. At the end of the day it was a great thing. 
Rahui Katene 
: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. Relevance—[ 
Interruption 
] 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker) 
: I have called a point of order. The exchanges in the Chamber will stop. There is a point of order. I do not care who started it; everybody will stop. 
Rahui Katene 
: I fail to see the relevance of this to the part we are debating at the moment. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker) 
: The member invited it herself by her own interjections. If the member is going to interject in that manner she will have to expect some contribution back and the unfortunate part for the member is that the member speaking has the microphone. It is a huge advantage. I say to the member that if she is going to interject she should calculate that the other person has a microphone and might wander a bit further than she likes. Having said that I have been signalling to the member with the call that he needs to come back to the point. It is a point well made. 
Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA 
: Kia ora Mr Chairperson. Tena koe Rahui. In the early days when I first came to Wellington to work out what was in the briefcase I used to go with this great man called John who was Rahui’s whanau. We used to go outside the Department of Social Welfare and protest. He used to tell me to line up out front at 1 o’clock and we would make sure we put right the crooked Department of Social Welfare and the Government. He was working for them at that time. He would give us the placards and tell us where to stand. I would go and start yelling out for Mrs Bazley or somebody else to come out so I could ask them what the hang they were doing. Then I would look around and wonder where the other 200 supporters were. There was nobody. But that Maori was a great Maori because he defended tikanga. He did not shudder or shut up or go away. I was proud to know him even though sometimes he would go over to America; he would come back with big Indian belts and give me one. He had international nuances that he knew about. I suggest to that member that I could teach her about some of the things he taught me. 
Tikanga should not be left to law. Tikanga is something that we have to live and maintain and we have to ensure it is enshrined in our being. It is not just about kapahaka and ta moko which are great things. It is not just about those or about waka ama. They are great things for our young generations to participate in and they keep going but tikanga is about living those issues that are relevant to being Maori. That is all we want to see in this bill: the issues that are relevant to Maori. We may have to adjust and align but not sell out and that is really really important. 
I feel for the 200 who are marching down the road thinking they are going to change the world; by the time they get here the Maori Party will have signed the bill off. There is nothing to come here for. 
There is nothing like being a Maori MP. We get it from the Pakehas like that silly woman over there who talked about holding one’s breath under the water and Alice in Wonderland. One wonders where the hang she is; she is writing Peter Pan notions. That is disgraceful and is the extreme of the other people in this country. We get it from our own cousins our own colleagues especially if we are Maori and are used to working as a minority amongst a whole lot of Pakehas Africans and everybody. We get it from everybody. Worst of all we get it from our own whanau. When the hikoi came down I had whanau on the other side yelling at me.