Turei Metiria: Maori Purposes Bill — In Committee 
Turei Metiria: Maori Purposes Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:636;Page:6972] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 I really need to take issue with some of the things that the National spokesperson has mentioned though I would like to welcome her back to the fold in terms of Maori affairs portfolios and issues. It is great to have a Maori from National back again in the role of Maori affairs spokesperson. 
I take issue with the question of certainty that was raised by the last speaker. Her view that this Treaty settlement deadline gives certainty to the Waitangi Tribunal to claimants and to the Government is of course complete rubbish. The tribunal did not come to the Government and ask for a Treaty settlement deadline in order to make its process easier. The tribunal has no interest in a deadline. As far as I can tell from all the submissions we received there was no indication from the tribunal at all that a deadline would be of any use to it. 
Actually the deadline raises real questions given that it is set so soon. There is an argument that it is only in relation to historical claims and that people can lodge broad generic claims with the tribunal which they can then fill in later with the research and the historical work they will need in order to make the claim viable in the future—that they can do that after they have lodged the claim and that that will be all right. The tribunal will suffer from a ridiculous false economy by having large numbers of incomplete and not particularly well-researched claims lodged with it in a big huge rush. It will then once the deadline comes about have to sort through those claims and wait for the claimants to be properly prepared to progress their claims. 
So in a few years’ time after the settlement date of 2008 there will be real bureaucratic problems in dealing with the management of the claims that are not ready to proceed because they should never have been put there in the first place as they were not ready to proceed. This deadline will not be advantageous to the tribunal at all. It will not assist the tribunal in its planning because it will not be able to progress claims properly in a well-researched and well-prepared manner. It is a totally false economy for the tribunal and it will do it no good. The tribunal certainly did not ask for a deadline so there is no justification for saying it will be better for the tribunal than the present situation. 
And the deadline is certainly not a better proposition for claimants either—absolutely not. The majority of submissions that the Maori Affairs Committee received on the bill were about that particular point. Of those submissions by far the majority were completely opposed to the settlement deadline. It has been said before and I am sure it will be said repeatedly tonight that there has been no consultation with claimants or potential claimants about the deadline. There is no evidence at all before the select committee in front of the Government or anywhere else that shows that a deadline will be beneficial to claimants—nothing; no evidence; no submissions; nothing. The fact is that a deadline is not beneficial to claimants. This is a political sop put in place by Labour because National was running its race hate rhetoric which I talked about last night. It has nothing to do with making sure that claimants have a better opportunity to progress their historical claims through a tribunal process that is designed to redress those and provide justice. 
This measure does not provide certainty to claimants; the situation becomes even more uncertain for them. Claimants will now have to find ways to manipulate the process by making claims fit within at least some kind of historical claim definition before 2008. They will have to look for things very quickly to put in their claim which they can then back up with research later. They will have to hope that their claim is comprehensive enough with no research no resources and no assistance to prepare it and hope that later on after the deadline is over they will be able to find the information to back up their claim. So this deadline will put claimants under considerably more stress. 
I note also the issue around most claims being known which was mentioned by the National spokesperson. That is not true either. The fact is that most of the claims that have come before the tribunal are those that were relatively obvious—that is fine—but they are not the ones that smaller hapu in particular will already know about and would then have been able to put forward in due course. Lots and lots of smaller hapu in this country do not have resources to submit claims. Often those hapu do not have particularly old old people either who have historical knowledge. We have to remember as was mentioned earlier today that the death rate for Maori is extremely high so we do not have lots of older people who have the necessary historical knowledge. There are whole families whose oldest member might be 60 years old. They will not have the information they need to set out the facts about the history of their land loss in the kind of detail that is needed by the tribunal. Instead a lot more other professional work would have to be done to enable them to prepare their claims. They are the ones who will miss out. 
The tribunal process was set up to provide a system of redress and justice for exactly those people—for those who do not have access to the courts and who do not have huge amounts of money. It was designed to be an easily accessible process for Maori. But if we put in a deadline like the 2008 deadline that we have here it will prevent the people who have the least access to justice from ever getting any so it will completely ruin the process. The whole point of the tribunal will then be lost. 
It is true that the tribunal process and settlement negotiations take a reasonable amount of time. We have had close to 170 years’ worth of wrongs committed against Maori and of the theft of land through legislation and other means—all of the things that everybody in this Parliament knows about. We cannot expect all of those claims all of those wrongs and all of those issues to come to light in just a few years. It has been only 10 years or so since we began to deal with the Treaty claims and negotiations process in an effective and a clearer way. The process cannot be run quickly and we cannot expect that it would. We should spend a lot more time on allowing the tribunal process to continue to develop and evolve to provide the best possible framework for providing justice to the victims of these crimes for whom it was designed. 
Instead we have a Government—it has been successive Governments actually; it does not matter whether it is a National or a Labour Government—that is trying to find ways to close down the process because it is costly and because it makes it obvious that the Government continues to undermine Maori progression and development over time. It is true that what happened is a horrible memory. When the settlements come before Parliament we can see that they show real horrors from our history. They are not pleasant but this country and this Parliament have to take responsibility for what happened. We have to be mature enough to cope with those histories and deal with the fact that those awful things happened. We should not be frightened of doing that. 
We should allow the process to occur. Otherwise we will end up doing the same old thing that we always do in Parliament in Government and in our country: trying to hide from the facts and making the situation worse. That is what we are doing here. This deadline is part of the process of denying justice in a system that is set up to provide it out of expediency because it is cheaper and easier for the Government to do so. I completely agree with the National spokesperson that the deadline provides certainty for the Government—absolutely it does. But the tribunal system is not set up for the benefit of the Government; it is set up for the benefit of the victims of wrongs—the victims of crime. They should be the priority in any process. 
I have three amendments to this part in my name. One of them changes the closing date for the deadline to 2050 which is a little over 200 years from the time when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. That is fair enough. It gives us another 50-odd years to deal with the claims that are coming through. It gives us another generation’s worth of time to work through the complexity of the Treaty process. Some claims are taking over 10 to 15 years to prepare and some settlements are taking close to that time as well. The people to whom justice is directed need to have time to work through that. That is one of the changes I would like to see made to the bill. 
The second amendment is to omit the date of 1992 at which claims become historical and replace it with 1 January 1841. That gives the Government a year after the signing of the Treaty. It can have a year in which we will accept that the Treaty was intended to be honoured. After that all of the things the Government did and refused to do all of the mistakes it has made would become contemporary claims. Then the deadline is irrelevant. That is the point. The things that the Government has done or that its representatives have done in the past need to be held to account. We can be mature enough and grown-up enough to take responsibility for them. That is our role as parliamentarians and citizens of this country which should be a bicultural country where two nations try to work together to deal with the issues. That change in the date will help to set the matter back and give us a clearer idea. This country is only 160-odd years old. It is actually a very young country in its current form. To say that all of the claims for what occurred prior to 1992 are historical and will become irrelevant to the tribunal process after 2008 is crazy. It is a crazy idea so I have an amendment to change the date at which claims become historical to 1841. It is another way of showing that these are contemporary claims that they are contemporary issues and that they are real and live for people. 
Earlier I was talking about many communities not having elders who have the memory or the confidence to talk about the things that happened to them their families and their grandparents in the past. Those things are live issues for the communities that live now. They are not historical for them because they suffer the effects of the very same crimes that were committed against them. So to them the issues are not historical but are contemporary; they are right now and people suffer them all day every day. We see that reflected in their daily lives. Therefore it is wrong to suggest that the things that were done to them—the crimes committed against them—are historical crimes. 
Finally I have an amendment to the bill that will delete the Treaty deadline process altogether because it was never a good idea. I can hear the National spokesperson taking credit for it. She should not take credit for it; this deadline is an act of overt racism and no one should proudly take credit for that kind of act in this Parliament in 2006. We should be a much more grown-up environment than that. We know how to deal with these claims justly. There are other models of it happening all around the world where crimes have been committed against indigenous people and people are being held to account for them. Governments and processes have been held to account. We are a leader in large part in those kinds of models. We should be proud that our models work. We should fix the bits that need to be fixed but we should never be proud of instituting blockages and processes that then interfere entirely with the process and with access to justice. 
This is not a proud moment for us at all. I urge all members of this House to seriously reconsider their position on this bill and to vote in favour of my amendment or if not my amendment then the Maori Party’s amendment to delete the Treaty settlement deadline. The deadline is not a fair thing to do. It is not good policy. It was never a good idea. It is a racist thing to do and it must be stopped.