SpeechJO HAYES (National): Thank you Madam Chair. I'm pleased to stand to take a call on the Estimates hearing for Māori Development. But before I start I just want to say: Kia kaha Te Reo Māori in recognition of Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori. I want to acknowledge our Māori Affairs Committee; I think we do have a very good select committee and it's well-run. I just want to do a shout out to our chairman Rino Tirikatene. I think you do a good job in keeping us all in line. So as my colleagues have said in their presentations and their discussions today we covered the four areas within the select committee: Māori development Whānau Ora Treaty settlements—as the Minister of Justice has just outlined a list of settlements that he's been working on as well as the Minister for Te Arawhiti the Hon Kelvin Davis. I found the presentations rather interesting and especially the previous contribution from Minister Andrew Little around the list of iwi that he has been working with since the hearings. It would have been great had he outlined all of this when we had asked questions around what he had lined up for his work coming up for this year. So this is very good. Maniapoto Whakatōhea—those were areas that the Hon Chris Finlayson had asked me to keep asking the Minister about. It's good to see that there's been some movement although it would be great to have some readings in this House very shortly with some of these bills mainly because in our Māori Affairs Committee we're running out of work to be honest. We need some work and really at the end of the day some of these bills actually provide us with this work. Ngāti Hinerangi is an interesting iwi because that is the iwi of Dan Bidois as well as Maniapoto. Dan was telling us a little bit about things that have been happening with Ngāti Hinerangi and I'm pleased that it's starting to move along especially for Dan. That's also with the Whanganui land claims. I've been talking to some of the whānau up the awa: they were telling me a little bit about some of the things that were going on. It never is a smooth journey when iwi traverse this area. I want to say that at the 2019-20 Budget the Government was very generous in their Budget towards Māori development—a quarter of a billion dollars in the Māori development portfolio. Yet even today a few months down the track I'm still getting asked by the commissioning agencies for Whānau Ora: when is the Minister going to start releasing some of those funds out to the commissioning agencies? I was of the view that it had already been released; it obviously hasn't been released. Its $20 million for this year—remember it's an $80 million fund spread over four years. So this is something where the Minister needs to—the Hon Peeni Henare—go back and actually start to have a look at the process for releasing that budget for the 2019-2020 time for $20 million to the commissioning agencies so they can get on and start doing the mahi that will actually help to bring together and bring closer whānau and some of the work that they've been doing within their families. I want to talk a little bit about—again following up on my colleague Matt King and his discussion around Te Ture Whenua. It's really important that bill. We did have a bill in the House that the Hon Te Ururoa Flavell was going through with the House. It was Labour working to actually go against Te Ture Whenua Māori Bill. That would have actually helped to release some of the blockages around Māori land-locked lands. Now Māori land-locked lands—there's thousands and thousands of hectares of Māori land-locked lands. If that could just be opened and released so production can happen for the iwi of those lands then we would see more economic development outcomes for the iwi of those areas. Let's look at Mōkai Pātea at the back of Taihape. They cannot get into their lands to develop and grow the very trees that the Hon Shane Jones over here has funding for. They cannot make any headway on accessing any of the funds for growing trees. Even though this Government shelled out a lot of money it's all stuck in ministries it's stuck in this Parliament; I don't know where it is. Why isn't this Government more accountable to the very people that they want to grow their economic development wealth—to actually grow employment for everybody for Māori? Why isn't this Government being more proactive and active for a constituency of theirs?