Rurawhe Adrian: Te Pire mō Te Reo Māori / Māori Language Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRurawhe Adrian: Te Pire mō Te Reo Māori / Māori Language Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 07 April 2016. Volume:712;Page:10338. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ADRIAN RURAWHE (Labour—Te Tai Hauāuru): Tēnā koe e Te Heamana o Te Whare. I want to first of all go to Supplementary Order Papers 164 and 165. Typically in settlement bills—and members will be familiar with this—there are three significant parts from my point of view which make up the apology. There is the historical context which is summarised by the agreed history which is within the deed of settlement and summarised within the bill. There are the acknowledgments that come out of the historical context—the Crown acknowledges the breaches. Then after that there is the Crown apology. So there are three parts to that.What I want to do is draw from that model to what we have here today within Minister Flavell’s Supplementary Order Paper 164 which deals with the acknowledgment and part of the history and we have Supplementary Order Paper 165 from the Hon Nanaia Mahuta which looks at the historical context and supplies an apology. I think all three components are very important. I stand to support the historical context the acknowledgment and the apology. To me if you have only the acknowledgment then you are missing two very important components of a model that is expressed within every single settlement bill that has been through this House particularly the later ones. I think some of the earlier bills had a different model.My point in supporting that this legislation have an apology is that an apology would expressthat to every single Māori in this country who has not had the opportunity to speak our own language. I include myself in that as well. I have struggled with learning Te Reo Māori. I would love to be able to complete this entire speech in Te Reo Māori but I do not have that ability. I think that if I look at my own situation—and I mentioned this in my first contribution—there has been historical and intergenerational trauma attached to Te Reo Māori. We can talk about it and many members in the House have spoken about it but let us give it a name: historical and intergenerational trauma because of acts that happened. For example the Native Schools Act 1867 and other actions within the education system meant that my grandparents were all hit for speaking Te Reo Māori. So they protected their children. They protected them in my instance by insisting that their children respond to them in English. They would speak to them in Te Reo Māori but their children had to respond in English so that when they went to school they were not beaten. The next generation did not have native speakers of Te Reo in our homes because our parents spoke mainly English.I think that every person of my generation and the next generations also who has not had the opportunity to speak our own language as a first language should be apologised to. I think that just simply acknowledging that something has gone wrong is not enough. I stand in support of Supplementary Order Paper 164 too—that the Crown apologises to iwi Māori for the detrimental effects of its policies which have caused in my opinion historical and intergenerational trauma that we still sustain today.I also just want to quickly move to the part of the bill that talks about providing means to support and revitalise the Māori language. What is not defined is how you quantify the revitalisation of the Māori language. What we do know from statistics from both those who have never had the opportunity to learn Te Reo Māori and those who have is that over a period of time the number of Te Reo Māori speakers has reduced quite considerably by over 4 percent in a period of 12 years from 2001 to 2013. My question is: how do we quantify that? Do we leave it to Te Mātāwai which determines the Maihi Māori strategy and the Crown which determines the Maihi Karauna strategy to quantify that?I certainly want to talk about my expectation around what revitalisation of Te Reo Māori actually means because that is not defined within the bill. From my perspective every single person who has been denied the opportunity to speak and to learn Te Reo Māori ought to have that opportunity so that—as my colleague Kelvin Davis has said—the numbers increase and so that those who are not fluent in Te Reo Māori will raise their level of fluency. I think it would be helpful in the future for Te Mātāwai and for the Crown to be able to determine their strategies. That is all I have to say on this part of the bill for now. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa i tuku atu i ō koutou whakaaro i Te Reo Māori tēnā koutou.[Huge congratulations to you all on expressing your opinions in the Māori language well done.]