Brownlee Gerry: Aquaculture Reform Bill — Second Reading Instructions to Committee In Committee 
Brownlee Gerry: Aquaculture Reform Bill — Second Reading Instructions to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:622;Page:17738] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 This part could perhaps be best described as the part that points out the two parties: the gullible and the greedy. The gullible party is the Government of the day the Labour Government which has quite clearly decided that any old story that any group of Maori may like to bring along to it will be put on the table for consideration. Previous speakers have made it clear that as far as Parliament was concerned this issue was dealt with in 1992 and was then subsequently handled by way of treaty settlement in 1996 and over a number of years since then whereby treaty settlors were given the ability to pick up allocation. So the question is this: why are we here today to require that any new area set aside for marine farming be divided up in such a way that up to 40 percent of that new area is given to Maori? 
And let us be clear that the area is not given to just any Maori because this is where the greedy party comes in. The allocation will be given to Te Ohu Kai Moana Trustee. If any Maori in this country believes he or she will get some benefit from that trusteeship at some point down the line then I say he or she will have a very very long wait for that. There is little doubt that the recent fisheries settlement bill that was rushed through Parliament and passed by the Labour Government—at the point where it had been bent over backwards by the old guard that runs the Maori Fisheries Commission—left this country in a state whereby Te Ohu Kai Moana Trustee is a group that sits between the beneficiary the owner of the asset and the administrators themselves. So to ensure that that old-guard group known as the Maori Fisheries Commission continued to have its little sinecure set aside for itself the trustees have gone to the Government and asked it to give them a big chunk of the aquaculture industry as well. 
We know that the system will be such that those in the group will keep the funds that may flow from these areas in their back pocket to pay their fees and that the funds will go nowhere near the people who expect to benefit from the asset. Not only is it bad for New Zealand to have such a race-based allocation of asset going on but it is also bad for those individuals who think they will get something out of it. It is quite clear in this legislation that the value of the asset will be determined by the old group of seven—the elite Maori who sit on the board of Te Ohu Kai Moana Trustee—acting as the trustees and that the company acting as the trustee will itself decide on how much of the benefit will be passed down the line. 
That leads us to the real point here. We have a bill that is supposed to settle an issue—that is to settle something that Parliament understood was previously settled—but that will create nothing but grievance further down the track. At the time of the passing of the Maori Fisheries Bill I predicted that before too long those who were supposed to benefit from it would come back to Parliament and say: “Help look what you’ve done to us. We need to be got out of this.” And here is another lot. This is a bill that will simply see grievance further embedded into Maori culture. This will not be an allocation that lifts people out of the sort of economic deprivation we see in so many parts of the country and provides new opportunities for them.