Prebble Richard: Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Bill — Third Reading 
Prebble Richard: Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:624;Page:19260] 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE (ACT) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the ACT party to speak to this bill. As members have accurately said the reason it is being passed is because a Waitangi settlement is about to come into effect and the iwi does not have a legal structure to enable it to take the money. So it has asked for a private bill. A private bill of course is not a public bill. A private bill is one sponsored—in this case by the people themselves through their local member of Parliament—for the law to be written; a law just for them. It does not apply to any other New Zealanders just to them. 
Parliament is obviously going to approve this bill. Well the ACT party will not vote for this bill. The reason for that is that we do not believe that the Maori Affairs Committee or those who have promoted this bill—and I understand that the Minister was involved—are doing the people concerned any favours. Let me just draw the attention of the House to this extraordinary fact. Some very substantial amounts of assets will be passed over and we are passing a law to say that the people who will be holding those assets in trust are not bound by the Trustee Act. That means they do not have the obligations that normally fall upon any citizen who is holding money assets or goods on behalf of other New Zealanders. 
We will have all seen in the newspapers in the media and within Maoridom severe criticisms of a number of iwi for how they have handled the assets they have received under previous treaty settlements. I say that anyone who has spoken in this debate and is voting for this clause is morally unable to ever criticise if anything goes wrong with any of the money that the State is passing over. Because one of the obligations which we would put on them but for this bill would be that they would have to follow the provisions of the Trustee Act which means one has to hold money and assets for the benefit of beneficiaries. Well we have waived that. In fact we have gone further than that. If members read this bill they will see it states that all the people in charge have to do is follow a charter. The charter is not attached. Then we read further and it states that the charter which apparently was approved can be amended any time in the future. 
Why I ask the House should this group of New Zealand citizens be given a second-rate—in fact I would describe it as third-rate—legal structure? Even shareholders in a company get more protection. There is no protection provided here. There is no obligation here for audits to be held. There is no provision set down for how people are to be elected. If there is a conflict within this iwi in the future—and I am not criticising this organisation; conflicts are part of human nature—how is it to be settled? We in Parliament are completely silent about that. Do we treat other New Zealanders like that? No we do not. If one is in a cooperative one is bound by the Co-operative Companies Act which sets out how people are to account and how they are to be elected. If there is a future row or if there is an argument—and rows do occur within Maoridom occasionally—how are they to be settled? 
I say to the House that there will be some future Waitangi claim because somebody from this iwi will be able to get up and say: “The Government did not carry out its duty towards us. It actually treated us like third-rate citizens and it passed a special law exempting us from the Trustee Act and exempting us from the requirements that private enterprise is required to follow.” A soccer club and a rugby club has to actually obey those requirements. The Friendly Societies and Credit Unions Act sets out a whole set of regulations that an organisation should have. The Minister promoting this bill at no time told us why he thought money should be handed over and we should not actually extend the 150 years of statutory experience that this House has with regard to public money and with regard to private money. [ 
Interruption 
] Has that member got an interjection? Is she going to tell me that these people do not need that help? 
Hon Georgina te Heuheu 
: Are you going to vote for the bill? 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: No I am not. The reason I am not going to vote for the bill is that I think this bill is itself under the present definitions a violation of the treaty. The Crown is in no way meeting its obligations. I am not interested in the fact that there may be some leaders within this iwi who have come forward and said: “We would rather like to be exempt from all the obligations that we would have to meet for holding money.” 
Pita Paraone 
: They have not done that. 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE 
: Well this is a private bill so the Minister is telling us that the organisation concerned is asking for it. Now if the committee is saying that they are not then what on earth is it doing coming through this House? 
I do say—and this is a criticism I have made of private bills before—that I think this Parliament passes private bills that are creating a special law for just one group of New Zealanders and that it does so far too easily. We have not been told why the models of the Companies Act the Industrial and Provident Societies Act the Charitable Trusts Act or the Co-operative Companies Act were not looked at. Now they are models that have stood the test of time. This model has not. We have actually been told that is a replacement for a previous model that has already turned out to be defective. We are actually being asked to give a rubber-stamp to a charter that none of us have seen. Even those who have seen it agree that it can be amended. 
I hope this turns out to be a wonderful settlement. I hope that this asset turns out to be great for the iwi. But is it supposed to last forever? It will be most extraordinary if this human organisation turns out to have this inhuman ability never to have any future problems. When it does have future problems people will look back and say: “What were the New Zealand members of Parliament doing? Why were they not prepared to apply the same safeguards that they applied to any other New Zealand organisation?”. That is one of the reasons—and I have some others—that I have grave doubts as to whether the present round of treaty settlements will turn out to be full fair and final. Indeed one can see that this Parliament is already setting itself up for a future grievance claim. 
It appears to me that the Crown actually does have an obligation to Maori to make sure that the iwi organisations do have a proper robust structure that ensures that all beneficiaries are properly treated that looks at issues such as conflicts of interest looks into how the people are going to be elected and covers all the sorts of things that one would normally expect. When one sees a statute going through that starts off by telling us that the Trustee Act is no longer going to apply I think that throws out all the warning signs. Accordingly the ACT party will vote against this third reading.