Shirley Ken: Maori Fisheries Bill — In Committee 
Shirley Ken: Maori Fisheries Bill — In Committee 
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Hon KEN SHIRLEY (ACT) 
: 
 I was hoping that the Minister in the chair the Hon David Benson-Pope would take that call. Both the two previous speakers have asked him to take the call. The issue that has been raised is important and successive speakers in this important debate have called for an explanation. 
The ACT party’s overall concern about this legislation is the bureaucratic bad governance that it is establishing. But here we have another consequence which I would have hoped was an unintended consequence and it is a very serious one: the Maori Land Court is to be called upon to make these determinations when arguably it is not equipped to do so. Inevitably the court will be brought into disrepute or it will certainly be placed at risk of being brought into disrepute for making such decisions. We are hearing evidence on parallel legislation—the Foreshore and Seabed Bill—where submitter after submitter even as recently as yesterday said that there is nothing more insulting than to question or to challenge one’s whakapapa yet here we are saying that we will have a judicial body charged with that responsibility. I sense all manner of problems with that as do other speakers before me. It behoves the Minister in the chair to stand to defend it. 
This is the Committee stage of the bill. We have Ministers in the chair so that they participate and answer questions and hopefully convince the Committee of the logic of why the Government is passing these measures through in legislation. Instead we have a Minister who sits like a dunce in the corner with his hat on and does not answer our questions—and he should. I ask him to take a call to answer that question. 
We know that the system we have under the quinquennial census allows people to make and nominate what ethnicity they might be—and it is a curious thing; I think that few other countries have such a system. For my part I always put myself down as being a Pacific Islander. Why do I do that? It is because I am a New Zealander and as New Zealand is a Pacific Island I am therefore a Pacific Islander—end of argument. Others feel the same. People tick all sorts of boxes in the census papers. A lot of people were quite surprised that the last census showed we had a huge upsurge of Kalahari Bushmen in New Zealand. No one really knew where those Kalahari Bushmen came from. It turned out that the McGillicuddy Serious Party decided en masse to register in the census as Kalahari Bushmen. So the New Zealand census shows we have a whole range of Kalahari Bushmen— 
The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson) 
: Order! 
Hon KEN SHIRLEY 
: You may think that this is stretching away from the part Mr Chairman but in fact it is not; it actually goes to the heart of the responsibility we are giving to the Maori Land Court and so much flows from that. A lot of commercial aspects are associated with it. My colleague Richard Prebble who took a few calls in an earlier part highlighted the fact—and we have it here in the ACT quarters—that the new income tax provisions mean that all the authorised Maori bodies in the bill will enjoy a tax rate of 19.5 percent tax. Where is the commercial neutrality in that? I think it is great. I think everybody should pay tax at 19.5 percent and good luck to Maori if they can. But it is grossly unfair when one segment in society because of some racial basis enjoys a taxation advantage. 
What is the country coming to? Let us be quite clear I am not against Maori enjoying a tax rate of 19.5 percent; I am just saying that everybody should enjoy it on that basis. We want these commercial enterprises to be successful and I believe they will be. But what is the message we are sending? Are we saying that Maori cannot run a proper business and need to have a tax concession relative to everyone else’s? How could one be more patronising than that? That is deeply patronising and insulting. I ask the Minister what the justification is for that. He has not answered that question.