Davis Kelvin; Tisch LindsayKELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): Tēnā rā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare tuatahi māku e Nuk mihi kau atu ki a koe nāu nei whakapūaretia tō tātou huihuinga i tēnei ata mā ngā kupu karakia e mihi au ki a koe! Nāu i whakatū te arawhata ki tō tātou Matua i Te Rangi hei honohono i Te Rangi ki Te Whenua Te Whenua ki Te Rangi. E ngā whanaunga kua tatū mai ki konei ki raro i Te Tuanui o Tō Tātou Whare nau mai haere mai ki roto i tēnei Te Whare o Te Motu. Nau mai piki mai haere mai. Pīkaungia mai ngā tini mate kei runga i ō koutou pokowhiwhi kia ūtaina mai ki runga kia tūhonohono mai rātou ki ngā mate o konei; nā reira hurirauna tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa.[Thank you kindly Mr Assistant Speaker. The first thing for me Nuk is to acknowledge you who opened our assembly this morning with words of blessings; I compliment you. You are the one that set up the ladder to Our Father in heaven to link up heaven to the earth and the earth to heaven. To you the relatives who have arrived here below the roof of our House welcome come hither into this House of the nation. Come forth climb aboard come hither welcome. Bring forth the many deaths upon your shoulders to be placed above so that they link up with the dead here; therefore salutations and acknowledgments to you collectively throughout and to us all.]I am privileged to rise and speak on this first reading of the bill. Last night I spent a number of hours reading through the deed of settlement and let me say I started to highlight the pieces of the deed of settlement that started to annoy me in the historical account. I found that it was just basically a waste of time highlighting the parts that annoyed me and angered me because it was just about the whole page and it would have been an easier exercise to highlight the parts that did not annoy me or offend me. The historical account—there are 29 pages of it and it does not do justice to all the decades of hurt and theft the alienation what happened to the people te iwi me ngā hapū o Te Rohe o Te Wairoa. In fact if there was a university course on how to alienate disenfranchise steal and commit cultural genocide basically this historical account is the blueprint for that.I would like to go through a number of the historical issues that occurred but first of all I will just fall back on the words of one of my Ngāpuhi tūpuna Te Atua Wera when he said to his friend Kāwiti: Kua hurihia e te pākehātanga Te Tiriti hei pūngāwerewere hei kai i a tātou Te Iwi Māori. Ko ōna whēkau ōna toto ka ngotea ka kainga. Ka whakarērea ki muri ko te pāpaka. He rite tātou ki te pāpaka o te tātarakihi. Ko taua pākaka ko tātou Te Iwi Māori."["The translated English version has turned the Treaty into a spider to devour us the Māori people. Its internal organs and blood are sucked up and consumed. What is left behind is the scab. We are like the scab of the cicada. That scab is us the Māori people."]Basically what that translates to mean is: Te Atua Wera said to his friend Kāwiti that the Pākehā has turned his Treaty into a spider to devour us the Māori people. Its innards and its blood and its guts have been sucked out and consumed and all that is left is the shell like the shell of a cicada. That cicada is us the Māori people. That to me is the perfect description from our tūpuna to describe what has happened to our people throughout the country. As I say the historical account for te iwi me ngā hapū o Te Rohe o Wairoa gives embodiment to those words the prophecy of Te Atua Wera.As the Minister and Dr Shane Reti said the people of that area did not actually have an opportunity to sign Te Tiriti o Waitangi. It never ever went into their area which means the people of those tribes were signed up to a covenant that they actually never signed up to and they have been made to account to a covenant that they never actually saw at all never actually bought into. That in itself is unfair. As we know Te Tiriti o Waitangi guarantees Māori rangatiratanga their resources and yet one of the things that the people of the area did in I think it was about the 1860s was they decided to lease out some of their land. Yet they were prohibited from doing that by a law that says they cannot lease out their land. So it just makes a mockery of rangatiratanga where Māori cannot even make use of the resources that they have because of a covenant that they were signed up to even though they did not sign up to that covenant.In the 1860s all this stuff started. The first contact with Pākehā was in the 1830s with people who were trading flax and guns. Whalers turned up by the 1850s; there were hundreds of Māori in the area who were part of the whole whaling industry. Between 1864 and 1868 some 83000 acres of land was acquired by the Crown. We say "acquired"—we cannot really say "bought"; we cannot really say—Meka Whaitiri: Gifted.KELVIN DAVIS: —"gifted" or "traded". It was acquired by dubious means. The Māhia purchase on 20 October 1864—the Crown acquired 14600 acres. The very next day the protests began about the acquisition of that land. Often one of the tactics used by the Crown on multiple-owned land was to go and get one or two or three people and tell them that that land is theirs. Basically systematically alienate land acre by acre by acre—sometimes tens if not hundreds of thousands of acres at a time—simply by buying off an individual when the land was actually multiple-owned.There was the Nūhaka purchase. This is really interesting; it talks about the 39th parallel—that sort of brings up visions of the line between the USA and Canada or between North and South Korea but instead we had our own 39th parallel—where south of the parallel was the Hawke's Bay province and north of the parallel was the Auckland province. There was land that straddled both sides of it. Look to be honest I have read and reread the particular part of the historical accounts as to how the land was alienated and I am still confused. There was something like 110000 acres of land and putting everything aside—the convoluted way that the land was alienated from the people—I can almost guarantee right now for the people sitting up in the gallery now that just about none of that land will actually be in their possession now. That is the end outcome. Regardless of how it happened and how dubiously it happened the end outcome is that the people sitting up in the gallery and the people back at the hau kāinga—basically that land is no longer in their possession and that is what is really wrong about this whole bill.There were gross errors in land estimates. So someone would go along and go "Oh yeah that looks like 14000 acres." and in reality it was more—grossly overestimated or underestimated again with the sole purpose of alienating those people from their land. The surveys lacked consideration of iwi-identified landmarks. So the iwi would say: "Well OK we're going to sell this bit of land. You can go to that river or that maunga or that beach." Instead the iwi landmarks were basically ignored in many instances.The Sim Commission in 1927 just seems like a total joke. It seems like a tool of the Crown to confirm really that what it did wrong was actually right. I do not know who the native affairs Minister was at that time but he seems pretty hopeless. He did not make decisions or if he did make decisions they were not made in the best interests of the people. Reserves that were meant to be set aside were not set aside. Of course the old Native Land Court where you divvy the land up award it to 10 people and say "Sorry" to all the other thousand people who have an interest in that land "we've given it to these 10."—that happened all over the place. I could go on—I have lost count; I did not add up how many tens of thousands of acres were alienated. The net result is that the people up in the gallery—it is time for them to receive what is duly theirs.The other point I just quickly want to make is about the summary execution of prisoners of Māori. When we talk about summary execution normally we think of the Germans lining people up against walls and mowing them down or the Japanese beheading Allied soldiers or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and we are disgusted by that. But this happened here in New Zealand and this we cannot ever forget. Kia ora.Bill read a first time. Bill referred to the Māori Affairs Committee.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Permission has been granted for a waiata if you wish—[Interruption] No? Then I will call on Government order of the day No. 10."