Henare Tau: Te Arawa Lakes Settlement Bill — In Committee 
Henare Tau: Te Arawa Lakes Settlement Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:634;Page:5351] 
Hon TAU HENARE (National) 
: 
 I understand the korero from e toku nei tuakana i tu ake nei i mua i ahau. [ 
my older brother who stood up just before me. 
] 
I say to the Minister in the chair the Hon Mark Burton that I want to concern myself with recitals 13 14 15 16 and 17 in the preamble. In particular I want to ask about this statement in the preamble: “(15) In December 1998 the Crown recognised the mandate of the Arawa Maori Trust Board to represent Te Arawa in negotiations for a settlement with the Crown. Terms of negotiation specifying the scope objectives and general procedures for negotiations were signed by the negotiators appointed to represent the Board in March 1999:” I am wondering whether the Minister can tell the Committee what the initial offer was as opposed to the offer accepted some years later down the track. Why does the preamble further state in recital 18: “The Crown and the Arawa Maori Trust Board initialled a draft deed of settlement on 15 October 2004. …” which is some 6 years after the 1998 mandate that was recognised by the Crown? 
I do not want to harp on too much about it but this annuity business is still bugging me. How does it come to a figure that just so happens to be $7.3 million when the figure for cultural redress is $2.3 million which makes a nice tidy sum of $10 million? Interestingly the figure is not $10.793.26 million it is just $10 million which leads me to believe—and I am not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch of the imagination—that the fiscal envelope is still hanging around. It is just that these days it is called the multi-year appropriations or maybe something else. So I ask the Minister in charge of the bill the Hon Mark Burton what the story behind the annuity is. How was that established? How was the annuity calculated? Was a formula used to calculate the capitalisation of the annuity from £6000 back in 1920-odd to $7.3 million now and how far out did that annuity go? If we were not having this discussion now what would have been the annuity in the year 2020 starting from that period? What would it have been if it had been capitalised out from then and backwards as well?  
I know that one can lead a horse to water but one cannot make it drink and that there will always be the difficulty even in general elections that not only do people have the right to vote but also they have the right not to turn up on the day and vote and I take the point made by Pita Paraone. There are some problems with this settlement. It is not as clean or as smooth as a number of other settlements have been. I am very very worried that 10 years or 15 years from now our offspring will be arguing about the same issue. If that is the case—and no one can see into the future—it will be a sad day in regard to what I consider to have been a bit of a rush job in terms of the template that has been used. I know full well that this same template is being used to knock Tainui into line in terms of its river claim. I would be very very surprised to see any Tainui settlement being different from the one in front of us.