Katene Rahui: Port Nicholson Block (Taranaki Whanui ki Te Upoko o Te Ika) Claims Settlement Bill — In Committee 
Katene Rahui: Port Nicholson Block (Taranaki Whanui ki Te Upoko o Te Ika) Claims Settlement Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:655;Page:5052] 
RAHUI KATENE (Maori Party—Te Tai Tonga) 
: 
 I rise to speak as a former public servant— 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: Another one—yay! 
RAHUI KATENE 
:—another one yes—who was working for the Treaty of Waitangi policy unit right back at the time before the Taranaki Whanui claim went to the Waitangi Tribunal. There was a great deal of difficulty getting the claim on to the Waitangi Tribunal’s programme so the claimants went to speak with then Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Douglas Graham and tried to get into direct negotiations with him. At that time the Crown did not have a policy for direct negotiations but was working on one. 
At that first meeting between the claimants and the then Minister I remember how the claimants were so incensed at the time it was taking to get their claim to the tribunal and the time it was taking the Government to get the claim into negotiations. The claimants said to the then Minister that if they did not see any action being taken then they would take part in a series of civil disobedience actions. They claimed that they were going to sit on the Wellington motorway and stop all traffic coming into and going out of Wellington. They said that if they did not get any reaction from that approach then they would look at further action. It was a real threat and something that they were quite prepared to do because they were so tired of how long it was taking for them to be able to get their claim heard. Thankfully they managed to finally get their claim to the tribunal. 
I remember also attending some of those tribunal hearings as a public servant particularly at Te Tatau o te Po Marae in Petone and sitting there listening to evidence given by Dr Ngatata Love’s father Sir Ralph Love. He was a man whom one did not trifle with. He had been working as a civil servant for a very very long time. He had a very very long memory. He knew what the Crown had done and he knew what the iwi had been doing to try to make sure that the Crown did not take away all of their land and to try to prevent the Crown from what it was doing which was resulting in Treaty breaches. This was before we had a Waitangi Tribunal that the claimants could take their claims along to. 
The hearings that the Taranaki Whanui went through were very fraught. A lot of mamae a lot of pain was expressed during those hearings. It really did appear that sometimes the Crown was not prepared to listen. Finally after what felt like decades—and was actually more than a decade—the Taranaki Whanui received their report and were able to go into negotiations with the Crown. 
As I said yesterday my husband was one of the Ngati Tama claimants who had so much difficulty with the rest of the claimants and with being able to get their negotiators on to the board to be taken seriously by the others. It was a problem. The opt-out clause was the only way they could go because they could not get the rest of the claimants to listen to them to take them seriously and to put forward the claims that Ngati Tama wanted to put forward. I agree that it is not a good way around the situation but neither is it a good way for the rest of the group to absolutely ignore Ngati Tama and not deal with their concerns. 
There was a very long process of Ngati Tama going to the former Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Margaret Wilson and having her say to them that she would listen to them separately from the others. Then 6 weeks later Ngati Tama got a letter stating that the officials had said it could not be done that way so they would have to do it another way. All of that inaction and contradiction was really itself a Treaty breach because what the officials were doing was going back on their word. This happened continually over 3 or 4 years of the negotiations. It is not a good idea to have an opt-out clause but sometimes that is the only way that one can go. So in this case I have to agree that an opt-clause is necessary. I congratulate Ngati Tama on being able to get their mandates through last weekend. Kia ora. 
Part 1 agreed to.