Jones Shane: Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Jones Shane: Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 08 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:2059. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon SHANE JONES (Labour) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Speaker. I stand to follow on from what have been relatively non-controversial speeches about the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Bill. In fact the first time I must say that I came across the word “pouhere” was when the Anglican Church decided to reorder its constitution and give equal recognition as I recall to the three tikanga. So now when I participate in debates to do with constitutionalism and Maori I will be able to find the right word. I hope though that the word ends up sort of reflecting content but that is for the future. So we support this bill going to the Local Government and Environment Committee.  
I want to focus on three things. This bill reflects a transition that authorities have been through in terms of how they treat how they categorise and how they prioritise the protection and safeguarding of Maori heritage interests. There is a great debate as to how much information a hapu or an iwi should provide to State authorities. That is often a debate that is driven by the loss of information that is inevitable as a consequence of people leaving rural areas people moving to the city the impact of colonisation and the fact that so much of Maori knowledge was regarded as lowbrow in the earlier decades of the last century. Indeed in some parts of New Zealand it is probably still the case. So it is amazing that information about Maori place names sacred sites and other areas of historical and heritage significance subsists.  
And then beyond that there is the genuine concern that Maori cultural information should be tightly guarded and that before it is shared with the general public it should be passed on to the members of the whanau or the kin group who are most directly affected by the decisions that happen when progress meets heritage etc. or development meets heritage.  
Those are some of the forces but the fact that the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Bill retains a Maori committee structure maintains a Maori Heritage Council and provides an opportunity for very learned people—as we would say in Maori nga pukenga—to actually provide direction to developers and to other statutory decision-makers is a reminder of the transition we have been through since 1975. I often use that as a watershed year—the year that the Labour Government of that time decided to enact the Waitangi Tribunal legislation or whatever it was formally called back then. 
 But this bill does not just impact on those interests of heritage that are near and dear to me. It also exhorts us to think about other icons of heritage not the least of which is the built environment. I will not say much about what has happened in Christchurch because those are exceptional circumstances and MPs who either represent Christchurch or who live in Christchurch no doubt are probably better placed to extend our knowledge about the loss of heritage buildings in that regard. But I am thinking more of Tamaki-makau-rau—Auckland. As Auckland has expanded and people have looked to modernise Auckland we have lost a lot of the historic building infrastructure and heritage items in Auckland.  
This bill retains extraordinary powers for the new organisation which will be a Crown entity as opposed to a somewhat ambiguous trust structure. What it does is it provides for staff for people authorised by the organisation Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga to actually enter on to property where they fear that sites of significance might be coming into danger or are actually being damaged as a consequence of people not abiding by the conditions of whatever statutory consent they might have. This is likely to annoy property owners and it may actually annoy the people they are working with i.e. the developers but I think it tries to strike a balance between the organisation that the State has posited with these powers and people who have capital at risk. I have some sympathy quite frankly for a number of people who do take risks and who want to expand our infrastructure. It may be central government or local government authorities wanting to improve the delivery of essential services. But most important this sends a clear signal that you cannot carry on in an untrammelled fashion if what you are doing is putting at risk archaeological sites or Maori heritage sites.  
What it also does is it builds a wee bit of a precautionary approach. If you want to enter into a building you require a District Court judge’s permission and that should have I would have thought a moderating impact in the unlikely event that future employees of this organisation respond to local neighbourhood pressures. For example we had in the Mission Bay area not all that long ago a building that the super-city had permitted to be demolished and the local people were concerned that another monstrosity would occupy the skyline or the environment of “Parasite Drive”—Paratai Drive rather. This bill actually provides a basis for a more measured approach.  
But I want to come back to the Maori side because although this bill does afford a level of recognition and protection Maori have shown that the real protection lies in being able to use the avenues that take them to either the Environment Court or more often than not the High Court. The fact that there is a Treaty of Waitangi reference in here the fact that there are deliberate black-letter law references to Maori interests is the ultimate safeguard. It is disappointing that from time to time tangata whenua groups are required to absorb the costs of litigation but given the nature of our constitution unless your interests are clearly elaborated and clearly contained in a statutory provision it is very difficult for a judge or a court to read into the letters of the law a level of meaning that might satisfy Maori interests.  
We have had some fantastic jurisprudence over the years and I think back to the late 1980s. I think the case was the  
Habgood 
 case and in those days we all relied upon a thing called section 3(1)(g) in the old Town and Country Planning Act which talked about the special relationship between Maori and their ancestral land. After thousands of dollars had been expended by people trooping backwards and forwards and suffering the withering language of Judge David Sheppard and others we finally managed to capture some of the jurisprudence that built a reasonable basis. And then of course that was augmented by the decisions of Justice Chilwell and others.  
I offer these potentially irrelevant remarks only to remind us how far we have come and that in this bill there are elements that will inevitably need to be tidied up in the select committee. We should remind ourselves that it is not just the current group of politicians or the current bureaucrats or the current Minister—no deprecation to the current Minister. This has been a long and gradual journey. This will not be the final step that we as a country take in the protection of our heritage.  
The fact that it is very explicit both in the duties and in the justiciability of Maori environmental and heritage interests is a wake-up call for people up and down the country. Unless we can maintain the physical representation of these Maori interests all that is going to be left is the names. We do not want Maori heritage interests to all of a sudden start to appear like some taonga brought back from the Netherlands or America from the Boston whalers where the provenance of that taonga is now so confused and lost in time that no one can really tell the story of the greenstone mere or the tiki that disappeared from the 1790s to the 1820s. We have an opportunity by protecting and using a number of the provisions in this bill so that the names are actually married off to the physical representation and are a reminder that the indigenous people had their own way of life. They had their own system of recording their history and passing it on.  
For those reasons I am very happy along with my senior colleague Mr Chauvel to support this bill to the relevant select committee. Kia ora tatou katoa.