Davis KelvinHon KELVIN DAVIS (Minister for Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. My great-grandmother died in 1919 as a result of the influenza that raged across the globe shortly after World War I. That pandemic left my 11-year-old grandfather his older brother and his two younger brothers motherless. So my father never got to meet his grandmother never got to give her a hug taste her cooking never got to get a telling off from her never got to hear her stories. A pandemic took all of that away from my father because my great-grandmother never got the choice of having a vaccine so our whakapapa could not be protected.I hail from the little valley of Kāretu in the Bay of Islands and the name of our urupā our cemetery there is Pūhangahau. In Pūhangahau there is a strip of soil about 10 to 15 metres long full of unmarked graves and I remember asking my grandfather What are these—what's happened here?" I remember him telling me that's where the people who died in our valley during that pandemic were buried and they died so quickly they didn't have a chance to record the names or where those particular people were buried. So there are people lying in our urupā there in Kāretu whose names we don't know and as a result whose whakapapa links to us we don't know—and whakapapa is what connects Māoridom. It's what connects me to Peeni Henare it's what connects me to Nanaia Mahuta it's what connects me to Dr Shane Reti and it connects me to all the other Māori that are here in this Whare. We as Māori talk about protecting whakapapa and I just want to quote from Haami Piripi. Haami Piripi is the rangatira from Te Rarawa. Haami was questioned by the anti-vax movement about the strong stance he's taken around vaccination for the people of Te Rarawa. As a rangatira he stood up and he said "What defines our identity as Māori is whakapapa. What we measure our survival as a people with is whakapapa. What determines the health and wellbeing of our whānau and marae is whakapapa." That is leadership. That is what being a rangatira is all about.But sadly there are many Māori who are doing all they can to jeopardise whakapapa and they use the pretext of mana motuhake and tino rangatiratanga to justify the unjustifiable. What price is the life of your nan or your mother or your brother your niece or your mokopuna? So they talk of Treaty rights but at the same time they neglect to talk about their Treaty responsibilities.Now my great-great-great-great-grandfather was a signatory to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and he was a real rangatira in that he actually had a hapū behind him. But what were his responsibilities as a signatory to Te Tiriti o Waitangi? Well first of all the responsibility of a rangatira is to protect your hapū protect your kāinga protect wairua protect the lives. So those people who hide behind rangatiratanga or mana motuhake to justify the reckless endangerment of whānau demean the very tikanga of tino rangatiratanga and mana motuhake. They wave the Māori flag and the flag of He Whakaputanga in the vain hope it lends a veneer of credibility to the stupidity.So these days it seems a prerequisite to be called a leader is to have big mouth and a Facebook account. The gauge of a leader is no longer the prosperity and wellbeing of your tribe but instead the numbers of likes and retweets. Being a rangatira was an important deep and meaningful role; now it's just a shallow social media presence by which to spread misinformation to the misguided.I'm really concerned about the lack of leadership the conspiracy theorists and the COVID deniers. I'm concerned about them trying to break through Auckland into Waitangi and spread the misinformation and stupidity. They mistakenly believe that is their right but they are clearly forgetting about their responsibilities."