Tirikatene Rino: Ngāti Hauā Claims Settlement Bill Ngāti Koroki Kahukura Claims Settlement Bill — First ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTirikatene Rino: Ngāti Hauā Claims Settlement Bill Ngāti Koroki Kahukura Claims Settlement Bill — First Readings[Sitting date: 22 October 2013. Volume:694;Page:14158. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]RINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Ngāti Koroki Kahukura Ngāti Hauā tēnā koutou. Nau mai hara mai ki te Whare Pāremata e takatū nei. Rau rangatira mā tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa.[Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. Acknowledgments to you Ngāti Hauā and Ngāti Koroki Kahukura. Welcome to Parliament House in readiness here welcome. Salutations and congratulations to you the many leaders and to us all.]I stand to tautoko and support these bills the Ngāti Koroki Kahukura Claims Settlement Bill and the Ngāti Hauā Claims Settlement Bill for these two iwi Ngāti Koroki Kahukura and Ngāti Hauā. The bills have been joined together for this first reading stage but I understand that they will be split out when we get to the final stages.This is another historic occasion. As I like to do I like to traverse the history of all of these visitors who come here to Parliament. The history of the Waikato Wars raises its ugly head once again. In this House we turn our attention to the claims settlement bills for Ngāti Koroki Kahukura and Ngāti Hauā two very closely related whānau who were drawn into conflict due to the Crown’s troops crossing the aukati at Mangatawhiri. The Christian chief Wīremu Tamihana also known as Tarapīpipi was the son of the famous Ngāti Hauā warrior chief Te Waharoa. At the death of his father Tamihana assumed the mantle of his father and he was the first of his generation of the sons of chiefs who learnt Christian doctrine and who learnt how to read and write in English and Māori. He was certainly a man of his time.After his father’s death he started a new community and built a church at Te Tāpiri. It is said that the church could hold 1000 Māori. The community’s rules were the Ten Commandments of God as given to Moses on Mount Sinai all those years ago. Three hundred people lived at that settlement all governed by the word of God. In the 1850s Tamihana built another Christian community named Pēria. Pēria was a much larger community than Te Tāpiri. It had a post office a schoolhouse and a flour mill. It wasadministered by a tribal committee of rūnanga. Pēria soon became a prosperous community through trading with Europeans locally and as far afield as Tāmaki. Even that tino taniwha known as John Gorst at that time a civil commissioner in the Waikato was impressed with the political social and secular way in which Pēria was run.We know of Tamihana’s concerns about land sales and how he soon realised that the Government was not listening to growing Māori concern over alienation of Māori land. History records Tamihana’s support for a pan-tribal council which ultimately became the Kīngitanga. Tamihana’s preference for kōrero over violence remained consistently in the forefront of his mind. He was a reluctant combatant who gave up his taiaha in a gesture of peace.Then came the raupatu—the devastating loss of land and mana by hundreds upon hundreds of hapū of many many iwi from Tāmaki to Taupō and across to the Bay of Plenty. What became of Pēria? Well like everything in the raupatu it was lost. It was taken unjustly. A thriving Christian community involved in commercial transactions with Pākehā Europeans was forfeited. The community of Pēria’s economic base was completely wiped out and the families left destitute. They never ever recovered.The loss of Pēria is but one story of grievance and loss that runs through the histories of Waikato-Tainui Ngāti Raukawa Ngāti Maniapoto Ngāti Koroki Kahukura and Ngāti Hauā in the Kīngitanga. There are many many more. It seems to me that the last thing the Crown needed during the New Zealand Wars was a Māori community that was seen to be thriving and prosperous. Pēria under Wīremu Tamihana and Parihaka under Te Whiti and Tohu bear a striking resemblance. They were two communities given over to Christian values and run by tribal rūnanga with their own leaders and whose communities had started to acquire the tools of their European neighbours—Christianity education a post office and flour mills. In the 1850s Pēria like Parihaka was to become must have been the envy of Māori and Pākehā alike.This story of Tamihana and of the communities he established underpins this settlement in terms of the history for these iwi. I am looking forward to doing my bit as part of the Māori Affairs Committee as we go through the aspects of this bill and as we hear the submissions. We have got a lot of work on our plate. We have quite a full work programme but I know that we will be getting through that mahi as expeditiously as we can. I would like to acknowledge the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations for giving us plenty of mahi to do. I would also once again like to acknowledge the whānau of Ngāti Hauā and Ngāti Koroki Kahukura who have travelled all this way to be here at this first reading. I commend this bill to the House. Tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa.