Smith Nick: Foreshore and Seabed Bill — First Reading 
Smith Nick: Foreshore and Seabed Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:617;Page:12739] 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson) 
: 
 The mess that surrounds this bill marks the end for this Government. This bill fails Maori; it fails all of the people of New Zealand. It is one of those bills so riddled with compromise that it serves the interests of no one. 
What has surprised me in this debate is that in talking about the foreshore and seabed of New Zealand—and I remind the House that we are talking about 18000 kilometres of coastline and 26 million hectares of foreshore and seabed—I have heard too little from the Government about how this bill will improve the management of that foreshore and seabed for all New Zealanders. 
We are in this waka together whether it is the economic use of our foreshore and seabed or the important protection of the environmental and recreational values of our foreshore. I want this House to honestly ask whether this bill will improve things. I say it will not. I say this bill is more driven by politics than providing a regime that will best serve the foreshore and seabed interests of all New Zealanders. 
In the foreshore and seabed we already have a plethora of Government agencies that have responsibilities. We have the Ministry of Fisheries the Department of Conservation regional councils local councils and also the Ministry of Economic Development. With the confusing array of ancestral connections new orders for customary rights on top of those that already exist in our fisheries laws I believe that we will end up with nothing less than an absolute muddle of different instruments that will serve nobody’s interests. Far from securing the rights of those who recreate and use our foreshore and seabed this bill does the opposite. 
 Those new provisions for ancestral connection are a step backwards. I ask the members opposite who rejected the concepts of ancestral landscapes in the resource management law because they would create too much confusion why suddenly ancestral connections are somehow going to do the job? 
National does not accept that Maori own the foreshore or seabed and that is not what the Court of Appeal said. Nor has it ever been the intention of this Parliament to have the Maori Land Court issue title for areas of foreshore and seabed. It is actually quite simple—land laws do not work at sea. It will be as much Maori rights with quota and Maori rights to customary fishing that will be countered across if we go down the road of having individual fee simple title in respect of that foreshore and seabed. 
But what is awful about this bill is the way it will compromise sensible management of that foreshore. Under this bill we will have areas of ancestral connection customary rights orders customary fishing rights quota-holder rights maritime transport rights and resource management regional plans. It is nothing less than a bureaucratic mess and it will adversely affect the management of those areas. One needs to start this debate from a principled point of view of how to effectively manage those areas of foreshore and seabed and this bill does anything but achieve that. 
I also want to make the point that the Prime Minister has failed the test of leadership. She failed to participate in this debate failed to speak to the Maori people who were on the forecourt yesterday and failed to have a clear policy on this issue over 9 months. Now we are to understand from John Tamihere that the ball game is still open and we do not know what the final Government policy is. That confusion and uncertainty is the cause of this problem and the Government need look no further than the mirror for this mess that will bring it down.