Flavell Te UruroaHon TE URUROA FLAVELL (Co-Leader—Māori Party): Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker kia ora tātou katoa. Ka mihi rā ki te āhuatanga o ngā kōrero ki ngā manuhiri kua tae mai i tēnei pō haere mai ka mutu ki a tātau e noho nei ā i roto i tō tātou Whare.[Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker and salutations to us all. I acknowledge the tenor of the contributions and to the visitors who have arrived here this evening I welcome you and furthermore us seated here in this House of ours.]Can I join with other speakers in acknowledging the member who is sponsoring this bill Jonathan Young and thank him for the opportunity to meet with the New Plymouth District Council and with Mayor Andrew Judd who came to my office last week to give us some overview about this particular bill—and members of the council as well. I have got to say that I know this area well. I know many of the people involved and I heard Carmel Sepuloni talking about Te Kauhoe Wano a good friend. So it is nice to know those connections—and of course your connection there too Mr Deputy Speaker to Te Tai Hauāuru. What I said to the council and to the mayor was that in these sorts of cases if iwi will give support to these sorts of bills then we are prepared to give support as well. This week has been sort of a strange week. At the beginning of the week we had a hīkoi from Ngāti Ruanui coming down to tell us that they wanted no more mining on the west coast. We also had a hīkoi in Waitara today I think at Ōwae Marae where a number of the hapū members were a little bit unhappy with decisions made by their trusts and I will come to them shortly. We have also had the debacle with regard to no discussions on bills on Friday and then of course today we have this bill so Taranaki is in the limelight for this particular week. Be that as it may I know many of the people involved had to come to some sort of a decision about how we are going to go with this particular bill. On the one hand we have a trust Te Kotahitanga o Te Atiawa Trust which is a post-settlement governance entity. It is a private trust with the purpose of receiving Treaty settlement assets and holding managing and administering the trust fund for the benefit of its members. In August 2014 the district council and the trust entered into an agreement to start having the discussion about the Waitara endowment lands. Since entering into the heads of agreement both parties have been engaging—and I heard that story very much from the mayor and the council members and representatives and I also took the opportunity to ring those of Te Atiawa to try to see where things had landed. On the one hand I know that there are people who disagree with this particular bill—absolutely—because they were marching in the streets of Waitara today. I have got to say that this is not about Treaty settlements; this is about a specific issue with regard to the endowment lands. But in a sense they are actually almost tied together because they came about from raupatu so you cannot get away from that. On the one hand the group that is stuck with this particular situation—and there are all sorts of players in it: the leaseholders the council the Government Te Atiawa those opposed the hapū the rūnanga those who signed it a fair few years ago and those who are now stuck with having to make decisions. It is not a nice situation. I have to say that under the situation that we have the Māori Party has no choice but to support the bill in its first reading. I endorse the comments that have been made already by people like Carmel Sepuloni and Pita Paraone. Why? To allow the iwi to come forward and have their say. After that I have got to say—I rang Mayor Andrew Judd and I told him and I do not know whether I have caught up with the member Jonathan Young—all bets are off. I am not too sure. We have just got to see what is going to happen after that. It will be disastrous if we cannot advance it but on the other hand Te Atiawa through the trust has also said that they have some concerns. In fact they set some of those out to me. So although on the one hand they do want to advance and they say specifically that in terms of the discussion with Te Atiawa it has been about the transfer of some land in Waitara to Te Atiawa the right of leaseholders to freehold their property the lifting of restrictions on how to proceed from the endowment lands and how they can be used the establishment of a statutory board etc. etc.—there are other bits and pieces in the bill. In the short time I have I am not going to go into them. Te Atiawa say that there actually are some key outstanding issues that they want to take up. For example in the current bill there is the appointment of the chair of the joint board by the council. They suggest that actually they could leave it over to the board itself as opposed to the council making the appointment—leave it to the board. They do not necessarily want to do it themselves. They say that there is no ability for Te Atiawa to have a first right of refusal over residential and commercial properties that the council may dispose of into the future. Of course when you are talking land in Taranaki these sorts of issues are serious stuff. In respect of the ability of the Taranaki Regional Council to apply its portion of the proceeds from the land outside Waitara that is a debatable issue that they do not feel very comfortable about. There are other bits and pieces that will come up in the select committee. I am hoping of course as we refer it on to it—and I am comfortable with the Māori Affairs Committee—that we can actually tease some of those issues apart and get a better feel from the community and in particular about Te Atiawa. I do not envy the select committee the job because it is a hard job and in one way or another not everyone is going to win but the hope will be that by putting it into a select committee process allowing the process to go ahead we will hear the views of the community and the council and then be able to make informed decisions from there. Ka nui te mihi kia ora tātou.