Clendon David: Ngāti Whātua o Kaipara Claims Settlement Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Ngāti Whātua o Kaipara Claims Settlement Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 05 June 2013. Volume:690;Page:10823. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): Kia ora Mr Speaker. Kei te mihi nui ki ngā manuhiri ngā hapū o Ngāti Whātua o Kaipara tēnā koutou katoa.[Hello Mr Speaker. I acknowledge the Ngāti Whātua of Kaipara visitors and subtribes greatly. Greetings to you all.]I am pleased to take a short call just to affirm the Green Party’s support for this legislation the Ngāti Whātua o Kaipara Claims Settlement Bill as we endeavour to support all of the settlement bills.I would like to begin by simply taking a moment to acknowledge as others have done rather a large gap in the Labour benches this morning. We reference of course our late and much-lamented colleague Parekura who always brought a distinct flavour to these debates. He is missed but his legacy continues and will do so far into the future.One of the mixed benefits of being an MP and particularly a northern MP is that I travel routinely. My journey to work each Tuesday morning literally gives me a bird’s-eye view of the Kaipara Harbour and the landscape that surrounds it. It is an extraordinary landscape—our largest harbour—and a very rich landscape historically an enormously productive landscape. The richness of that place both culturally after 300 years of occupation by ngā hapū o Ngāti Whātua o Kaipara and of course ecologically—the richness of the land and the sea—attracted people to live there so many years ago. Of course sadly over time that landscape both culturally and physically the environment has been degraded and it is an unfortunate reality that now the work begins again—or continues I should say—to restore the quality of both the cultural landscape and the physical landscape the ecology of that place.This settlement bill we are debating and will pass unanimously today I am sure is a significant step towards that restoration and for that we applaud the work of those at Government level who have contributed to that. I must commend Minister Finlayson—something I must confess the Greens do not routinely do—for his stated commitment to continue to put energy and time into the Kaipara.I mentioned degradation. It saddens me to think back to my childhood when driving around the countryside you would routinely hear people sneeringly remark about Māori land and how one could identify Māori land because that was the land growing gorse and with broken fences and no sign of much work being done. Of course what was missing from those statements is captured in the text of this bill which notes that the Native Land Court established in 1862 was intended to—and did very successfully—alienate Māori from their land. It goes on in the bill to say that the law did not provide a way for the owners to collectively manage their land. This meant it was difficult forowners to accumulate capital and make improvements and frequently owners had little option but to use sale proceeds to meet their immediate needs. That has been part of the history of the Kaipara rohe as indeed it has been of the entire motu of New Zealand generally.Now is the time to celebrate the fact that we see in the course of these settlement bills a significant step towards restoring the integrity of the land as we restore the integrity of the mana—recognise the mana whenua for who they are and what they are. In that sense it is a genuine pleasure to be part of the process albeit in a small way.A week or two ago one of our Labour colleagues used a word that was not familiar to many of us and in that spirit I am going to introduce a new word and talk about the palimpsest of Kaipara. That is a word that has many meanings but in landscape terms it is one I came across in a former life. It talks about the marks the impressions that are left by human interaction with the land over time. Those marks can sometimes be erased. They can be the contours of a hill where once there was a pā. It can be a kūmara pit. It can be the remnants of a stone wall. But what we see around the Kaipara as in so many other places is lines that reflect dispossession alienation and degradation.I believe that the passing of this bill will make a contribution to restoration so that in future people will look at that land and they will see impressions they will see marks on the landscape that speak of productivity of richness of quality of life and of integrity of the environment. That is the challenge that lies before us all to ensure our ongoing support beyond the speeches and the goodwill of today to ensure that we put our energies into supporting the ongoing recognition of mana whenua throughout the country and in this specific case of course the mana whenua of Kaipara Harbour and their surrounding land.A year or so ago—in fact probably longer; 2 years ago perhaps—I was fortunate to be at a hui at Puatahi Marae that was a getting together of a group called the Integrated Kaipara Harbour Management Group. That is not a title that flows from the tongue but it is an extraordinary and admirable coming together of Māori interests of local hapū and whānau of farmers of conservation groups of ordinary members of the public and of local government. The common cause the common purpose of that group is the restoration ofthe whenua and of the moana of Kaipara. The ambitious and worthy goal of that group is to plant 2 million trees around Kaipara by 2015. That is an extraordinarily ambitious goal and one I am sure it is well on the way to fulfilling.We know that as we restore the land we are restoring people because people and their land are interwoven inextricably. If one is degraded the other inevitably is degraded. As we restore the land the rivers and the harbour we are also restoring the quality of life of the people who live in it and on it and whose tipuna have lived there for such a long time. So I can say that community ground-upward initiatives like the Integrated Kaipara Harbour Management Group indicate to us that communities often move faster than does the legislativeprocess. In a sense we are catching up with where the community is leading us and notably where ngā hapū ngā iwi katoa are leading us to restore this place and to restore this country to the richness and to the quality that it deserves to have.Once again I extend to the people of Kaipara our greetings our goodwill and our ongoing support from the Green Party. Kia ora koutou.