Davis KelvinHon KELVIN DAVIS (Minister for Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti): Strangely enough the new Crown-Māori relations portfolio is under the justice review so I'd like to take the opportunity to talk about the work that's been done to establish Te Arawhiti. Now last year we set about on initially 18 hui around the country to talk to people about what the new Māori-Crown relations portfolio should look like. Due to popular demand that number of hui increased to I think 33.There were some consistent messages that we heard from people throughout the country in terms of what they wanted to see from—well it wasn't named Te Arawhiti at the time—the portfolio. One of the things that they kept saying to us one of the messages was You know Governments you've got to stop going around and telling Māoris that they're the problem and that we've got the solution." They said "Stop telling us what you're going to do. Come out and talk to us and have the discussion about what the solutions are going to be."Te Arawhiti was formed. Te Arawhiti translated into English means "the bridge" and it's a great analogy for what we're trying to achieve. The name comes about because of a sermon that I used to hear from one of the old uncles up north an Anglican minister by the name of Charlie Shortland. He spoke about there being a Māori world—like a river bank—and a Pākehā world—the other side of a river bank. Te Tiriti o Waitangi was a bridge that connected one world to the other world.He asked the question: how often and who has crossed from one side from their world into the other side—learnt the language learnt the customs learnt everything. Almost entirely the traffic has been from the Māori world into the Pākehā world and Māori have learnt the ways and the customs of Pākehā. The question he posed was: how many times have people from the other world crossed back over that bridge into the Māori world and learnt the customs and the language and everything? He said it does happen but very rarely.To use that analogy to describe what Te Arawhiti is doing it's basically bringing Government ministries agencies and departments from the Pākehā world across that bridge into the Māori world so that public servants understand how Māori think and feel and why we do the things the way we do. Part of it is to stop to prevent Māori having to continuously justify our world point of view. So that's part of what Te Arawhiti does. It's trying to bring people across that bridge Te Tiriti o Waitangi into the other world. The question is whether people actually want to cross from the Pākehā world into the Māori world because that would be telling if they don't want to.Aside from that one of Te Arawhiti's jobs is to monitor the post-settlement commitments. Now there is something like 10000 of them and the monitoring of those 10000 commitments was basically done—it was paper based: spreadsheets and things like that. So what we're developing is a portal where somebody can tap in something to do with their Treaty settlement and that will come up and they'll be able to see all their commitments around that. It's quite intensive work and hopefully we'll be able to launch that portal properly in a month or so. Just a couple of examples of the great work that Te Arawhiti has been doing: one Waitangi Day. People will know that Waitangi Day over the last two years has gone really smoothly. One of the things we've done is depoliticise the occasion. I think as politicians we all need to take ownership of the mess we caused because Waitangi Day became a bit of a popularity contest—who can bring the most people wearing red or blue or green or black on to the marae down the bottom of Te Tii Marae and make it into a sort of popularity contest. We've depoliticised it. We want Waitangi Day to be a day that we can all celebrate as New Zealanders and hence that's why we all go on together. We have made sure that the Leader of the Opposition the leader of New Zealand First the leader of the Greens and Labour speakers all have an opportunity to speak. We all stand up and sing and support everybody so that we depoliticise that occasion so that we can create a great celebration of our national day for all New Zealanders. Quickly the other great thing that we've been doing is working with the Iwi Chairs Forum on shared priorities on shared work streams and reporting back together at the quarterly meetings—as opposed to how things were in the past when basically random Ministers turned up and spoke about the random things that they're doing with no real direction on how it all fits together. Kia ora."