Turei Metiria: Foreshore and Seabed Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Turei Metiria: Foreshore and Seabed Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:621;Page:17021] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party also has a number of amendments to Part 2. One amendment is to alter clause 12 and like United Future to put in place an entrenchment clause. We will be supporting United Future’s amendment and hope that if that fails United Future will support our amendment. However our amendment has a significant difference in that it excludes any agreements or special legislation for the transfer of title for treaty settlements. The whole point of this bill has been to completely reconfigure the way that customary rights and potential title in the spectrum of title are available to Maori. Treaty settlements may be appropriate in this area and therefore we have an exclusion in our entrenchment clause for that.  
Another of our amendments is to clause 28. Clause 28 has been changed by Supplementary Order Paper 304. The changes that have been negotiated to that clause—we understand by New Zealand First—have meant that the territorial customary rights for Maori will be virtually impossible to get. The changes have significantly confined the criteria that Maori will have to meet in order to get a territorial customary right. There are two criteria that render this clause effectively useless. The first is that the exclusive use and occupation has to have happened substantially without interruption between 1840 and now. It would be almost impossible to show that those uses and occupations have occurred to the exclusion of all others.  
If everyone in the whole country has been working on the basis that they can go anywhere anytime they want then it will have been impossible for anyone to have kept people from general access to those areas of land. Yet Maori have to prove that not only have they continued to use and occupy that same area for the same purposes since 1840 but that they have been able to exclude others from it. It is an extremely high test. There is no justification for that and it will be virtually impossible to prove. So it is making it very very difficult for Maori to get through that particular hurdle.  
Then of course that same little subclause restricts the activity to what was happening in 1840. The select committee heard evidence from iwi and hapu who talked about the kinds of sharing manaaki processes that have happened over time where coastal iwi would grant certain rights to inland iwi for the purposes of customary activity on the foreshore and seabed. If under tikanga Maori those processes have happened since 1840 then the people who have those customary Maori tikanga rights will not be able to exercise them because New Zealand First wants to keep Maori static as they were in 1840. New Zealand First and its Maori MPs want to keep Maori as savages—as natives—in their own land. Tikanga Maori is entitled to as much development and progression as any other culture in this country. New Zealand First is keeping us from being able to develop our customary rights to develop our tikanga Maori to engage in the customary tikanga processes that we have been engaging in since mai rano yet it continues to keep us down. New Zealand First wants us still in grass skirts and in the museum.  
If the concern is to make sure that those customary rights are legitimate there are other ways of making sure. Maori do not need to be continually confined to the existence we had in 1840. What is the point? We are continually told that we have to be modern people in this new technological age. We are doing that all the time. We are meeting those expectations. We are managing ourselves in those ways. We are achieving and excelling in the modern world yet New Zealand First and the Labour Government want to keep us static and stuck in 1840. This clause is an absolute disgrace. It is fundamentally racist. New Zealand First and the Labour Government are complicit in keeping us stuck in 1840. The Green Party will ask for the removal of that clause.