Finlayson Christopher: Ngati Mutunga Claims Settlement Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Finlayson Christopher: Ngati Mutunga Claims Settlement Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:635;Page:6430] 
CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (National) 
: 
 First I apologise to the Committee. I missed the boat. I thought we were still on the title so the Minister was very generous in not boxing my ears for being slow. But I do want to say something about clause 7 because the member for Otaki raised an interesting question about the National Party’s policy on the principles of the Treaty. I thought I had articulated them reasonably clearly when we debated the New Zealand First bill to deal with deleting references to the principles of the Treaty and essentially my friend Mr Henare has outlined them very well this afternoon. 
The position is this. We say that there are some pieces of legislation—for example the Conservation Act—that are of general application where sections that state that the Act is to be interpreted in accordance with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi can be deleted because we say that they are statutes of general application and those sorts of vague references do not necessarily help in the interpretation of the Act. I drew a distinction however between general legislation and settlement legislation. I think that it is very dangerous and unnecessary in the context of settlement legislation to delete references to the principles of the Treaty. Particularly clause 7 of the Ngati Mutunga Claims Settlement Bill has in English the text of the various acknowledgments entered into between Ngati Mutunga and the Crown in the deed of settlement and the Crown acknowledges certain things. 
I do not think that it is very clever in the context of a debate in Committee or in the House for Parliament to be deleting references in the context of a deed that has already been agreed between the settling party in this case Ngati Mutunga and the Crown.  
 And that is why the National Party’s position which I outlined in the first reading debate on the member’s very own Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Deletion Bill was that we would not interfere with those clauses; nor would we interfere with clauses in legislation like Te Rununga o Ngai Tahu Act 1996. But as I said earlier we would interfere and delete provisions that are of general application. Further I said that if there were clauses in legislation where we thought there ought to be some kind of Treaty clause we would draft that clause with some precision and detail and not rely upon the generalist phrase “the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”. 
So there we have it; it is not an unprincipled approach at all. That is the National Party policy as articulated most recently in the context of the debate on that member’s bill and that is the approach we will adopt when the bill comes before the Justice and Electoral Committee. I know that we have had quite a number of submissions and I am very much looking forward to the debate on that issue. But I thought for the benefit of the member for Otaki I should make it quite clear that everything Mr Henare said this afternoon—as we would expect—was completely and utterly correct.