SpeechTĀMATI COFFEY (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. Tuatahi he mihi tēnei ki a koutou o Ngāti Maniapoto. Tainui waka Tainui tangata e mihi kau ana ki koutou katoa kua tae mai nei ki te tautoko i tēnei kaupapa tō pire.[Firstly I greet you of Ngāti Maniapoto. The Tainui canoe and the Tainui people acknowledge your coming here to support this issue your bill.]I would like to first of all just thank our manuhiri who have come here today to witness and to be part of this process. So often over this COVID pandemic we've had nobody in the gallery so it's really nice to have warm bodies in the House to be able to talk to. So I just want to acknowledge that first and foremost. The Minister has outlined the couple of changes that the select committee requested but I've got to say that it's never easy. When you're talking about historical Treaty settlements they are never easy and they're made harder by the fact that there is a deed of settlement that happens everybody signs up to it and then it comes to the select committee for a formal process through the parliamentary system. We can't substantially change the things that occur in the deed of settlement from the time of the deed of settlement to now—and nor should we—but we should be able to scrutinise the process and if we believe that the process has been wrong or if we believe that something needs to be raised then we do. Part of that process is the submission hearings where we have to listen to everybody's side of the story and sometimes that comes with a lot of heartache and a lot of pain. In this particular situation we felt that heartache and we felt that pain that has gone on between some parts of the iwi who believe one way is the right way and other parts of the iwi who believe that they are right and that they want to pursue things the way that they did. The Minister did briefly say that in total we've had 26 submission: only two in support 11 in opposition nine wanting to see changes to the bill and four where we would actually say No position expressed." They're the aunties and the uncles that just want to be heard about something. We get to the end of their submission and we say "Did they support it or not?" and we don't really know so they go down as "No position expressed." However some of those people that didn't support the bill just generally oppose the Treaty settlement process. They believe that it's divisive or they believe that the Crown is not doing enough but they came forward and they had their voice heard. Some of the submissions talked about the Minister and talked about the fact that in their position they felt as though there'd been a lack of consultation with the Minister and I want to say that we had to scrutinise that as well. We had to find the information on how many times did this particular group meet with the Minister and we were satisfied that there had been due diligence on that part. This has been a long road for the people of Ngāti Maniapoto and again it was made harder because there had been these differing factions. We worked out really early on that there was amongst the people that were causing a bit of dispute a real fundamental whakapapa recollection about Rereahu and about Maniapoto and about Ihinga-a-Rangi and where everybody sits in that and what became clear to us was that this was a conversation about mana and about where people felt as though their mana was where they wanted it to be and the impact that they felt was going to be felt by people if they didn't sort this out. So this became very quickly a conversation about who had the mana was the mana handed over or could mana be handed over and these are really deep philosophical issues for the Māori Affairs Committee to have to grapple with. It's easy when everybody agrees but actually when they don't you really have to sit down and ask the questions: has the process been followed and what exactly is our job in this House? There's one thing that is not the job of the Māori Affairs Committee to do and that's to decide what the right whakapapa is or who gave mana to whom. We have to go with information that's around us and I want to point to a very pertinent clause. It's an important argument. The Rereahu position was summarised in a submission by Grant Erskine from Afeaki Chambers which said that the bill would remove the ancestral association of two iwi Rereahu and Te Ihinga-a-Rangi. The submission stated that it didn't want to prevent Maniapoto from settling with the Crown but it didn't want Maniapoto's claims to effectively confiscate the land over which Rereahu iwi and Te Ihinga-a-Rangi iwi have mana whenua. The submitters claimed that Maniapoto do not have a mandate from Rereahu or Te Ihinga-a-Rangi to agree settlement terms which relate to them. The submission states that "The Bill if enacted would create a fresh grievance." and that's something that we don't ever want to do. We never want to create a grievance out of a grievance. What we did in that position was we took advice from the Waitangi Tribunal report and again this parliamentary process that we're going through is just one part of the process. Our iwi have been on this process for a long time working through the Waitangi Tribunal and working back at home with the iwi. There have been many incarnations of this. In the tribunal report Whatu Ahuru and also the other report the Maniapoto mandate report of 2020 the report provided findings and recommendations on how to settle claims with the rohe of Pōtae region and it acknowledged that there are alternative readings of the Rereahu whakapapa. But the tribunal came down in favour of the interpretation that Rereahu had conferred his mana tangata on Maniapoto and that the Crown had been guided by this finding in its approach to the mandate challenges. In the right of reply that we have from the Maniapoto Māori Trust Board they acknowledged that a stand-off had happened between the aspiration for a collective settlement versus the aspiration for multiple settlements and that was at the heart of what most speakers had gone and put forward. We believe that the Maniapoto Māori Trust Board always wanted a collective settlement but argued that this didn't meant subservience for any of those individual groups which would make up the new governance entity Te Nehenehenui. We were satisfied that the new entity Te Nehenehenui would keep the door open for those other iwi that wanted to come and sit at the table and that's what the structure currently looks like. There is a need and a want to get this show on the road and this has been far too long whānau. So I look forward to the third reading where we can actually tick this off so that our iwi can move forward with confidence. They can start investing they can start building and they can start on their journey of reparation for what this Crown did—the Government in this Parliament that was standing in right here. We need to be able to just give the money over and say sorry and do what's right and put things right and that will make us feel better in here but actually it's the start of a whole new journey for the iwi. So I congratulate you on getting this far. I want to thank all of the submitters that appeared before the select committee even though many of them didn't support where this was going. But we know that this is a process this is a journey and I'm looking forward to moving this journey out of this House so that our whānau up there can actually move on with their settlement and with their lives so that they can make the decisions that our tamariki mokopuna need them to be able to make hei oranga mō te iwi [for the well-being of the people].Nō reira e te whānau huri rauna i tēnei Whare tēnā koutou tēnā koutou mauriora ki a tātou katoa. [So to the family all around this House greetings greetings and life to one and all.]"