Moroney Sue: Ngati Tuwharetoa Raukawa and Te Arawa River Iwi Waikato River Bill — First Reading 
Moroney Sue: Ngati Tuwharetoa Raukawa and Te Arawa River Iwi Waikato River Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:665;Page:12821] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 E te Whare tena tatou katoa. Ka nui te mihi i roto i te wiki o te reo Maori. Tena koutou e nga iwi o te awa Te Arawa Raukawa Ngati Tuwharetoa tena koutou katoa. 
[ 
Greetings to us all the House. I acknowledge you hugely in Maori Language Week. I acknowledge you the tribes of the river namely Te Arawa Raukawa and Ngati Tuwharetoa. Greetings to you all 
.]  
It has been one of the highlights of my short time in Parliament to be here for the third reading of the Waikato-Tainui Raupatu Claims (Waikato River) Settlement Bill. It is indeed a great honour to be here for the first reading of this Ngati Tuwharetoa Raukawa and Te Arawa River Iwi Waikato River Bill which partners that one. I say with a great sense of pride as a Waikato-based member of Parliament that our area our region will take a leadership position over the co-governance of our special taonga the Waikato River. In fact I feel so proud about this that in a recent media interview I was having the journalist thought that he would put me on the spot and ask me to name one thing—just one thing—that I thought the current Government had got right and it was this. 
Paul Quinn 
: One! 
SUE MORONEY 
: Yes I worked hard at it but I was very gracious in deciding that there was in fact one that I could name. I named the Government’s going ahead with the Waikato River settlement because I really believe that it is so important to our region that the politics have been taken out of the issue. It has been incredibly important; I do thank the current Government and the Ministers for their continued commitment to a process that was started under Labour. We did not have to think that because of a change in Government we had to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one so I offer my congratulations to the Government. I offer my congratulations to the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations who has continued the good work; as has been mentioned he has refined and improved the process brought about by this bill as it has gone along. 
It would not be proper for me to make reference to the Waikato-Tainui Raupatu Claims (Waikato River) Settlement Bill without also bringing the greetings to this House of my good colleague the Hon Nanaia Mahuta who is not able to be present for the debate this evening. I know that she along with the rest of my Labour colleagues wholeheartedly support this bill which is ground-breaking. I believe that not only is New Zealand watching but the world is watching what is happening here because we are breaking ground on both a nationwide level and an international level. I feel incredibly proud as I said before that our region is taking this leadership position and taking it not only to New Zealand but also to the world. 
In doing that it is important—and I address these comments perhaps to Mr Garrett—that sometimes we need to take a calculated risk when we are in a leadership position. When one is leading and doing something different in order to improve a current situation sometimes one needs to step outside one’s comfort zone. I would encourage the ACT Party and the percentage of the population it represents to do exactly that—to join with the rest of the population and recognise that what we are doing now is not working. It has not worked. We need to look only at the degradation of the Waikato River to recognise that we need to do something different. 
Certainly from a Waikato perspective I can say that there has been very little opposition to the Waikato River settlement and I think that tells us something important about our maturity as a nation. It tells me that we are getting there. There will be some dissenting voices but I would ask those dissenting voices—and they are well and truly in the minority—whether we could do a worse job. I ask whether we could have done a worse job than what we have done to date in our guardianship of that river because I do not believe that we could have. So it is time to go forward and to look at other solutions and I believe that this is a fantastic start on finding a different solution. 
It is interesting on a number of counts that we are debating this bill today. It is Maori Language Week which a number of members have made reference to during the course of this debate. I think that makes it a special week to be introducing this bill into the House. It is also relevant because today I noticed that Environment Waikato has made an announcement that it is lifting its monitoring of Waikato dairy farms on the Waikato River from 15 percent to 25 percent each year to check compliance with dairy effluent rules. Today Labour congratulated Environment Waikato on that move and I notice that chair Peter Buckley is in the public gallery this evening. I welcome him and I thank him for the leadership that Environment Waikato is taking on this issue. We had been concerned to learn that last year’s monitoring had revealed a 25 percent increase in events where untreated effluent was at risk of entering water sources. But we are encouraged that Environment Waikato has said that in 80 percent of cases its re-inspections show that there is in fact improved effluent management on re-inspection. We in Labour believe that increased monitoring is likely to lead to increased compliance so that is some good news from today and makes the debate on this bill even more relevant. 
Earlier this evening I had the opportunity to meet with Water New Zealand. I remind members just how important and what a precious commodity water is around the world and increasingly so in New Zealand and how important it is that we take a leadership role and take our guardianship role very seriously in ensuring that we have a better quality of water. I think there has been some progress. It is not all bad news. Certainly in the last decade there has been some progress in the Waikato River. We have noticed locally that just one or two species that we had not seen around for a while have been coming back into the river. That is one of the measures but of course there will be even more stringent measures than that. 
I look forward to seeing what I might call the stocktake that the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research is currently undertaking to guide us through this process to tell us where we start from now and where we go to next. I think that that piece of work will be incredibly important in informing and detailing the journey that we take together. 
There has been a little bit of debate about what co-governance means and I think it is worthwhile just reflecting on what this bill says about co-governance. The co-governance framework includes the recognition of the specific and enduring relationship of iwi with the Waikato River. I say to Mr Garrett that I do not feel threatened by that at all. It also covers the development of objectives for the Waikato River by iwi the legislative recognition of the vision and strategy for the Waikato River the establishment of and granting of functions and powers to the Waikato River Authority through legislation and importantly the establishment and funding of a contestable Waikato River Clean-Up Trust. 
I do not wish to take up any more time in this debate. I know we have further readings on this particular bill and I look forward to contributing to them. I feel it is important that as we have visitors with us as my colleague has said we give them an opportunity to celebrate the introduction of this bill into the House this evening. I think they should be celebrating it and we should be celebrating it. We should celebrate this together because it is incumbent on all of us to get this right as the legislation is for our future generations. We all have a stake in that. Thank you.