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:17072] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 One of the Green Party amendments is to insert a new clause 43AA into this part. That clause proposes that the rights are inalienable and that no person can: “alienate or cancel any interest in an ancestral connection order customary rights order or territorial customary rights.” We were very concerned—and we raised this at the Fisheries and Other Sea-related Legislation Committee as well—that customary rights orders can be very easily cancelled. The bill provides that once cancelled they are extinguished forever.  
Customary rights are very difficult to get of course. One has to pass very high thresholds. One effectively has to have carried out an activity since 1840 that has not in any way been interrupted or interfered with by any enactment or rule of law or interrupted by anything as simple and fleeting as a resource consent. Once one has passed those high thresholds to get the customary rights order one can then go through a very easy process to cancel it. Basically if the holder of the order is an authorised person—and that person’s name is on it—has given notice to the other people who are affected by that order has held a hui about it and there are no meritorious objections that order can be cancelled very easily. The application the holder must make has to include the reasons for the cancellation what process the holder wants to carry out for consultation and some statement indicating how much support the holder may have from the community affected by the customary rights order. That is so easy to do with very very few people in support. One has only to look at how few people can support and vote for treaty settlements and governance entities that are accepted by this Government and one will see just how easily the numbers can be managed in such a way that very few people who are affected by and entitled to the exercise of that customary right need to be involved in order to cancel it forever.  
A customary rights order sets out the customary rights that those people their children their grandchildren and generations to come are entitled to exercise by right of their whakapapa from their tipuna from mai rano. They have those rights and it is not appropriate that they can then be so easily on a simple application to the court cancelled and extinguished forever. There are no provisions in this bill to protect that customary rights order. There are no provisions even to indicate whether anyone can object to its cancellation after it has happened and reinstate it—those processes would not work and would not be effective. I imagine that those people would have to take judicial review action in the High Court for that change to occur. The people who will get customary rights orders—if they can get them—will not be people who have the resources and who can spend money on a High Court action in order to reinstate the customary rights that they have already spent so much time money and effort getting.  
There is a series of Green Party amendments. They delete the capacity to cancel customary rights orders in the bill entirely and they make sure that none of those rights can be cancelled or extinguished once they have been identified. If John Tamihere is right that the Government’s intention in this bill is to protect customary rights there is no justification for enabling their cancellation and extinguishment forever by a means as simple as a written application to the court—a process that does not even have a voting requirement in it. There are no numbers in the bill’s provisions to state that there would have to be more than 50 percent support for the cancellation. It could even be the case that those orders could be bought out.  
That is not the whole point. If one wants to trust the Government on this bill one can listen to its members who say that the whole point of the bill is to protect those rights and to identify and keep them extant through common law provisions—but clearly that is not the case. The Government has made those rights exchangeable and tradable and that goes directly to the heart of the bill. The whole point is to protect the foreshore and seabed from being tradable and saleable and to protect customary rights from being extinguished so as to enable Maori to continue their activities and engage with their customary activities over time but this bill fails us.