Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): Ngā mihi o te rā ki a koutou ā e ngā manuhiri Te Whanganui Iwi ngā Hapū ngā kaitiaki katoa o Te Awa Nui ā tēnā koutou katoa.[Salutations of the day to you collectively and to the visitors the Whanganui tribe the subtribes and to all the guardians of the great river. Acknowledgments to all of you.]Before I begin to address the business before us with your indulgence I would just like to put on the record of the House an acknowledgement of the passing of a remarkable New Zealander. Maggie Lawton who was a scientist a businesswoman a policy maker and later in life a politician—a member of the Otago Regional Council—sadly passed away a day or two ago. She was a leader—a leader of a sort that not only sets high standards but then enables people to meet those standards. She was a proud mother with reason to be proud and above all she will be remembered for her leadership and for her commitment to the well-being of this country and all of those people in it. Ki ngā mate e whā moe mai moe mai moe mai i roto i Te Ringa o Te Atua haere haere haere rā. Te hunga mate ki te hunga mate te hunga ora ki te hunga ora mauri ora.[To the four deaths sleep rest and slumber in the arms of God. Depart go forth and farewell. Let the dead remain among the dead and the living among the living. Let there be life.] To return to much happier matters it is a great pleasure and it is a privilege to speak on behalf of the Greens in support of this quite remarkable piece of legislation. The Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations referred to it as historic and it is historic in many ways not only for at least partly putting right the harm that has been done to Whanganui iwi and indeed to the awa over many years but also to the extent to which it does break new ground or strengthen our commitment to embedding Te Ao Māori into Pākehā law. That is a remarkable step. It is remarkable progress.In one of my former lives I was fortunate to be a lecturer. I taught in resource management. One of the tasks we set our students quite early on in the programme was to challenge them in a sense to understand their own world view—the way in which they interpreted and saw and understood the world. It was thin ice for academics to be challenging young people at that level at that very fundamental level about their values and beliefs. But the purpose of it in part was to enable them to recognise and to strengthen their awareness that although they had a particular world view—a product of their culture of their upbringing of their whānau and of all of those things that influence us as human beings—the people with whom they would engage in terms of their professional career would also have a particular and a unique world view. It was endeavouring to help those students understand the importance of respecting and understanding other people's as well as their own positions.One of the key challenges we put to our students was to ask them about their understanding of the relationship between humans and the non-human world. Given that many of them came from a Pākehā predominantly Western cultural background—a very rational dare I say it world view—often they would see human beings as separate from the rest of the world from nature from this thing we call the environment. We did not seek to prove those students wrong but we certainly wanted to challenge them so that they could explicitly state something about those assumptions and those beliefs. For many of them there was that sense of dualism of people being separate from the rest of the natural world.One of the readings I would require of students was an article written in 1972 by an American legal academic called Christopher Stone and it was called Should Trees Have Standing?—Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects". To say it was controversial at the time would be an understatement. The proposition was that yes we routinely assign rights to human beings but that changes over time. At one time women had many fewer rights than men if any indeed. Some women would argue that has not changed dramatically. For many people the notion of assigning rights to non-human entities was a step too far and yet they would understand—or accept rather—that corporations that companies and that trusts could have the rights of a natural person. So it ought not to have been but it turned out to be rather difficult—"unthinkable" was the word he used—for some people to accept the proposition from this Christopher Stone who was as I say an American legal academic in 1972.He said this: "I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests oceans rivers and other so-called 'natural objects' in the environment—indeed to the natural environment as a whole." In academic circles legal circles and political circles that was a bombshell. It was deemed laughable ridiculous and unworkable. It is interesting that I think for indigenous people not least of all Māori there is no such barrier to assigning legal rights and agency and personhood to natural objects because we as Māori understand we are linked through whakapapa to those elements in the landscape. We are linked through whakapapa to our mountains to our rivers to our moana to our forests. So that barrier to the understanding or the acceptance of what this bill does has never really existed in the same way.I think it is remarkable that this bill does embed one of the fundamental beliefs and values of Te Ao Māori: the notion of connectedness with the natural world and human beings as part of it. It embeds that deeply into statute into New Zealand law in the same way that Te Urewera Act did. I think that as well as being significant and important as an empowerment of Te Ao Māori and Māori beliefs it is also a very powerful assertion of tino rangatiratanga the notion that we Māori as others will will determine our own futures and that we should allow the non-human elements of our world—in this case the river—to also have a hand and a say in asserting their own futures. This legislation I believe will lead directly assuming a happy outcome in terms of implementation to a restoration of the mauri of our largest river a river that is one of the most significant features in this country and in our cultural world as well. I would be so bold as to quote Gerrard Albert the negotiator of Ngā Tāngata Tiaki o Whanganui who said that "The point is to approximate at law what the river is to us in custom and kawa: a living tupuna not an inanimate lifeless resource to be used without regard to its mana."I think it is true to say that any person who sits alongside a river or sits quietly in a forest will hear the voice of that river will hear the voice of that forest. In a more pragmatic sense and a more practical sense the river will require a human voice and this legislation does allow for that: Te Pou Tupua the human voice of the river. When we are making decisions—I shall call them the mundane but critically important decisions—about resource allocation about land use and about policy the river will have a very powerful voice directly in those negotiations in those discussions and in that decision making. It will be a Māori voice and a Pākehā voice and that is as it should be.I think there is enormous potential in this not only to heal the harm that has been done but also to help New Zealanders who may not yet understand the significance of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the importance of embedding Te Tiriti and its articles and its purpose deeply into all of our law into all of our thinking into all of our decision making. The great winner I believe in this legislation will be Te Awa o Whanganui. It will be the people of Whanganui. It will be all of us. It enhances the mana of this Parliament to pass legislation of this sort. There are no losers I believe in the passing of this legislation and that is something one cannot always say about bills we put through this House. So finally I will simply acknowledge—and others are far better qualified than I to name them so I will not—those living and those who have passed who have fought long and hard to bring us to this point when we can appropriately recognise the mana of Te Awa o Whanganui. Kia ora."