Roche Denise: Te Ture Whenua Māori Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Te Ture Whenua Māori Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 11 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:11006. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green):Ko Rangi-nui kei runga ko Papatūānuku kei raro ko ngā tāngata kei waenganui; tīhei mauri ora tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā koutou katoa.[Rangi-nui is above Papatūānuku is below and mankind is in between; behold the breath of life acknowledgments salutations and greetings to you all.]I rise to take the second call—a short call—for the Greens on this the first reading of Te Ture Whenua Māori Bill. I do that in the knowledge that we will be opposing this bill. The reasons for this were outlined in detail by our first speaker Marama Davidson but it is also because it breaches the very charter that the Green Party is founded on.The opening comments in the charter of the Green Party say that “The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand accepts Te Tiriti o Waitangi as the founding document of Aotearoa New Zealand; recognises Maori as Tangata Whenua in Aotearoa New Zealand;” and then it goes on to commit us to four principles. The third principle is around appropriate decision-making. Our charter says that “For the implementation of ecological wisdom and social responsibility decisions will be made directly at the appropriate level by those affected.”The process that has happened to bring this bill to the House we believe does not meet our standards of appropriate decision-making and we certainly would not want to see it continue through the legislative process. The second point is that we believe that this bill has the potential to create the kind of errors we have seen in the past from the Crown where the Crown deliberately set up legislation that breached Te Tiriti o Waitangi.In the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations’ address earlier today he stated that Te Ture Whenua Maori Act desperately needs reform. We are not necessarily opposed to reform in the right circumstances. He also outlined that over the last 100 years there has been something like 180 different pieces of legislation dealing with Māori land. Most of those I would add—nearly all of them—were about alienating Māori from their land. It was not until the first Act Te Ture Whenua Maori Act 1993 came into being that it actually put at its heart the retention of Māori land by Māori. So if we are going to as a Parliament reform this bill then we need to look very very very carefully at how we do that before we even start.The Greens agree with the report from the Waitangi Tribunal and with the concerns that it raised. Some of those concerns were around the fact that the consultation process has not been big enough or wide enough or sure enough to enable Māori to build support for this bill. We will not support this bill through the legislative process when it is not supported by Māori because that goes right against appropriate decision-making principles as outlined in our charter.We are concerned that the governance of Māori land should be driven by Māori not by the Crown. There is an unseemly haste to pursue this reform when we still do not actually know—and the Waitangi Tribunal outlined it itself—what the barriers are to utilisation and economic development; what the barriers are with the current Te Ture Whenua Maori Act 1993. We believe there should be a slower process taken and that there should be proper consultation; not consultation on the hoof as happened with a shifting meal at every meeting where different drafts appeared—in fact where drafts of this appeared which could not even be understood or digested at the time when the consultation was supposed to be taking place. So for these reasons we urge the Minister for Māori Development to pull this bill back and to think again because we will be opposing it.