Delahunty CatherineCATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): I have been fascinated by this debate and I recognise the privilege of having five members' bills selected from the ballot. The National Party may not be on my side but the gods are because sometimes an issue needs to be brought into the light and I am very grateful for the opportunity of bringing this issue into the light. I do need to clarify a few things. First I want to thank the Māori Party and the Labour Party members for your support still. I really appreciate the support and the speeches and the understanding that this is an important contemporary issue as well as an historical issue. I clearly need to spell out in simple words that this bill is not an attempt to address historical wrongs even though they need to be addressed. We need a process for that and my petition to the select committee may open the door for that. But this bill is to acknowledge that this is about the current risks from the Public Works Act. If we are going to talk about holding the country to ransom let us talk about who is being held to ransom. The reason we wrote the bill was that Patricia Grace's whānau less than 2 years ago were held to ransom. Speakers from the National Party say this is in the past and it cannot happen. What happened which I described in the first part of my first speech was that she did not even get told it was going to happen. She found out at the eleventh hour that her land was up for Public Works Act confiscation. Call it what you like this is not about—for the benefit of Nuk Korako—blocks of land that are the same. Customary-owned freehold Māori land collectively owned is not the same as individual title. We are trying to protect what is left of the collectively owned land of which there is only 5 percent in Aotearoa. We are trying to make sure that that does not shrink. We do not accept the argument that this is separatist or racist or holding anyone to ransom. The people who are still being talked to by development agencies about taking their land are to this very day being told that the Public Works Act can be used against them. It is a forced sale. What is the difference between that and our previous bad history when it is about the small blocks of collectively owned land that are not addressed—read my lips National Government—by the Treaty settlement process? We have to be honest about the risks still existing; the Grace whānau story and what happened to their neighbours just less than 2 years ago is a case in point. Their neighbours lost their land because of the divide and rule tactics of the Transport Agency which managed to separate them from their land; they did not have the Grace whānau's ability to challenge. That is not right. It is a contemporary issue. It is not right that it should be still going on. It is really extraordinary to hear about privilege—that we will be creating privilege. What privilege is there when 96 percent or more of your land is gone and a bill seeks to protect any more being alienated? Where is the privilege in that? This is the time for us to face up to some facts here. We do not live in an equality paradise where every landowner and every whānau or family has the same rights before the law. That does not exist. If we are going to protect what remains of that land and stop fantasising about the myth of the kind of country we live in—that everything is sorted now because we have got the Waitangi Tribunal process—we will never address the risk of ongoing alienation of Māori-owned land. I am not talking about individuals; I am talking about customary collective freehold Māori title. It is not the same. Read my lips: not one more acre of the customary tangata whenua identity should be threatened or manipulated or divide and rule used for developments that they do not want. Yes we need to address the historical injustices but as a Pākehā as a person committed to Te Tiriti I am proud to have stood up in this House to have brought this bill to have stood tūturu for this kaupapa. I am not here to create separatism; I am here for justice because people have told me—as the nearly 5000 people who signed our petition said—we have been through enough with the Act; no more. They want a line in the sand and I have attempted to draw it no matter how we vote tonight. Kia ora koutou katoa. Not one more acre!