te Heuheu Georgina: Ngati Awa Claims Settlement Bill — In Committee Procedure 
te Heuheu Georgina: Ngati Awa Claims Settlement Bill — In Committee Procedure 
[Volume:623;Page:18816] 
Hon GEORGINA TE HEUHEU (National) 
: 
 It was probably timely for someone to point out as the Minister did that the phrase “the principles of the treaty” which I acknowledge is now causing quite a lot of difficulty was framed in the enabling legislation that set up the jurisdiction of the tribunal. 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: Labour legislation. 
Hon GEORGINA TE HEUHEU 
: My colleague says it was Labour legislation and of course he is quite right. I have wondered as the term “the principles of the treaty” has come under such a lot of fire over the last few years whether people are aware that that legislation is probably where it stemmed from. I noticed that a  
Sunday Star-Times 
 columnist attributed it to my late father-in-law indicating that he somehow invented the term “the principles of the treaty”. He did not and he did not really have to. 
Coming to Part 1 there is something I want to ask the Minister. Of course it is proper—particularly when Ngati Awa have gone through the long process of taking their claim to the tribunal and having their history adjudicated on and recorded and given that this is another tribe who were made landless and labelled “rebels” “wrong people” and so forth—that any such settlement cannot proceed unless there is an apology first. I know that some people find this difficult to believe but the reality is that sometimes the apology is the most important thing because it is a vindication of all the grievance and the hurt that tribes have felt over the last 140-odd years or more. 
No doubt Ngati Awa have also worked on the text of this part. Again I hope someone has been through it with a fine-tooth comb and made sure that one text is a translation of the other. That leads me to ask the Minister about apologies in the three ancillary claims dealt with in a Supplementary Order Paper. Deeds of settlement were signed in respect of these three ancillary claims also. These were not completed when the select committee held its hearings which I do not think sets a good precedent. There is a main claim and in this case some ancillary claims are attached. I think that in future the Minister ought to make sure that all claims whether they are a main claim or an ancillary claim can be examined by the select committee. 
I will stand to be corrected but I do not think that these three ancillary claims were. If I had been able to do so I probably would have raised the issue in the select committee but as I was not I raise the issue now. If a treaty settlement is being made albeit it is called an ancillary settlement nonetheless someone has presumably been done a wrong. There does not seem to be any apology to those three claimant groups and I would like the Minister to explain why that is so. Maybe the groups did not ask for an apology. That seems a bit unusual to me. The claims might be termed ancillary but for the families for whom the ancillary claims have been negotiated the hurt is just as big as the hurt for the groups concerned in the overall claim; therefore presumably an apology should have followed in the ancillary claims as well. 
On the other matter I think the Government has been guilty during its time in power of bringing the term “the principles of the treaty” into disrepute. Some will say that the principles must be referred to in settlement legislation but the Government has tried to insert them into health legislation and all sorts of other legislation where they really are not appropriate.