te Heuheu Georgina: Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
te Heuheu Georgina: Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:608;Page:5518] 
Hon GEORGINA TE HEUHEU (NZ National) 
: 
 I would like to make a contribution to this debate particularly on the issues that have just been discussed. As a Maori obviously I have a little bit of a direct interest in some of this stuff but the reason I am taking a call is that I want to state that the way this Government goes about this whole process is designed to bring Maori people into disrepute. I want the Minister to think about that. 
Jill Pettis was endeavouring to make some ground here and I certainly appreciate some of the points she made but the issue is that in the end we are the legislators. It is very easy to sit here at 8 o’clock on a Wednesday night discussing these notions but in the end we are not the ones who are out there wanting to see development proceed and wanting to see a level of sustainable development proceed. We are not the ones who have to interpret or cope with the ideas in the bill. That is the problem in my mind. 
So what happens? Because the concepts are ill-defined or not defined and they are not well understood by a great many people—mostly non-Maori—who gets the criticism? Maori people do. That is wrong because it is the job of the legislator the job of us here in Parliament to make the law as clear as we can. Now in the process local bodies out there the Environment Court as well and so on will be tackling this stuff. So we will have this whole thing just being compounded where Maori people will always get the blame for a lot of this stuff. 
That is so wrong because in fact we have a Government that is not prepared to give proper clarity and proper definition to some of these concepts. It is very ready to include these concepts in legislation partly for the fact I suppose that somehow it has to hang on to the Maori vote in the face of a New Zealand First party that probably will increase its share of the vote. So all in all unfortunately we give room for politicians in a sense to look like they are taking it out on Maori people. That is very unfair. I am a Maori person and I have to sit here a lot of the time and listen to that and it is not always easy to do so. 
The problem here is that without any public input this Government has extended the historic heritage provisions to include the notion of spirituality. I personally have no problem with that. I also know that it will be the case in the future that it will not be only Maori spirituality that we come up against in this provision because Maori are not the only ones who might want issues of spiritual interest protected. But the way all of this is always framed and the push and the way this Government approaches Maori issues is to bring the focus on Maori people alone and as I said at the beginning that is unfair. 
I refer now to cultural landscapes and ancestral landscapes. There is nothing in there that suggests that that is only Maori either. I know Pakeha people where I live who hold that concept very dearly. I know a Pakeha family on a farm between Taupo and Rotorua out in the Reporoa area. They have a long association with the farm. There is a part of that farm that they would hold as dearly to them as I would a wahi tapu where ancestors of mine are buried. I would say that that probably qualifies as a cultural landscape or an ancestral landscape for them. So again the approach of this Government I think is first of all to bar anybody from having some input into this. That is not the way legislators should be behaving. We should be behaving in a far more responsible manner.