Abel SteveSTEVE ABEL (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. I stand to speak in support of the Ngāti Paoa settlement and to tautoko what has been said by members across the House. Here there are so many parts you can read in these deeds that articulate the unrelenting winds and seas of bad that were done to Ngāti Paoa: the confiscations the raupatu the wars the taking of land the acquisition of land by hook or by crook. The land was lost drained stripped bare. Even the rivers changed course. Iwi members were killed during the Crown invasion of Waikato in 1863. Ngāti Paoa had interests in the vast swathes of land confiscated by the Crown in the following years. By 1865 the Crown introduced new laws creating individual title over iwi land. Most of the land was sold or taken under the Public Works Act by the end of the 20th century. The Crown drained and developed the Hauraki wetlands altering the course of the Waihou and the Piako rivers.I have a particular reference to what happened in Hauraki because it was up the Waihou River that Joseph Banks and James Cook took a longboat when they first arrived to these lands. Banks being a botanist took a particular interest in the magnificent trees that stood on the Hauraki Plains and the kahikatea—ngā uruora" as Geoff Park describes it in his book—was a source of food and nourishment for the iwi on the plains who managed the plains for access of food as well as for gardens and production of food. Those magnificent kahikatea trees were so straight and huge with their buttressed roots that for the men of the British navy their eyes opened wide because they saw an opportunity to refurnish that navy with timber for shipbuilding.It turned out the kahikatea was not good for shipbuilding—although kauri was and other of the native trees—and most of that kahikatea forest was burnt. What was left was destroyed in the draining of the Hauraki Plains and then what was still left was cut down and turned into butter boxes for our export dairy industry at the beginning of the 20th century because kahikatea puts no aroma or taint into the butter. What little was left of those magnificent forests was logged indiscriminately up until really the 1960s and 1970s and this is just one of the harms of the impact of a highly extractive colonial interest that destroyed a magnificent native environment and indigenous forests with huge impacts on the ability of iwi to maintain their cultural practices—their means of self-sustenance and food production that were traditional. But iwi quickly were able to produce food by other means. Indeed as it is noted in 1841 in Tāmaki it was Ngāti Paoa who provided the food to the settlers there bringing Te Tiriti o Waitangi.So we stand here and we must acknowledge the loss and the harm done. We must acknowledge that it's the Crown that has done that harm that has wronged Ngāti Paoa and here we make some small amends for that. But really as has been spoken by others in the House the deeper challenge to us as a nation is to uphold Te Tiriti o Waitangi through ongoing relationship and justice. This is not a thing that has a full stop at the end of it. This is a thing that must go on if we are to have a viable a meaningful and a legitimate society in this land. That's what we stand here for today and we commend this deed to the House. Kia ora."