Sage Eugenie: Mount Maunganui Borough Reclamation and Empowering Act Repeal Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sage Eugenie: Mount Maunganui Borough Reclamation and Empowering Act Repeal Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 13 June 2012. Volume:680;Page:2956. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
EUGENIE SAGE (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Speaker. Thank you. I am pleased to take a short call on the Mount Maunganui Borough Reclamation and Empowering Act Repeal Bill. Although as the previous speaker Maggie Barry noted it may not be controversial I think it is instructive to look at some of the history of the bill and I am very grateful to Te Ururoa Flavell for explaining some of it. 
The bill repeals a 1975 Act that gave authority for the transfer of 73 hectares of seabed to what is now the Tauranga City Council for its sewerage scheme and other municipal purposes. The Green Party supports the bill because it will prevent further ecological damage from infilling of the harbour and because it recognises the grievance of Nga Potiki in relation to its Treaty claim. 
Even a very brief reading of the Waitangi Tribunal’s report on Tauranga Moana’s 1886 to 2006 claim highlights the importance of this ancestral landscape and the natural environment of Tauranga Harbour to tangata whenua. Chapter 7 of the tribunal’s report begins with the words: “By 1840 Tauranga Moana had become one of the most continuously occupied and densely settled landscapes in New Zealand. It is not hard to understand why. It is a place of great natural beauty and diverse and productive ecosystems: open seas offshore islands coastal sandy beaches and rocky shores the large harbour lagoon and its many estuaries mudflats tidal pools and wetlands together with many waterways draining densely forested hills.” 
Tangata whenua told the tribunal that over many decades in which the town of Tauranga had burgeoned into a city they had been shut out and excluded from decisions that influenced the city’s development. They had been unable to act as kaitiaki to guard and protect their taonga—the harbours the waterways the forests the fisheries and the sacred mountains of their ancestors. When you read the tribunal’s report it talks about widespread typhoid amongst Maori populations because of the very poor way in which sewage was discharged; the fact that even in the 1950s effluent at Mount Maunganui was ending up in an open drain there were septic tanks that were seeping into the harbour and the borough council’s “solution” was to develop this reclamation and sewerage scheme. It was strongly opposed by iwi at the time because of the impact of the discharge on the estuary and the fact that it would diminish the very flourishing ecosystem there. The estuary discharge did not proceed but there was further work which the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment opposed as well. There was opposition by iwi to the reclassification of the waters in the harbour to allow the sewerage scheme to proceed. So there has been a whole history of Nga Potiki and others putting forward their concerns about the impact of the sewerage scheme. 
This was at a time when we had the Town and Country Planning Act 1953. Unlike the Resource Management Act it had no specific provisions for local authorities to have regard for either Maori land or Maori interests. That was characteristic of that time and it was very much the poorer for it. 
So this Act that we are repealing is a creature of its time. We have moved on since then. The repeal of the Act will go some way towards assuaging the very well-founded grievances of Nga Potiki. It does reflect its time. We hope that with the Resource Management Act and the much greater concern the statutory recognition in that Act for kaitiakitanga there will be much greater attention paid in future to making sure that sewage discharges and sewerage treatment schemes do not impact on the values of mana whenua and the ethic of kaitiakitanga for their taonga. Thank you.