Turei Metiria: Ngati Tuwharetoa (Bay of Plenty) Claims Settlement Bill — Second Reading 
Turei Metiria: Ngati Tuwharetoa (Bay of Plenty) Claims Settlement Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:624;Page:19608] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 The Greens will support this bill. We acknowledge the incredibly hard work of those who have negotiated to obtain some degree of redress for the crimes that have been committed against them. We thank those who made submissions to the Maori Affairs Committee and we also thank the officials—who always get a hard time from the committee on these issues—for their hard work in bringing this bill to the committee. 
The Greens recognise Te Tiriti o Waitangi the legitimacy of the Maori text that was signed by the hapu signatories. Te tiriti is an agreement between hapu and the Crown. It is in our view a solemn pact. The treaty settlement process is designed to provide some redress for the grievances that have arisen from the Crown’s failure to adhere to that pact. The Greens acknowledge that representatives of the Crown have breached and continue to breach te tiriti rights of Maori. We support the resolution and restitution of outstanding historical and current breaches but via a process by which those who have been aggrieved are the designers of the process for their own justice. 
We recognise that there are serious problems with the current model of treaty settlements and that those failings create further grievances and will continue to create further grievances until the Crown accepts that there are problems and moves towards a better process. One of the problems that continues to arise is that in the 21st century we continue to have confiscations. The rohe that is the subject of this bill includes coastal land and the mana whenua of that coastal land have recently had their legal rights and potential rights taken from them—in other words confiscated—in the 21st century. The Labour Government is a modern-day confiscator and New Zealand First is likewise a confiscator of land stripping Tuwharetoa ki Kawerau of their legal rights. 
How do we ensure that future grievances will not arise? We guarantee that we will not create any future grievances by undertaking these unconstitutional treaty-breaching activities in the future. It is relatively simple if we learn the lessons of our history which we should be doing given the number of settlement bills that are before us. We know what has happened in the past. We should know not to repeat it. As I am talking about considering our histories I want to mention that there was an issue in the select committee about statements of association. These caused some difficulties in the select committee because they were inadvertently left out of the bill so the committee could not test their legitimacy and test that they were not controversial with the submitters. This made it very difficult for the select committee to deal with the statement of association. 
I must say though that the Green Party has no problem in principle with the inclusion of statements of association in settlement bills. These statements are statements by the claimants of their views of their histories and their associations with their particular resources. In our view they are incredibly valuable to the claimants and to the whole country. One real gap in our nation’s education and a large part of the problem that leads us to keep making stupid mistakes when we should know better is that we do not have a clear understanding of the collective history of our own country.If we are to find ways to foster understanding and peace in our country we need to know our collective histories in detail. These settlements despite their flawed process and what we consider to be fundamental injustices can at least provide to local communities that precious information about the stories and histories of their local areas. 
These settlements the settlements bills and the deeds of settlement describe the local stories of what was a terrible civil war in our country. Many lives were lost in that war. Horrible crimes were committed in that war. These settlements outline some of the local stories that have been largely kept from us about our own histories—things that were done and stories that belong to our neighbours to our friends and to the people whom we deal with and meet with every day. These stories can give us incredibly valuable insights into how our country has developed why we are in the state we are in today and how we can ensure that we do foster peace in our country in the future. 
These settlements contain not only statements and descriptions of recent occurrences and historical occurrences in our country but also through things such as statements of association pre-colonisation histories that have remained intact—cultural traditional and spiritual stories that describe in the idiom of the indigenous people their pre-colonisation history. Statements of association in my view are gifts by the iwi to us; gifts of their precious histories that most of us would never otherwise know. These statements are no less valid than any preamble or historical description in settlement bills or in any other bill. 
Some have argued that these statements should not be in legislation but in my view that is stupid. They do not need to have legal effect to be incorporated into legislation and to be valuable in legislation. It is after all the iwi’s bill. It is their restitution and their grievance that has been dealt with and they are entitled to have their stories told—not the stories interpreted through the coloniser’s view but their own stories about their own pre-colonisation history—as they choose. It is absolutely critical that they have their views and their stories recognised just as the history of Pakeha and others in these bills are also recognised in the preambles of these settlement bills. These statements are as valid as any other preamble. It is just that they describe a pre-colonisation history that colonisers’ sympathisers continue to decry and devalue. There are lots of ways that we can describe that particular attitude. 
The Greens do not like the process of settlement bills. We think that they are unfair and wrong and that they require iwi to compromise too much. But we do see that they have enormous value as an educative tool as a way of recognising the history and the value of that iwi themselves on their own terms and not interpreted through English or through the coloniser’s perspective. We will continue to advocate for a fairer process for settlements and for the expansion and distribution of these settlement histories to the whole community so that perhaps we can undermine some of these bad attitudes from various parts of our community and actually have communities that truly understand our collective history so that we do not create further grievances in the future.