Kerekere ElizabethDr ELIZABETH KEREKERE (Green): Kia ora. As is the custom I congratulate Joseph Mooney for having his bill drawn from the ballot—I'm still crossing my fingers after 18 months—and it has come up on the Order Paper so many times I think I wrote the notes for this last year. So I'm glad that it can be addressed tonight one way or another. I certainly agreed when you spoke first before the break that when Māori succeed Aotearoa New Zealand succeeds so kia ora. To add to the whakapapa outlined by my colleague Tāmati Coffey we note that this comprehensive and weighty bill is effectively the same one introduced by the National Government following the review of Te Ture Whenua Maori Act in 2013. I understand it met with a lot of opposition at that time and was subsequently withdrawn in 2017 by the Hon Nanaia Mahuta.I'm on record as supporting a complete overhaul of Te Ture Whenua Maori Act. It has so much wrong with it I believe and to date we've only seen piecemeal incremental changes to it: different laws that take small chunks and try to make sense of it. The previous Government of course went on to pass the Te Ture Whenua Māori (Succession Dispute Resolution and Related Matters) Amendment Bill in August 2020 and the current Government has passed the Local Government (Rating of Whenua Māori) Amendment Bill and the Local Electoral (Māori Wards and Māori Constituencies) Amendment Bill. All of these we did support.So this bill we note has drawn upon advice of the review panel of March 2014 and submissions on an exposure draft that was extensively consulted on back in May 2015. It does seek to improve the performance and productivity of Māori land to repeal and replace the current law relating to Māori land and to allow Māori land owners the right to do more and improve that performance and absolutely it correctly identifies it is underutilised land. We note that it intends to prescribe a clear decision-making process and provide the Māori Land Court with more discretion—we support that aspect of it—as to whether the partitions will assist owners on Māori freehold land to retain occupy or develop this land. However as I've mentioned in other bills and in any pieces of legislation that come in the Government determines how Māori must account for what they're doing in their decisions on their own land and there remains that paternalistic aspect of this bill which seeks to determine what Māori should do once they have access to their own land. I would so love to see a bill which just gives Māori land back to the owners—the original owners—and allows them to just do what they like with it. Hence Hoki Whenua Mai and #LandBack. I would like to say that the policy statement at the beginning of this bill is actually really beautiful. I thought that that was really well written so I just mihi to that but I think this bill does not live up to it. I don't think enough has been done to it that makes it really really fit those goals. We were vocal opponents of previous iterations of this bill because many Māori viewed it as having been rushed and having had inadequate consultation for them when it was initially introduced. As Mr Coffey has identified hapū and iwi across the country did not support it because they felt that it didn't uphold their tino rangatiratanga and that the whenua was still not being properly protected through its provisions. They felt that even though so much work went into this it still didn't actually resolve some of those issues around providing active protection and accessing landlocked land. So our position is always that all these land reforms need to be led by whānau hapū and iwi. I don't know that necessarily it shouldn't go ahead because there's not a groundswell of people saying we should have this at the moment but these are longstanding issues. This will always be an issue. We feel that the concerns that have been raised by those iwi hapū and whānau have not been addressed in this bill so tonight we're not able to support this and we do not commend it to the House. Kia ora.