Turei Metiria: Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Bill — Third Reading 
Turei Metiria: Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:624;Page:19262] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party is very pleased to be supporting this bill. We congratulate Ngati Awa on their achievement and in particular on their tenacity in getting to this part of the settlement and getting it through the legislative process. 
The bill sets out the mechanisms for the organisation that will manage the iwi’s settlement assets. I must say that the Greens still consider it extraordinarily rude that the Government did not consider this bill fit to be a Government bill and taking up Government legislative time especially as it was only because of Government policy through the Office of Treaty Settlements that the bill was needed in the first place. Mr Prebble is quite wrong in his analysis that this legislation was sought by Ngati Awa. Ngati Awa was forced to have this structure and forced to have the legislation go through the House in this way because their views about the way they wanted to manage their assets were considered inappropriate owing to Office of Treaty Settlements policy. 
 The Greens have continually criticised the Office of Treaty Settlements for its obstructive approach to Ngati Awa in the development of a structure that meets their needs and their requirements. The failure of the Office of Treaty Settlements to prioritise the needs of iwi does not come as much of a surprise; instead prioritising their own views has meant that the final structure is not the optimum one that it might otherwise have been. It has also meant that the settlement has been significantly delayed due entirely to the intransigence of the Office of Treaty Settlements and those delays have been incredibly costly. The Greens believe that in matters relating to the entity that manages an iwi’s settlement assets—assets that belong to the iwi that have been achieved because of the wrongs committed in the name of the Government and New Zealanders in the past and that are theirs and theirs alone to control—it is the iwi that should decide how that management happens. The Office of Treaty Settlements and the Government in general should be charged only with facilitating their views and not holding things up. 
It must be remembered that iwi pay the costs of these settlement negotiations. Many of them must borrow against their future settlement restitution assets in order to pay for and fund what can be very lengthy settlement negotiations. Ten years is not unusual so any delays especially those caused by the Government itself and Government agencies are an erosion of the restitution that the negotiation process is supposed to and is designed to provide. The Greens are completely opposed to this sort of approach. We want to see a process that is just and does not pauperise iwi in the process of providing restitution to them. That is what we think about this. 
For Ngati Awa this part of the process of settlement is now over. Ngati Awa will soon have the runanga to manage their own assets. Very soon Ngati Awa will also have the settlement legislation passed and the restitution and those assets returned to them—assets that in some cases were wrongly taken and other assets in compensation. The Green Party sincerely hopes that these resources will assist Ngati Awa in achieving greater self-determination economically socially and politically. We sincerely hope that the Opposition parties listen to their own rhetoric and fix their own mistaken perceptions and leave Ngati Awa alone to manage their assets without a continual barrage of unnecessary and destructive interference in their affairs. Such interference is a perpetual barrier to iwi hapu and individual Maori success in our country. Kia ora katoa.