Copeland Gordon: Foreshore and Seabed Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Copeland Gordon: Foreshore and Seabed Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:621;Page:16972] 
GORDON COPELAND (United Future) 
: 
 I want to speak entirely on clause 2A which of course is the object clause of the bill and therefore is an overarching clause that is reflected right through the rest of the text of the bill.  
On 18 August 2003 our Prime Minister Helen Clark was interviewed on the  
Holmes 
 show. On that evening she announced to the nation that the Government’s proposal was to put the foreshore and seabed into “public domain” so that no one would own it. Paul Holmes then asked her: “Why on earth are you doing that? Why don’t you just do the straightforward thing and put the ownership of those assets with the Crown?”. I found the Prime Minister’s response on that evening very very interesting indeed. She said: “Well Paul you know that if I were to do that then from a Maori perspective they would have lost and the Crown would have won.” She made it quite clear therefore that the concept of public domain was an attempt to seek a kind of a neutral position in the hope that both the Crown and Maori who are the two partners to the treaty would be able to come to some common understanding and say: “Yes we together can go forward on this issue as a nation.”  
I say to Dover Samuels that I too grew up on the beach. I walked on the beach used the beach swam in the water took mussels from the water ate them on the beach and so forth for all of my boyhood. I frazzled my fair skin almost to obliteration in the process but I say as I think any New Zealander would that each of us desires to have full unfettered access to the beach. The bill achieves that but I do more in sorrow than in anger regret the fact that the Government lost its nerve and moved away from the concept of public domain. I thought it was a very useful concept. I think it could have contributed very positively to this debate and helped us to find a way forward.  
This is the way that I would have worded clause 2A: “The object of this Act is to provide for the guardianship”—and I use the word “guardianship” of course because that term will resonate with the concept of kaitiakitanga—“of the public seabed and foreshore in perpetuity as the common heritage of all New Zealanders for themselves and all future generations by vesting in the public domain the public foreshore and seabed and recognising as appropriate the association of whanau hapu and iwi with the areas of the public foreshore and seabed.”  
United Future really does regret that the concept of public domain was ditched so quickly after the good start the Prime Minister and the Government made in favour of going back to Crown ownership. I think it will therefore continue to be viewed by Maori as a win for the Crown and a loss for them. That is because of course for generations now Maori have regarded the word “Crown” as symbolising not the people of New Zealand but the sovereign of the United Kingdom. We see in treaty settlements for example the Crown even apologising for the confiscation of land and so forth. So that is embedded in Maori thinking and rightly and understandably so. I regret very much that the Government so quickly gave away the concept of public domain.  
My colleague Larry Baldock told me there would have been some legal difficulties. OK there might have been but the bottom line is that where there is a will there is also a way. I think that if the will had been there in the Government to stick with that concept a way could have been found to express the concept that is involved in the term “public domain”. One has only to look at say the Auckland Domain or down the road from where I grew up to the Mapua Domain to know that all New Zealanders understand that a public domain is something that all of us own that all of us have access to and that all of us enjoy egress from and travel across. It is something we can all use for recreation; to carry out our swimming our fishing our sandcastle building and all the other activities that all New Zealanders associate with the beach and with the foreshore and of course the seabed itself as we go out and fish and enjoy other activities of that kind.  
Really if that had been changed then of course all of the rest of the bill would be changed. When we read the bill now it is like a tattoo: a repetition of the word “Crown”.