Bennett Paula: Te Arawa Lakes Settlement Bill — In Committee 
Bennett Paula: Te Arawa Lakes Settlement Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:634;Page:5353] 
PAULA BENNETT (National) 
: 
 I rise to speak on Part 1 of the Te Arawa Lakes Settlement Bill. I did not sit on the submissions process in the Maori Affairs Committee and I have had limited input into this bill. I certainly have limited knowledge of it in all fairness; it is just what I have read and what I have heard in the House over the last few days. I suppose what I would ask—and what I have been asking my colleagues—is whether Te Arawa want this legislation. No one could really answer me on that. In fact I started to get different answers from all directions and that is what concerns me the most. So I thought I would do what any good politician should do: I would go directly to the source. 
I grew up in Taupo so I know former students and other people who are of Te Arawa and I thought I would talk to them directly. I was very good friends with Aroha and she is now living back in that area so I rang her. As a bit of an aside when we were at school we were called “marshmallows” by our Maori teacher not because of our shape—as some people may think—but more because we were considered to be brown on the outside and white on the inside. That was the way she put it. A lot of that was about being disengaged from the process and feeling disengaged from our own iwi and our participation in it. As I talked to Aroha on Friday it struck me that we talk about the mandate and about the opportunity to vote but the reality is that many Maori feel disengaged from the process and from their own iwi let alone from the Pakeha process the Crown and everything else. We have to take all of those things into consideration when we look at whether there is a mandate for something like this legislation to go through. 
I am reluctant to go back to numbers because I think this issue is much more about people. When we start to spout off numbers like 40000 and 4000—that sort of stuff—we forget that we are talking about people. The fact that such a small margin of people feel engaged by the process has to raise some concerns such as whether Te Arawa actually want this settlement. Someone is just telling me that marshmallows are pink on the outside until they are toasted. I think my teacher did mean “MallowPuffs” so there we go. But it is the same point. We all have our MallowPuff stories that we bring from school and still carry with us today. 
Anne Tolley 
: Scarred! 
PAULA BENNETT 
: We are scarred by the feeling of being disengaged from the process. That is the question that I raise with the Minister in the chair the Hon Mark Burton. It is one that brings us huge concern. 
We can talk about the purpose of the bill and about the apology and everything else but the question is whether this settlement will be full and final. If we do not have a sense of buy-in and of the settlement being what the people want and need then will there really be an end to the grievance or is this merely the start of a process? It feels to me as though this bill is still very much a part of the process and that we have a long long way to go. For that reason I certainly support my party in opposing this bill. 
The bill talks about the whole historical grievance of the period and it makes sense in the way it is constructed but I do not know whether that would be everybody’s story. That is when the situation becomes one where people are coming from different places on the issues and are not taking into consideration anyone. What could result from that actually is more of an uproar from people opposed to the legislation than of support from people who are standing up for it. 
No one is keener than the National Party to see these settlements go through. The acknowledgment of wrongdoing and the settlement of claims are things that National started in the early 1990s so they are obviously things we feel very passionately about. But when we look at the engagement of people like Douglas Graham we can see how they got buy-in by taking the time in negotiations. When they talk about the process they went through they say they did not go a few times to talk; they kept going back and going over the same ground many times. They found that other people became more engaged as that process went along. I wonder how we can come up with legislation like this which perhaps does not really address the concerns of the majority of people and how we can lay something like this issue to rest. 
In the first reading debate I said there was a lot more work to be done before we got the bill to this place and I thought we should be going back to the drawing board before we took it through the select committee process.