Franks Stephen: Ngaa Rauru Kiitahi Claims Settlement Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Franks Stephen: Ngaa Rauru Kiitahi Claims Settlement Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:627;Page:21860] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 I do appreciate the opportunity to hear Dr Mapp speak on these matters. I think that we have had some of the most interesting analysis over the past 3 or 4 months on these vexing issues that could be imagined. I think it is a great shame that nothing is being reported of the thoughtful reconsideration that has been given to the role of the settlements the treaty and the language. 
But I am concerned that it is all a waste of time because however wisely we analyse this bill or however much we might want to change it during the debate on the last bill of this kind for which I put forward amendments to change it the amendments were ruled out. They were ruled out because of Assistant Chairperson Simich’s statement that an amendment that purports to amend an agreement reached between the Crown and other parties is out of order in a bill intended to give effect to that agreement. In other words that ruling made in 2003 makes this whole Committee stage nothing more than members flapping their gums. I do not say that members should not have time to do that but I wonder what this Committee thinks it is doing when it ratifies these agreements and debates them in a Committee stage—which is supposed to be the members’ chance to correct and amend them—when the Chairperson has ruled that members cannot amend them. 
It is a little odd because the Maori Affairs Committee itself has proposed some amendments and in this case they are amendments to the very section that we are looking at. The select committee has reframed the Maori text. So I think it is time that that ruling was reconsidered because it means that ACT cannot vote for this part. We too believe that this recital is wrong and we think that it would not take very much to correct it. But as we have found from experience no amendments will be accepted because this preamble is part of what has supposedly been agreed between the Crown and the iwi in question. 
Dr Mapp I believe probably would not have stated it as bluntly as I would have but he is absolutely right that this bill projects a view of the treaty that is utterly untenable. Article 2 of the treaty was an assurance of classical English property rights. The Maori version was an assurance not only to rangatira but also to the ordinary people that they would all have the rights of a king in his castle. To use that very eloquent English description the peasant in his hovel has the same right to exclude the king as the lord in his castle has. That was a novel and quite astounding assertion at that stage of human legal development. That kind of property right was being held out to Maori in the treaty and they agreed to it. 
Instead what we have in this part of the bill asserts a kind of mystical power to the treaty or a set of values that the Crown was assumed to have signed up to that no Government could ever sign up to. No Government could ever sign up to an agreement to hold people indemnified for the consequences of losing their land. People often sell land. In fact the whole treaty was supposed to ensure that they could sell their land instead of having it stolen or seized from them by force of arms. 
Here we have a craven Government solemnly promising people 160 years later that it will make amends for the inevitable accidents of history. What would be the fate of the United States if it was still apologising for Sherman’s March in the Civil War? And this stuff happened at the same time as that. Where would any modern country be if it spent its time examining its navel rewriting history and wailing over grievances—[ 
Interruption 
]—which are very real grievances and there is a good reason for them but it is not a good reason to be rewriting history—and then producing a bill like this which actually does not make amends. It gives the shadow of making amends and a whole lot of spurious rights.