Brownlee Gerry: Ngati Tuwharetoa (Bay of Plenty) Claims Settlement Bill — In Committee 
Brownlee Gerry: Ngati Tuwharetoa (Bay of Plenty) Claims Settlement Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:625;Page:20261] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 This is the title debate but I notice that the debate has been ranging across the bill more widely in quite an interesting way. 
I want to make it very clear to the New Zealand First member who stood up and introduced his party as being the only non-aligned political party in the country that no one believes that at all. New Zealand First is of course the Maori party proper. Everyone knows that. 
I am staggered by that speaker’s concern about the title of this bill. His suggestion that “Bay of Plenty” should have been in te reo is not a bad idea. He should perhaps have put forward an amendment to have that happen if he were serious. But if he were super-serious then of course he would be from the “Tahi o Aotearoa” party rather than from New Zealand First and I do not see New Zealand First racing out to the public to start publicising itself as that. Mr Winston Peters leader of the “Tahi o Aotearoa” party—I cannot see that going down too well. The moment we saw that title come across the screen Winston Peters would be confined to the very low levels in the poll that I think the election will ultimately deliver anyway. 
The ACT party speaker suggested that National is somehow doing a bit of a copycat on the proposals put forward by Mr Derek Quigley. He might remember that National backed Mr Quigley back in those days and in fact was quick to embrace the concept and that it was National that said back in the 1990s that we wanted to settle this whole grievance as quickly as possible. We put a 10-year time line on it. We did not quite get there basically because since 1993 we have had coalitions in this country which have not proved particularly prosperous as far as getting this sort of legislation through quickly goes. 
However if ACT thinks it has some sort of right to provide good ideas for the rest of the world to pick up on I would like to know where those ideas are at the moment. Where are these good ideas? Where are these earth-shattering new views of how to do things? There is a party that for the last 6 years has lamented the fact that it has not had the numbers to do anything. 
As to the concern from ACT about the reference in the bill to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi I think it would be a strange settlement bill that was put together on the basis of accepting Treaty of Waitangi issues as laid out by the tribunal that does not mention the principles. As I made clear to New Zealand First—my apologies “Tahi o Aotearoa”—last night there is a need to refer in some cases to the principles because those principles are littered throughout so much of our legislation and I mean that in its most literal sense. So what simply is being said in this bill is that it deals with all those issues. It tells Ngati Tuwharetoa Bay of Plenty that they cannot go around trolling through bits of legislation to find new interpretations of principles that let them come back to the Crown and say “Let’s have another go.”—which they accept. So from that point of view we are happy with it. 
The bill of course is called the Ngati Tuwharetoa (Bay of Plenty) Claims Settlement Bill and we are at the moment discussing the title. It would seem to me that to refer to this bill in any other way at all would be quite ridiculous so we will support the title. 
I will just make a final comment on the concerns about metaphysical references mentioned by Mr Shirley from the ACT party. From the start of my involvement with the Maori Affairs Committee I have raised issues around this stuff. However I accept in this case that the references do have a geographic nature. In that regard I think defining the part of New Zealand that is special to Ngati Tuwharetoa Bay of Plenty in terms that they has always understood in their tribal history is not unreasonable because when it comes to this settlement bill it is about a giant step in the history of the iwi.