Bridges Simon: Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill — First Reading 
Bridges Simon: Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:666;Page:14017] 
SIMON BRIDGES (National—Tauranga) 
: 
 It is good to follow the Hon Shane Jones. I agree with much that he said and indeed with much of what the Hon David Parker said in what I think was an excellent speech. I do not want to sound a sour note after hearing their good speeches but I cannot let the Labour Party’s revisionism in this area pass that somehow this was all Don Brash’s fault or it was somehow all Winston Peters’ fault. It is a matter of historical record: the New Zealand Press Association the day after the Court of Appeal’s Ngati Apa decision recorded Helen Clark as saying that the Government would legislate to preserve if necessary the status quo in this area and that it was a matter of policy for the Government not a matter for the courts. So to say that this issue arose somehow because Labour had no choice and that it was the “Iwi/Kiwi” billboards that brought this about is simply not the case. Labour should take its share of blame and its share of the history on this issue just as I accept that the National Party should as well. 
But I do not want to look backwards. I think this is a very positive day for this country. I come back to the members of the ministerial review panel Hana O’Regan Richard Boast and Sir Eddie Durie who said that—and I think this is something that Shane Jones picked up on—there have been some polar opposite views in this area between some Maori who saw the 2004 Act—perhaps rightly so—as highly discriminatory and some Pakeha whom perhaps David Garrett speaks for. There are many Pakeha—and I do not call them racist because I do not think they are—who see the repeal of the 2004 legislation as racially divisive. 
The review panel also said that we in this country have a duty to achieve a balance between those competing interests—a compromise if one likes. I think we do that in this bill through two key concepts. The first is access to justice which is a core interest for Maori and iwi in this country—the ability to go to the courts and have their claims heard. The second is public access and the uninhibited right of all New Zealanders Maori and non-Maori to enjoy the beaches and so on. The review panel talked about that as a bedrock right of New Zealanders. 
So it is a compromise but I believe that it is a principled compromise. Some might say that that is an oxymoron—that we cannot have a principled compromise. David Clendon from the Greens would have us believe that we cannot have that. But I say we can and that what we are doing in this bill is entirely in accordance with the law and with the Court of Appeal’s Ngati Apa decision. In that decision the Court of Appeal rightly overturned—and I hear the arguments that maybe it should have gone to the Privy Council—the Ninety Mile Beach decision. Here we are getting back to the tests set in that decision. We are in a principled way reaching a compromise that in some ways the Court of Appeal did. The bar will be set high in the law we set out just as it was in the Court of Appeal’s decision for iwi. That is as it should be. We are getting back to that Court of Appeal decision; it is not more and it is not necessarily less. I think that in this legislation we have a balanced law. It is a law of compromise but it is principled compromise. I agree with a lot that David Parker said. Let us hope that it is a compromise that is enduring and is once and for all.