Delahunty Catherine: Te Pire mō Te Reo Māori / Māori Language Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Te Pire mō Te Reo Māori / Māori Language Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 07 April 2016. Volume:712;Page:10356. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. He mihi nui ki Te Whare Pāremata nei he mihi nui ki Te Reo Rangatira tēnā koutou katoa.[A huge acknowledgment to this Parliament to the chiefly language and to you all.]I just feel very privileged to stand up and speak. I feel it is important for Pākehā to do so because tangata Tiriti have been responsible—our culture was responsible—for the attack on the language and our culture needs to be responsible not only for apologising but also for actually owning the benefit to the whole of Aotearoa if the ideas that are encapsulated in this bill can be brought to life for the benefit of all. It is for tangata whenua first—Te Reo Māori for all tangata whenua—but also for all of Aotearoa. I think that is the hope for my mokopuna for my generation.So I would just like to support the bill support the Minister’s work and support the Māori Affairs Committee’s work and support the fact that this bill has been strongly worked upon and strongly improved and we are now able to support it. This does not mean that it solves the problem. It took all those years all those generations of attack on Te Reo to bring Te Reo to the state that it is in. It has been an incredibly humbling thing to watch Te Reo being rebuilt in my lifetime and I just feel that there are so many people outside this Whare whom we can honour notably through kōhanga reo but also from the amazingly dedicated flax-roots hapū who treasure the language every day to the wāhine toa who pass it on through kōhanga to the kids and to all the scholars and everybody else who makes Te Reo Māori live. We need to be so grateful to them and appreciative of them. We need this bill we need these strategies we need more resources and we need a Crown commitment so that Te Reo Māori the first language of Aotearoa can be truly celebrated in Aotearoa.I just want to support a couple of Supplementary Order Papers. I am supporting my colleague Marama Davidson’s Supplementary Order Paper 167 which suggests making an amendment to clause 33(1) so that “the Minister [is] to establish an independent panel to review the operation and effectiveness of the Bill after the expiry of 3 years from its commencement.” I think the key word there is the idea of having an “independent” panel. That is an important part of making sure that there is accountability for the use of the precious resource and how it is going to work to make sure that there can be confidence. There has been a lot of kōrero in the community about this bill and about whether these strategies are going to work so it would be excellent to have this independent review to make sure that it can actually happen and can continue to happen. There is huge expectation and hope out there and we need to make that real.I want to acknowledge the kōrero of the Minister in the chair Te Ururoa Flavell and Minister Finlayson about the issue of the apology but also to say that we do support Supplementary Order Paper 165 from Nanaia Mahuta. Obviously a lot of people have put a lot of thought into this and the acknowledgment is a real acknowledgment—it is a genuine acknowledgment in the bill—but I also appreciate the Hon Nanaia Mahuta’s Supplementary Order Paper. Although this issue is obviously different and specific to hapū and iwi throughout the motu and this is well handled in the settlements the Crown did not distinguish between hapū—the Crown did not attack Te Reo Māori differently throughout Aotearoa. The Crown attacked Te Reo. It thoroughly systematically attacked the language wherever the language was being spoken. Wherever the language tried to live the Crown attacked the language and that is why in a sense a national apology could be useful. It is quite important for my culture to remember that this was not just a couple of not-very-nice teachers saying a couple of bad things; this was a systematic Government-driven attack on Te Reo Māori. An attack on the language of a people is an attack on those people and that is what it was—it was part of the war machine against tangata whenua.I think of my friend in Tai Rāwhiti who is the same age as me who was raised by her grandmother. She was 5 years old when she went to school and on her first day at school she was beaten for speaking her Reo. So she went home and told her grandmother and her grandmother said to her: “From now on in this whare we will not speak the Reo. I cannot see you beaten.” That was the beginning of the language loss just in that one whānau. That story really hit home for me because I am of Irish descent and the Irish went through a struggle where they had to run their language schools behind hedges. They had hedge schools to try to keep their language alive. Like Māori we have suffered the consequences of speaking our Reo.