Borrows ChesterHon CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. It is a privilege to breach protocol and give a speech on a bill that I have been sitting on. Next Tuesday is my valedictory so by the time I get in trouble I will be out of here. It is pertinent to stop and have a look at how the bill got before the Māori Affairs Committee and we will have various views but I recall sitting in the Chair there and thinking that this should be coming to the Māori Affairs Committee. I was approached by Jonathan Young then Nuk Korako and then a number of others and we saw the discussions going on around the Chamber. People realised very quickly that this looked and smelled and sounded like a Treaty settlement bill and the committee that was rightly placed to be able to consider it was the Māori Affairs Committee. I am glad that that decision was made. Albeit where cognisant of the parliamentary processes there would have been the fear that if the matter had gone before another select committee where the Government had a majority—it was a local bill and the convention is that you support local bills right across the House regardless of whether you are Government or Opposition. It no doubt would have gone through in the form that it was in and it was in a flawed form. The fact is that every commentator on this bill everyone who has had a look at it has recognised that it was not in good nick when it came to the House the first time. Thankfully there has been an awful lot of work going on to get it in that space.So we have mentioned a lot tonight such as—quite rightfully—Jonathan Young the member of Parliament for New Plymouth and the work that he has done. We have also quite rightfully mentioned Nashwa Boys sitting up there in the gallery now. It is good to see you there Nashwa. The work that these two did particularly and others who moved within those stakeholders as articulated by Kelvin Davis earlier is very very significant because what I hope it does is it gets across to the public that they can have confidence in this parliamentary process that everything is not a done deal and that things can be changed. Over a period in Parliament you can see a number of occasions when common sense prevails—thank God.I also want to commend the work of the select committee members who kept asking difficult questions not only before the select committee but when we were spoken to by our caucuses. We are in a difficult situation because the guts of it came along after the settlement with Te Atiawa so the immediate response from one sector of the community was: Well they want to have their cake and eat it too. They got monetary compensation through the Te Atiawa settlement bill—$23 million for not getting the land back. They agreed they weren't going to get the land back and here you are trying to give them the land back. Well how does that work?". Those stakeholders were concerned because the leaseholders had been told quite wrongly at the time that they took out the lease that they were assured of having an opportunity to freehold their land at some time down the track. They went ahead and went through those transactions of buying that land for their own uses but many of them—some of them rather—went out and speculated by purchasing other land in the hope that they would be able to freehold it later on down the track to their own benefit.I think the saddest thing in looking at this in considering the bill was that it set Te Atiawa against the iwi of Manukōrihi and Ōtaraua. It is sad when you see families fighting and that is the situation that we had here. The hapū walked away from the Te Atiawa settlement and quite justifiably so. But it is great to see that through the work that has been done by those people whom we have mentioned and the fact that they have managed to sit down with one another they are now in the space where they are having the opportunity to have a look at something that is much more palatable in reconciling history and also in acknowledging the hurt that still continues today.The fact is that raupatu lands that were confiscated in the 1800s have had an ongoing and material effect on communities. Living in Taranaki for the last 30-plus years I can say it is obvious. It sticks out like the proverbial. When you look at colonised people around the world they are all in exactly the same spaces—overrepresented in areas of health and welfare and employment and prosperity. It sticks with them. These injustices stay with them for generations upon generations.Another feeling of sadness I have around the hapū in having to consider this is that they have not had the time. The benefit of the Treaty settlement process is—because it goes on for an extended period of years people work through the processes and consider then what the profit and loss is going to be and end up in a place in their minds where they are ready to settle albeit not rewriting history albeit understanding they are not going to get back full value and full monetary compensation but actually getting to a place where they are saying: "Let's just have this settled."That is a process that takes years. But in this case the two hapū have had weeks. It was very very difficult then for them to be able to get that place in their mind where they can actually say: "OK we've chewed this over and we are going to settle on this." If they get to that space in the next couple of months all power to them. The decisions that they make and hopefully they will make to proceed with this bill will be something that will not rewrite history. It will not tart it all up and make it something acceptable. But what they will have is tangible assets that will be able to be used for the betterment of the future of them and their families living in Waitara.Another part of this bill that I am very happy with is the obligation to educate. Earlier on in the select committee last year we had a petition from two young girls from Ōtorohanga about having a commemoration day for the Land Wars. This was something that many others had tried including none other than Dame Tariana Turia who could not make it work through the House. These two young girls have petitioned the Parliament and before it had even completed its transaction through the select committee it was agreed that this would happen. Now as we heard from Pita Paraone on 28 October this year will be the first recognition of those Land Wars.I have got to wonder when I was going through school—quite a number of years ago—why it was that I was learning about the unification of Italy; why I was learning about parliamentary reform in Britain or the former provinces of New Zealand; and why I never learnt a thing about the Land Wars in New Zealand some of which we are talking about right here and now. It is good to know that that is going to be a different situation for my grandchildren—hopefully I will have some one day in this country and not in Canada—and they will have the opportunity to learn about the history as it is. I never came across any of this until I moved to Taranaki and as the local policeman in Pātea started learning a little bit about these things.People have had land confiscated from them in these horrible Glasgow leases that go on ad infinitum with 21-year leaps—totally disproportionate leases being charged either far too light if they are well into the 21 years or far too heavy if they are newly into the 21-year period; never having an opportunity to be able to remove the improvements and being locked into a situation where they are kept within perpetuity.Of course the other problem that we have within this land is harbour board endowment land kept for a specific purpose. Leases that are charged on harbour board endowment are then going for the betterment of the harbour not necessarily being spent in there in the past and never being spent locally in Waitara for the benefit of those people who are living there and have been there for some time.It is certainly a situation where there is much pleasure in being able to commend this bill to the House. It has certainly been for me a great experience to see this piece of legislation transact through the Māori Affairs Committee. I do commend it to the House. I commend it to the people of Manukōrihi and Ōtaraua and hope that it will be passed into law next term. Nō reira tēnā koutou katoa."