Franks Stephen: Ngati Awa Claims Settlement Bill — Second Reading 
Franks Stephen: Ngati Awa Claims Settlement Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:423;Page:18551] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 It may be that this bill will be one of the first settlement bills that the ACT party can support at the end of the select committee process because I was delighted to hear that New Zealand First will be moving for the elimination of all the references in this bill to the spurious so-called principles of the treaty. I hope that that gets support from the whole of this House because those spurious references have been the source of a great deal of grief. I am delighted that New Zealand First has reached the point of putting its votes where its mouth has been for a couple of years. I hope that that succeeds. But if it does not succeed this party will not vote for the bill irrespective of whether the other matters that I now wish to raise as concerns are addressed because it is time for this Parliament to stop passing law when it does not know the meaning of the words in it. It is time for Parliament as Mr Brownlee said to stop passing law that reflects a completely mythical partnership and it is time to respect the actual words of the Treaty of Waitangi. 
I just want to read one article of the treaty before commenting on the way in which it is reflected or not reflected in this bill. I am afraid I will read the English version. I would prefer to read the Maori version retranslated—Sir Hugh Kawharu’s version but it is not in the Treaty of Waitangi Act which I think it is polite to use in this House: “Article the Second. Her Majesty the Queen of England confirms and guarantees to the Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand and to the respective families and individuals thereof the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession;”. 
I have read that because one of the most offensive parts of this bill is the repeated bleeding nauseating references to the Crown accepting blame for the fact that many Maori chose to sell their land as indeed have most people who have ever owned land in this country. There are very few pieces of land anywhere in this country that are still in the possession of the original holders or even in the possession of their direct ancestors. Of course that occurs but people sell their land because as the treaty assumed it may be their wish and desire to do so. Yet this Parliament is being asked in this bill to make a nauseating acceptance of blame for the fact that the land ceased to be held communally. 
There are other things that we could dispute. But that one seems to me to be the most fundamental because part of the purpose of the treaty was to enable the alienation of land. Let us remember the treaty was signed in a country where a population the size of that of the Palmerston North area occupied the entire country and where the typical span of a farm might have been 10 acres. New Zealand was enormously long in land and it was properly contemplated that Maori would sell land. It was also contemplated that they could make those decisions individually and get individual benefit from them. The people who drafted the treaty were very aware of what happened when collective rights were left in the hands of the chiefs. They were very aware of the injustice that could occur if it were left up to the chiefs to decide on what happened to collective property. 
I believe the Labour Government for its own political advantage is getting this House to make those nauseating statements of grief and blame because Maori people in this area have chosen not to maintain their 1840s lifestyle or even their 1860s lifestyle and have chosen to operate as individuals as families as hapu and as iwi but in very different ways from what they were then. It is time Labour gave that up so we will move amendments on that. I doubt whether they will be accepted but it is certainly time that that sort of thing was dropped from the precedents—[ 
Interruption 
] Land was confiscated but land was handed back. There were injustices. The United Future party is protesting at this speech. 
One of the things that this bill does is to actually repeat the unfair pattern of the past. One of the complaints was that when the commissioners examined afterwards the far too broad confiscations—the very unfair collective punishments—and handed some property back to the sections of this iwi that had not been in rebellion those amounts were handed back individually. But it was not going to be very easy to leave them in the state in which they had been confiscated. The commissioners were deliberately drawing distinctions between those who were the wrongdoers and those who were not. Now we have a collective settlement that ends up by giving the benefit of the compensation for those who were wronged to the descendants of those who were in the wrong. This bill does not draw distinctions between those who killed Volkner or Fulloon—or the descendants of the wrongdoers—and the benefit that can flow from this settlement. If the same principle had been being applied that the Crown is busy saying should have been applied back there in the 19th century there would have been a very careful effort to make sure that the beneficiaries of this settlement did not include those who had brought down the wrath of the Queen on that iwi. To turn around now and say that what was done 150 years ago is wrong because it was collective punishment and then to give collective compensation that includes benefit to those who ought to have been considered to be in the wrong is wrong in itself. Either collective treatment was wrong then and it is wrong now or it was not wrong then and it is not wrong now. It is time that this Parliament stopped pursuing those one-sided repeats of the wrong. 
I was interested too in Mr Peters’ explanation of the effect of clause 13. I do not fully understand how the definition of hapu flows through to the definition of Ngati Awa and accordingly to the definition of the beneficiaries. But I can see when the people of Tamaki-makau-rau and Poneke are deemed to be hapu if they never have been under any kind of customary definition that what we have here appears to be a deliberate attempt to extend benefit to circumstances where an entitlement should not exist and the corresponding exclusion of people who should have just the same claim when they have none. During the Committee stage of this bill I would like to hear what happens for example to the descendants of people who may qualify today when they as so many of the energetic capable and promising ones do go to live in Sydney. What happens to the descendants who have not got as far as Poneke or Tamaki-makau-rau and who are simply living in Rotorua? Does it mean that they need to come back to this House to get an express extension of the definition of a separate hapu? What exactly does it mean? 
We need people who understand this bill to be here in the House. I am not sure whether members of the Maori Affairs Committee could explain it because that is the committee that tells us that we have rules relating to legislation to confirm agreements such as deeds of settlement. Those rules mean that we cannot substantively amend this bill in any way that is not acceptable to the party to the deed being implemented. The party to this deed is defined as a group of whom it appears only about one-third have approved the deal and of whom less than one-third have approved the entity that is to receive it. Maybe the Crown is just being ruthlessly practical and saying it will settle with the nearest to a majority that it is going to get and put that issue behind it. I am afraid that it will not put the matter behind us if the low vote actually means there is another group of claimants out there. 
I have just mentioned two respects in which the bill can obviously be attacked in principle. Why did the select committee state that there are rules stating the House cannot change it? There may be conventions and there may have been practices that the Government and the Crown have bound themselves by but this House is not bound to rubber-stamp these settlements.