Williams ArenaARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. Ngā mihi o te wā o te Pīpiri e haere mai nei i tēnei pō.[Thank you Speaker of the House. Acknowledgments of the month particularly as the month of Pīpiri nears us this night.]It's an honour and a privilege to stand today to speak to what is an important part of the history of not only Ngāti Tara Tokanui but all members of the Hauraki of uri who whakapapa to what is a shared set of interests and shared tūpuna in the Hauraki region and for Māori to celebrate an opportunity for the Crown to atone for those things in this historical account that we say today were wrong and should never have happened.The Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations is right to acknowledge the work that has gone into this and the first acknowledgment that I wish to make is to those tūpuna and esteemed members of Ngāti Tara Tokanui who have since passed on and who are not with us at this time when the bill is progressing through the House. There are members who have contributed to this piece of legislation who will be proud today to have reached the second stage in the legislation and who will be looking forward to the third reading when it will pass into law. I know that there are members who will be watching today who will hold their contributions in their memory and at the front of their minds as this progresses through the House and I acknowledge them. I also want to acknowledge those Crown negotiators who have worked very hard to make sure that the Crown's history and the agreed account is something which is enduring and which captures those not only oral histories but written histories which are available in this region because of successive Waitangi inquiries into the history here and that is recorded in the legislation today. Those are the chief Crown negotiator Mike Dreaver and also the Hon Rick Barker who worked through this settlement with Ngāti Tara Tokanui and indeed the Pare Hauraki settlements which were treated as a large national grouping and were progressed as such under both Labour and National administrations in the large national groupings approach to these settlements. It was hard work to progress these settlements with the Hauraki iwi. I want to thank not only those negotiators but also the Ministers who were involved with the Crown agencies for providing the support that was required to achieve these settlements and this settlement with Ngāti Tara Tokanui in particular. The negotiations with Ngāti Tara Tokanui began at Ngahutoitoi Marae in 2011. It gives you a sense of what it takes even for a settlement of this size—which is deeply important in its historical nature but is not large in quantum—when members formally hand over the power to their negotiators to represent their interests on their behalf with the Crown and when they then work through a process for their negotiators to build a sort of consensus around these areas which are dealt with in the settlement. The agreement in principle was reached in that same year—in 2011—and that's a tribute to those negotiators who were able to quickly work through the issues which needed to be put to the Crown. Then to get to this stage is quite a quick settlement process and it's a tribute to their work. I just want to touch on how this is an area of the country as somewhere where the Crown has a lot to apologise for. The history here which is recognised in this bill and the other bills which have come before this House already for Pare Hauraki are an account of the historical injustices that the people of the area faced. A lot of that is recorded in the Native Land Court records of this time and so it provides a useful historical touch point for this House to consider—records like the letter of 1869 written by Te Keepa Raharuhi which he wrote to the Native Minister and the Crown's representative in Hauraki asking them to honour undertakings negotiated by them. He wrote E hoa mā tēnā kōrua. He kupu tāku kia kōrua ko mātou whakaaro kua tūturu ki runga ki o tātou whakaaro. E hoa mā tera pea mātou e mate i te Hauhau e ngari kei a kōrua te whakaaro kia mātou. Kāore hoki e tahi o mātou i whiwhi i te tika i enei mo te wahi e kino ai Te Hauhau kia mātou. E hoa mā tēnei ano tētehi o a mātou kupu kia kōrua. Kō matou pīhī whenua i roto i te rohe a te Kawana i te takiwā o Katikati i tukua e mātou kia Te Maki i mua. Whaka-ae ana ia i tēnei ra ka tukua atu e mātou kia kōrua ma kōrua e whakaputa mai kia mātou. He oi ano te kupu kia kōrua."["Friends greetings. I have a message to you both our thoughts we have agreed to what us and you suggested. Friends we may die at the hands of the Hauhau but we will leave our decisions to you. Not one of us received any rights to this block where the Hauhaus may not like us. Friends this is another message to you. Our piece of land within the boundaries of the Government in the Katikati district we gave to Mackay before. He agrees on this day to give over to you for you to hand back to us. This is all we have to say."]What he was saying there was that he was appealing to the Government to honour the agreements that they had made and he refers to them over and over as "my friends". He was offering a peace there for what was an injustice of land being taken away by the Government but also of boundaries being violated by successive Governments in the Katikati District. He had already appealed to Mackay before and he refers there to the injustice which had been done over and over by a Government which was refusing to negotiate with the people who occupied that land at the time.The historical account of any settlement legislation is one of the most important parts. At this second reading it's my privilege as the chair of the Māori Affairs Committee when this went through that select committee to inform the House that we delved deeply into the historical issues. We heard from the 15 submitters about how this would affect them and how having access to an agreed history would allow them to move forward. It is something which I am proud that our Treaty settlement process in Aotearoa allows us to do—to have these historical touch points on the record as part of the shared knowledge that we can then build from.In conclusion may I thank everyone who has worked on this bill and I thank Minister Paul Goldsmith for continuing to advance it at pace. It is something that I am proud that New Zealand legislators all agree on and may that long continue."