te Heuheu Georgina: Te Roroa Claims Settlement Bill — In Committee 
te Heuheu Georgina: Te Roroa Claims Settlement Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:649;Page:18351] 
Hon GEORGINA TE HEUHEU (National) 
: 
 I will take another brief call to again mention the preamble. My colleague is right: the preamble is a very important part of the Te Roroa Claims Settlement Bill. Te Roroa have the advantage of a very comprehensive Waitangi Tribunal report and much of what was traversed and found in that report now finds its way into the preamble in the bill before us. 
It would be great to read out some of this narrative in full for the benefit of those who are not in this place and who do not readily have access to the background to these settlements. I mentioned in my earlier contribution that Te Roroa are an ancient people with a proud proud history—a history that quite soon after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi started to become blighted by their interactions with the settling Government of the day the Maori Land Court and the legislation from those days which has a lot to answer for in terms of breaches of the Treaty that have been found. 
Te Roroa once a proud community of various lands in the north came to find themselves virtually alienated disjointed and lost—lost from their whenua. That loss—as I also referred to earlier—still shows itself today in the way the people recount their history and share their aspirations for what they want to do into the future and it was so obvious to the Maori Affairs Committee when it went north to hear them. 
Although the claim that immediately gives rise to this settlement in the bill before us is more recent Te Roroa actually began petitioning the Crown from the late 1870s over the Crown’s failure to provide appropriate reserves once the Crown had made up its mind to go in and by various means deprive Te Roroa of their landholdings. As I say there is a long history here. Further petitions were made into the early 20th century—in 1907 and so on—and between 1908 and 1912 approaches were again made to Parliament. This like many claims has a long history of petitions other claims court cases and approaches to various Parliaments over a long long period of time. That is why it is so important that New Zealand continues on its way to settling these longstanding injustices. I am sure it has been quite hurtful in a way for Te Roroa over the last 12 months to witness the sudden burst of energy that has come into the process driven by Dr Cullen and to see other tribes move forward—move ahead even—with the settlement of their claims with Te Roroa still languishing on the sidelines. 
So yes the Minister in the chair the Hon Mita Ririnui might like to be all tidy and wait for us to move to the next part but we are on the preamble and we are in a sense talking in the dark. The Minister did not brief us on the improvements to the Te Roroa Claims Settlement Bill. If the Minister had we would not have been on the phone yesterday chasing around the country. One of the claimant negotiators had been out of New Zealand for a month. Fortunately I managed to get him. He had just hopped off the plane from the United States and we were able to get some details. So I say to the Minister in the chair he should tell us now.