Smith Murray: Ngati Awa Claims Settlement Bill — In Committee Procedure 
Smith Murray: Ngati Awa Claims Settlement Bill — In Committee Procedure 
[Volume:623;Page:18810] 
MURRAY SMITH (United Future) 
: 
 United Future has not really spoken at all on this issue of the preamble and the problems with interpretation that have arisen but I believe that this debate has been an important one and also an inevitable one. Although many concerns have been raised in the Chamber about the correct translation of English words into Maori this debate is timely—as there is a rise in interest in te reo in New Zealand as there is a greater use of te reo and as it is accepted more broadly we will face more and more of these problems. The difficulty that we have is always a difficulty in terms of how we translate one culture’s language and meaning into another culture’s language and meaning. 
I welcome the rise in the acceptance and awareness of te reo. This morning I was at the Hui Tamata powhiri and I found that speakers spoke on the marae without there being a translation into English. I wished I knew more te reo so that I could have understood what they were saying particularly when they were obviously cracking jokes amongst each other the meaning of which I was unaware of. I was grateful for John Tamihere being there and at least telling me a little bit about what was going on. 
The increased confidence of Maori in terms of their own language and tikanga is important and we ought to celebrate that. But we as a Parliament should know about the problems of not getting language translation correct. After all we still have problems with our treaty dating back to 1840 in trying to work out the difference between tino rangatiratanga and kawanatanga and the conflicts there. We all know the problems we are having in terms of the conflict with and misunderstanding about that terminology. The question is—and it is a very real question that we need to address in Parliament—how do we actually resolve that? It is not easy to do it by a literal language approach because then there are problems in terms of the language and what it can convey. I know for example that in Greek there are three words for love: agape philia and eros. If one chooses the wrong one one term means something very very different from the other. I understand that Eskimos have a multitude of terms for snow because of their cultural context whereas we have only one. 
So the ability to transfer ideas from one language to another is not easy. Nor can we look at a broad translation because that tends to be very subjective and it changes over time as my friend Mr Franks has said. Even in English we find difficulty with courts interpreting Acts and the language in Acts written in English can be interpreted differently from what Parliament intended the legislation to do. So even in English we have a problem with translating concepts specifically. 
Mr Franks suggested that we should indicate in these instances which of the languages should predominate in the event of conflict. I have been thinking about that while I have been sitting here and although for a Maori bill one could lean towards the idea that Maori should be the language that predominates it seems to me that a clause like that of Mr Franks would be a good idea. But given that most members of Parliament passing this legislation are English we are forced at this stage to say effectively that English should predominate. It would be nice if that were not the case but because we are the members of Parliament who have to make a decision about this bill and its contents—whether we as a Parliament will endorse those contents—the fact that the bill is in a language we understand with concepts we understand is a critical part of that process. 
I do not think that we will resolve the issues until we as a nation are bilingual. I look forward to the day which I guess is a generation or two hence when we will not have these problems because we will all understand te reo as much as we understand English—to the point that when we read the te reo version we will know what it is saying and we will understand it not only in terms of the words it has but in terms of the concepts it is trying to convey. In that situation maybe we would not need an English version of the bill at all; we would have enough knowledge in this Parliament by a majority simply to be able to understand the Maori version and to be able to interpret it in accordance with Maori tikanga rather than English concepts. So I do not think we have come to the conclusion of this debate in terms of the general view; I think it is something we will have to address for a long time hence.