te Heuheu Georgina: Estimates Debate —  Speaker Recalled In Committee 
te Heuheu Georgina: Estimates Debate —  Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:610;Page:7269] 
Hon GEORGINA TE HEUHEU (NZ National) 
: 
 The report of the Maori Affairs Committee on the 2003-04 estimates for Vote Treaty Negotiations raises several areas of concern and I urge the Minister in charge of Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations to give serious consideration to them particularly as most of those concerns were shared by all the committee members. 
The manner in which they were discussed in the committee shows I guess continuation of bipartisan support for treaty settlements. National of course continues strongly to support any and all efforts to settle historical injustices because until we do that and put those injustices behind us we cannot look forward to building a nation. It is because of that wish that I want to raise in some detail one of the areas we traversed in the select committee. It underpins I think how critical it is that the Government understand the need properly to resource all parts of the claims settlement process. 
There is no doubt that claimants over the last 4 years as much as they have wanted to move to negotiations have shown a strong preference to go to negotiations armed with tribunal findings or at least armed with the historical casebook that shows by and large the nature of the breaches. They want their day in court and the Government needs to keep that firmly in mind. It should underpin the funding decisions that it makes. 
This year the Office of Treaty Settlements has received additional funding—and I will come to the two main areas—but the Waitangi Tribunal has not. In my view that will quickly cause a bit of a bottleneck. I heard Mita Ririnui gloat a little about the Government’s achievements; I will not be churlish given the discussion that went on earlier with Pete Hodgson in relation to science. If settlements are moving through that is good. The additional funding this year is mainly to enable the Office of Treaty Settlements to strengthen its negotiating capacity; it includes pre-negotiations and also includes better integration between the Office of Treaty Settlements and the Waitangi Tribunal. Secondly the additional funding is to strengthen Crown representation at the Waitangi Tribunal hearings. 
The new funding is predicated on increased negotiation activity due to so we are told a recent Government commitment to enter negotiations with five central North Island iwi comprising over 100 claims and secondly the Waitangi Tribunal’s new approach to researching hearing and reporting on claims which has caused it to revise its hearing schedule. The hearing of historical claims will be finished it thinks in 2011-12 instead of 2014-15. It has been able to revise that date downward to 2011-12. Again that is promising. 
There is a problem however. It arises in National’s view because there seems to be an assumption that streamlining the tribunal’s process means spending less or the same money. National refutes that assumption. In fact streamlining the process which means doing the same thing in a shorter time frame probably means that more resources need to be applied. I understand that the Government having put a priority on the central North Island claims expects that the Waitangi Tribunal will hear the claims in tandem with the negotiations activity. One may ask what happens when the Government has this expectation. The answer is that the Waitangi Tribunal must still do the same amount of work but with the Government’s priority in mind and it must do it on the same funding that it has had in previous years. So it is going to refocus its resources—in fact it has had to refocus its resources—on the central North Island claims. 
But if it does that it creates a bit of a bottleneck in terms of the work it already has in progress. I understand that the Gisborne report which was scheduled to be made public in December last year is 7 months behind. As of today those claims have not been reported back. The Tauranga report which was scheduled to be released midway through this year—and we have now passed to the second half of this year—will now not be out on current timetabling until the end of the year. In terms of the Tauranga claim which has focused on the raupatu question there was going to be a report and then it was going to move to the next phase. That cannot now be done. The Hauraki hearings have been put back. Although the Government has increased the funding of the Office of Treaty Settlements to get better settlements it is absolutely clear that those settlements will not occur in the way that they should. When one claim is given priority it means that other claims already in the process are put on the backburner. 
I know that this is not this Minister’s directresponsibility but she like all of us wants to see these historical claims resolved. I would urge the Government to consider putting equivalent increased funding into the tribunal; otherwise it will get sorely behind. While the central North Island claimants might feel happy that they are getting priority—and while as a potential beneficiary of those claims I might be happy about that—I am not happy for that to happen if it means that claims that have already been in the process for some time and that came in ahead of the central North Island claims are now being delayed and put back down the programme. 
That is a real issue. The committee has discussed it in its report and I would ask the Minister to urge her colleague the Minister for Courts to consider giving some additional funding to the tribunal particularly in the light of the fact that the Government seemed willing enough to pump $6.5 million into her treaty education programme. I guess that the bulk of that will go to consultants to hold more seminars and the gravy train will grow even bigger while the poor old tribunal struggles along on limited and meagre funds. 
One of the other areas of concern was the policy of settling with “large natural groupings”. Concern was expressed by all members of the committee that the Government must take care not to submerge the interests and the identity of smaller groups of individual iwi hapu and whanau in its wish to encourage the settlement of claims with “large natural groupings”. Obviously that is proving to be an issue and National thinks that some effort should go into that area to make sure that nobody is left on the sidelines. Although settlements are coming through this House Mita Ririnui and the others know very well—and possibly this will happen tomorrow—that there will always be those who feel that in the push to settle with the wider grouping others are left out. That is what we cannot afford in the resolution of these claims. 
Lastly there is the issue of the ratification of settlements and governance entities. It seems that there is reasonable buy-in of claimants to the actual deed of settlement—the settlement itself—but there is real concern which the committee looked at in some detail about the lessening proportion of eligible voters buying in to the ratification of their governance entity. We wondered why that was so. Certainly the issue of resourcing is part of it and we urge the Minister to look at that area.