Tanczos Nandor: Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Bill — First Reading 
Tanczos Nandor: Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:619;Page:15046] 
NANDOR TANCZOS (Green) 
: 
Tena koutou nga mihi nui ki ngahapu katoa me ngawhanau hoki o Ngati Awa. I give greetings to all of the people of Ngati Awa. 
Let me begin by making it clear that the Greens support this bill because we support Ngati Awa in their attempts to get redress for injustices perpetrated against them historically by the Crown and others. It is clear that Ngati Awa have worked extremely hard to get to this point in the settlement process and the Hon Georgina te Heuheu has already made mention of that and spoken of it in some detail. 
I understand that the formal process began in 1988. There were Waitangi Tribunal hearings in 1994 and negotiations were entered into in 1996. Eight years later their legislation is finally coming to this Parliament. It is coming in two bills: this governance bill which is before us today and the settlement bill which will have its first reading next week. As the Hon Parekura Horomia has said this bill establishes a governance structure for the management of Ngati Awa settlement assets. This is a significant issue and there has been a lot of debate about the proper form of post-settlement governance structures. 
I remember the hui in Taupo—I think it was last year—where there was quite extensive debate about what form post-settlement governance structures should take and that will be the subject of ongoing debate but I understand that Ngati Awa did not want themselves to have to develop a new bill to establish a governance structure. My understanding is that they wanted to use the structure that had already been established in legislation in the 1988 Te Runanga o Ngati Awa Act and there are issues there. The runanga is currently a Maori trust board under the Maori trust board legislation. That means it is accountable to the Minister of Maori Affairs and that is something that cannot continue. 
The way that Maori trust board legislation is written has been a source of some mystery to me for some time. In particular I have always found it somewhat patronising that a Maori trust board needs to have ministerial sign-off before it is accepted as a Maori trust board. So it is good to see that this will mean that the runanga will not be accountable to the Minister of Maori Affairs and will not need the Minister’s sign-off but it will be accountable to ngahapu me ngawhanau of Ngati Awa. That is a good thing because clearly that old configuration was not appropriate. But it seems that having a separate bill in the way this bill is separate could have been avoided by having a little bit more flexibility in the way that the Office of Treaty Settlements approached the issue. We think there could have been an amendment to the Maori Trust Boards Act where those accountabilities could have been rectified on a broader front which would have made some sense. But it seems that the Office of Treaty Settlements has bullied Ngati Awa into an unnecessary legislative process where a separate bill is going through to formalise the governance structure at the same time as the settlement bill is going ahead. 
It is interesting that the Office of Treaty Settlements was happy to negotiate with the established runanga which had received assets from the Crown in the past but refused to accept them as a governance entity for the settlement and I sometimes wonder at the pressures and imperatives on the Office of Treaty Settlements. I understand that the Office of Treaty Settlements wanted Ngati Awa to establish a private trust which would have meant that the assets would not be collectively owned in law but that there would have been individual entitlement and clearly that approach would have been a cause of major problems. Ngati Awa quite correctly did not want to go down that path because they wanted their assets to be collectively owned and that I understand would be correct according to tikanga. 
This highlights the difficulty the Crown has in dealing with concepts of collective ownership and it is the same difficulty we have seen in its approach to the seabed and foreshore legislation where concepts of ownership governed by tikanga rather than by fee simple and individual title is something the Crown finds very difficult to grapple with despite the ability of other jurisdictions to deal with those issues. Notably Canada has been able to recognise those customary collective ownerships but in New Zealand it is something the Crown has great difficulty dealing with. So we are concerned that instead of working with Ngati Awa to look at how to develop the best governance structures that are appropriate for the iwi the Office of Treaty Settlements has tried to fit a round peg into a square hole. We think this is a classic case of the Office of Treaty Settlements attempting—and fortunately failing—to impose its own views on iwi forcing them to squeeze into models dictated by the Crown and we believe failing to operate with the best interests of the iwi in mind. 
What is of particular concern is that once again the costs of the delay and the obstructionist positioning by the Office of Treaty Settlements on behalf of the Crown are being borne primarily by the iwi. That is the standard practice and it is most unfortunate that this is the case because the iwi has incurred enormous time and fiscal costs that we believe would have been absolutely unnecessary if the Office of Treaty Settlements had been prepared to work with iwi instead of against them and had been prepared to show some flexibility and fluidity in the way it approached those issues. 
So in supporting the progress of this bill—and we do support it and want to see this come to a speedy resolution—the Green Party thinks it is also an absolute disgrace that the Government is taking up time on a members’ day for this bill when we believe it should have proceeded alongside the settlement bill as part of the Government legislative programme. We believe that the two bills could have been one bill which could have gone through the process and then if necessary it could have been separated at the third reading and there are many many examples in this House where that process happens. We think that it is a slight to Ngati Awa that this is the case and that their governance entity legislation which was required of them by the Office of Treaty Settlements was not considered important enough by this Government to take up a slot on the Government’s timetable and we wonder whether this is the quid pro quo for Ngati Awa pursuing the best governance structure for Ngati Awa. We think the Government should be ashamed of its bullying tactics in this regard. We do not believe that it had to be dealt with in that way and we believe that Ngati Awa should be congratulated on refusing to accept the Crown’s one-size-fits-all approach and demanding that the best results for their own people should be what determines their own governance structure. We support them in their expression of their rangatiratanga and we congratulate them on working so persistently and so hard to bring this matter before the House. We look forward to the House passing this legislation forthwith.