Jackson WillieHon WILLIE JACKSON (Labour): E mihi ana ki a koutou te whānau kua tae mai nei i tēnei wā i whakarangatira i te Whare. He hōnore nui ki te tū i mua i a koutou i tēnei wā. Tēnei te tino mihi ki a koutou. [I acknowledge you all the family who have arrived here at this time and honoured the House. It is a great honour to stand before you at this time. This is a true acknowledgement of you all.]Well it's lovely to have the whānau here. I was listening to Shane Jones earlier talking about his experiences. It's lovely when we have Minister Jones on song with us. It's really been that sort of week—we're all on song together. Unity and love has come through the House. Jenny Marcroft: Kumbaya".Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Yeah "Kumbaya" as Jenny Marcroft said. It's been quite a week so it's lovely to have whānau here to tautoko this kaupapa. These are the types of kaupapa we do come to whakakotahi for—unite for. Last night we had a special event here that a lot of our whānau will not have seen where our Pasifika people came in and the House united—well most of the House—which is how it should be. You wouldn't know when we go through these Treaty bills that there has been angst over kaupapa Māori over the last few months and I always look at it and I think it's a bit of a shame because I do see the human element from all members on these sorts of kaupapa. These sorts of kaupapa touch people—they really touch people. They touch something in people—the injustice of what happened to our people. As myself and the Hon Peeni Henare know and we know this process as well as anyone up there you went into this process 35 years ago—35 years ago our people went into this process. It's a long time to wait for justice—a long time to wait for justice. So when you come here and the whānau honour us with their presence we should remember the type of struggle that has gone on with our kaumātua and our kuia before us. I was listening to Minister Jones talking about the minerals stuff. I thought that that was really lovely what he was talking about. He didn't talk about his minerals strategy though but he talked about—DEPUTY SPEAKER: That didn't relate to the bill. Hon WILLIE JACKSON: No that's true Madam Speaker—that's true. He didn't talk about his minerals strategy but he did a lovely analogy in terms of the tikanga of the minerals and the reo—as we all know he's an expert and he's very clever in that area. But the bill acknowledges so much of what we've gone through. You know I was looking through it and just acknowledging what happened with our reo—with our language. In just simple paragraphs like "The Crown acknowledges that in the second half of the twentieth century Te Korowai o Wainuiārua children who attended Crown-established schools were punished for speaking their own language and this has contributed to the decline of te reo Māori among the iwi of Te Korowai o Wainuiārua."—and just to have that in a settlement means so much doesn't it? It means so much because sometimes when our people talk about our parents or our tīpuna being beaten for speaking Māori they are challenged over that. They are challenged over that. Peeni Henare knows it as does Shane Jones. These two are both experts in our language—Tama Potaka also—and they know of the history and the background. We love to see that in settlements like this and I was reading and I thought that that's not in all settlements. But it's an acknowledgment and what that does to an iwi is that it crushes an iwi because all of a sudden you only have so few people who are Māori language - proficient. So this is only the first reading and we'll tautoko this all the way through. But I just want to say to whānau who have come here today that it's just wonderful to participate in the process. I mihi to our Māori Affairs Committee chair Dan Bidois over there and the former Ministers Andrew Little and Chris Finlayson and Minister Goldsmith for us always being able to find a way through things let common sense prevail and let our people have the opportunity to develop. So just a short call today to tautoko our iwi and tautoko the kaupapa today. Nō reira tēnā anō tatou katoa."