Delahunty Catherine: Ngāti Hauā Claims Settlement Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Ngāti Hauā Claims Settlement Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 07 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17657. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koe e te Whare Pāremata tēnā koutou Ngāti Hauā. He mihi nui ki ngā mana me ngā rangatiratanga.[Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker.Salutations to you the House and to you collectively Ngāti Hauā. A huge acknowledgment to the powers and authorities.]I am very privileged to speak to the second reading of the Ngāti Hauā Claims Settlement Bill. It is my privilege to be a resident in the Hauraki and to therefore be in the neighbourhood of Ngāti Hauā and to acknowledge at the end of the rohe of Hauraki Ngāti Hauā’s strong interest in and relationship and whakapapa connections to Te Aroha the maunga ātaahua in our area the beautiful mountain that we are working to restore from pollution.I am going to take a brief call because in the third reading I would like to expand on some of these issues. I think the most critical issue is the need to bring the Pākehā community into an understanding of what Ngāti Hauā and other tangata whenua groups have been through so that we can actually say that things have been settled. I think thata number of Pākehā might know the name Wīremu Tamihana Tarapīpipi and the word “kingmaker” but have no real concept of the extraordinary leadership of this tupuna the history of his descendants and everything that he and his people went through during the Land Wars of the 1860s. So it is really important to acknowledge his descendants here today and back in the rohe who have carried on since those times to assert their mana and rangatiratanga despite the incredible process of violence and colonisation that took place in their rohe.Of course the Waikato being one of the most fertile and beautiful parts of Aotearoa it was in the sights of General Cameron and in the sights of the colonial settlers and they were determined to wrest that land from its rightful owners. Much of that land is now in private hands and thus there is a conundrum when we talk about full and fair restitution and justice for Ngāti Hauā and other Waikato people.The classic issues are involved in the settlement but first I will acknowledge the effectiveness of this particular negotiation at this time. Obviously Ngāti Hauā had initiated an excellent negotiation with the Crown and within 6 months had reached an agreement that represented the best that could be negotiated. I think we should acknowledge and celebrate that while also stating the Greens’ refusal to accept that settlements are full and final. These deals can never be the end of negotiation. The reason I say that is that we know that issues like those Patricia Grace has just experienced with the Public Works Act even though it ended in victory and discussions around post - Treaty settlement monitoring are not entrenched in the settlements. They rely on the goodwill of the Government of the day and that is insufficient.We cannot rely just on the goodwill of the Government of the day in post - Treaty settlement monitoring. That is not sufficient. We actually need if we are going to make a proper settlement to recognise the absolute legal obligation on the Crown under the articles of te Tiriti to continue dialogue and negotiation for ever so that we can attempt to live in the right relationship out of the mess that colonisation created in Aotearoa.So the goodwill and willingness of each Government is not sufficient. We cannot rely on the fashion to support te Tiriti depending on who is in power. We need to entrench those values and those articles of te Tiriti into these processes if they are going to be meaningful. I would like to acknowledge my colleague Metiria Turei who said of the previous bill that although the process is designed by the perpetrator it is pretty difficult to see that the redress is going to be appropriate in all senses no matter how much good work has been done. It is an imbalance of justice.I want to talk about war because the Waikato War is not written on the walls of this building. I am looking forward to the day when we acknowledge the wars in our own country as well as the wars offshore. I think we have had a recurrence now of acknowledging Ōrākau Rangiriri and Pukehinahina for example but they are not on the walls of Parliament. They are not expressed as a true part of our history and that does not do them justice. They are the most painful wars we have been involved with because they strike at the heart of our identity as a nation and they strike at the heart of some of the myths of our nation about how we live together. When they are on these walls I am going to have faith that we have truly taken on te Tiriti.The other issue in relation to Ngāti Hauā is that I read the aerodrome provisions with some interest. The Public Works Act in the 1940s and 1950s was used to divest these people of their whenua. At the moment the settlement talks about the future but what it gives them in concrete terms is the right to sit on the parking committee. I do not think that is what justice looks like. To say that one day they might get the aerodrome back if people no longer use it—well that is not really justice either. One day when thosepeople who like flying their planes around decide they might like to give the land back—I am not sure that that is justice.I am interested in truth and reconciliation being meaningful and it is not truth and reconciliation when one of the parties i.e. the Waikato Pākehā community has no idea not only of the content of the settlement—most of them—but also of what happened in Ngāti Hauā what was done and what conditions people have to survive with. Even the good things that are in the settlement do not really come to grips with that either.Really interestingly the constitutional review process that the Government and the Māori Party led talked about the need for these issues. The report talks about the need for te Tiriti education and civics education as being critical if we are going to create a genuine reconciliation to history and therefore a real settlement of the Treaty process in Aotearoa. But the constitutional review recommendations have not been followed through as far as we can tell in any meaningful way. There was a discussion in Parliament yesterday on this very matter and it was not at all clear who was going to take responsibility for making sure that genuine robust te Tiriti education based on what happened at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 in the Te Reo Treaty signed by the chiefs of the rangatira will actually have any place in the education system. Words are one thing but we are way overdue.If we are talking about the Ngāti Hauā settlement we need the people of Waikato the Pākehā community tauiwi katoa to really understand what has taken place what has been done what is being returned what is not being returned what is the finished business what is the unfinished business and how they as citizens under te Tiriti who are protected by article 1 in terms of kāwanatanga have a responsibility to work in a right relationship under article 2 rangatiratanga with the tangata whenua the mana whenua of Ngāti Hauā or anyone else in the Waikato.We talk about co-management co-governance and all these models but we have not got a basic understanding in the Pākehā population—and I know this because I have taught this subject for 20 years. The Pākehā population has no basic understanding of what the articles of the Treaty mean in terms of their responsibilities or that the settlement process is actually their process.I am one of the few very privileged Pākehā who speak in the House about this. I do that because Te Tiriti o Waitangi is the most important issue for Pākehā in Aotearoa tauiwi katoa. Tangata whenua have never given away their rangatiratanga and te Tiriti does not give it to them. It merely affirms the existing reality that has been damaged and that we are now attempting to heal. We as Pākehā my people need to understand—and nowhere is this more significant than in the Waikato—what happened and how we have a role in supporting the restitution and justice for Ngāti Hauā.I am looking forward to the day that this constitutional conversation actually leads to proper te Tiriti education so that every citizen can stand up in the Waikato and say: “What happened with General Cameron and what happened in the burning of the women inside the church—what does that mean for me and how can I understand that?”. Not in a way of feeling paralysed with guilt or shame but in a way to feel empowered by history to live in the right relationship and support a settlement such as this one and to make the settlements in the future ongoing robust meaningful and justice based. Kia ora tātou katoa.