Turia Tariana: General Debates 
Turia Tariana: General Debates 
[Volume:608;Page:5483] 
Hon TARIANA TURIA (Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector) 
: 
 Mr English reserves a separate vocabulary to discuss issues concerning tangata whenua. He talks of special privilege racial apartheid political correctness discrimination and second-class citizens. His treaty policy talks about it being time to move on; I say to Mr English that before he moves on he needs firstly to get to terms with what the treaty says as it is the basis for constitutional government in New Zealand. 
The Waitangi Tribunal report into the Maori electoral option stated that under the terms of the treaty the Crown formally recognised the existing rights of Maori and undertook to protect them. It is in that sense that Maori people have a special constitutional status. That special constitutional status is one by which we acknowledge that the treaty does create unique rights in terms of the right for Maori interests to be actively protected the right to development and the right to equality. Maori have reminded the Crown of their special constitutional status when considering the history of Maori representation. It sounds so easy yet as we are all so painfully aware the history of this country is one where successive Governments have failed to recognise and give effect to the treaty as the basis of constitutional government. 
Let me remind members of what some of those so-called special privileges have really meant for tangata whenua in the history of this land. I see some of the National Party members sniggering. How many tauiwi have experienced the privilege of Crown-sponsored theft of their land and resources? We must not forget the shameful history of the native land acquisition and settlement legislation. That statute gave the Governor the power to take any native land for settlement whether or not the owners wanted to sell. That sounds like a really special privilege! That was entrenched further with the Native Land Act 1909 by which the Governor-General was able to take land for roads or railways with the explicit instruction that no compensation shall be paid—another privilege. How many members have had their people imprisoned without trial because they peacefully resisted injustice? That is another privilege. The Maori prisoners legislation allowed just that stating that it is not deemed necessary to try the said natives in order to inflict punishment. By that legislation hundreds of Taranaki Maori were given the special privilege of being imprisoned without investigation or trial. 
For those members who are dismissing those Acts as historical grievances that we should move on from I remind them that in our generation there are other events requiring that same scrutiny. Members will no doubt recall in the immediate aftermath of Anzac Day that when Maori soldiers coming home from the war returned to the Raglan district they found that their marae had been taken for defence purposes. It eventually became a golf course. Who can forget the tragic picture of only 20 years ago of a convoy of army vehicles transporting hundreds of police to remove Maori protestors from Takaparawha led by our former colleague Joe Hawke? 
The history of colonial contact and indigenous resistance is not so very old and it took until 1993 for issues relative to the taking of Maori customary land to be stopped with the introduction of the Te Ture Whenua Maori Act. We should not forget that at the signing of the treaty Maori owned 66 million acres of land. The special privilege of being native meant that by 1975 Maori land had been reduced to only 3 million acres. 
So what does Mr English’s advocating removal 
of 
so-called special privileges mean for tangata whenua? Is it about legislation that deprives one of fundamental human rights including the suppression of one’s medical and spiritual experts; the removal of one’s right to breastfeed; the removal of one’s right to a whangai system of caring for children; a history where one is treated as the deviant other the noble savage who must be acculturated and assimilated into subservience; and a denial of or an exclusion from basic health education and a whole range of other social services? If we choose to look at the really poor statistics for the so-called privileged Maori we see that they surely are an indication of extremely poor political representation and an inability of the systems and structures to meet the constitutional rights and privileges guaranteed in the treaty.