PRINCIPLES OF THE TREATY OF WAITANGI DELETION BILL - First Reading

The Green Party will oppose this bill, as we have similar bills. It is amazing how often this issue keeps coming up and being stopped dead in its tracks. We are really concerned for Labour, and we certainly look forward to hearing from its Māori MPs as to their views on this legislation. What do they think about it, given that their party is going to support it? It is a very sad situation.

Poor old Doug Woolerton. What has to be remembered here, when he says that the whole point of this bill is to get rid of the industry, is that his leader has been saying to get rid of the industry for years and years. Now Doug has taken up the mantra. Well, I tell Doug that it is just too late. We have had the principles in legislation in this country for 31 years. For 31 years we have had a massive amount of jurisprudence on the issues around the principles — not that it is all good, and not that it is all a good thing, but there has been that jurisprudence and work done. We are finally getting to the point where many of the issues have been resolved. Doug is just too late.

What has this supposed industry spurned as a result of this jurisprudence? I will tell members what it has done. Generations of young Māori lawyers have been able to come through the ranks, enabling them to take control of their hapū and their iwi and to be active and work for their people. These are the new leaders of this country. There is a new generation of judges and a new generation of politicians. These are the things that have arisen out of the 30 years. Business management graduates are coming up who will be able to manage the resources that arise out of, in part, the principles and their application to various areas. They are industry leaders in agriculture and in information technology.

The Waitangi Tribunal has done amazing work with the tools it has had — flawed as those tools might be — doing things for New Zealanders as a whole, such as protecting New Zealand's forests. If it were not for the Treaty, the principles, and the application by the tribunal this country would have sold off its Crown forests in massive amounts. It has enabled Māori broadcasting to become an amazingly successful industry in this country, in television and radio. It is te reo Māori week; it is Māori Language Week. But for having this tool — like I say, flawed as it is — we would not have had Māori language protected in law.

It is the principles. This is the tool that has been used because it was the only one available to enable that protection to happen. We, the Greens, completely agree that the tool is flawed. We do not concern ourselves with the principles. They are not in any of our policies. We never refer to the principles, because we believe it is the text and the articles that are relevant. But we will not support a bill that eliminates the principles from legislation and from the legal processes, leaving just a huge lacuna — a massive hole — where that jurisprudence lives, because that would return us back to the days before the principles were enacted and used. It would return us back to the days when the Treaty was a nullity and we were not able to use any tools in law to see that our rights as tangata whenua were being met and dealt with properly in legislation. That, ultimately, is what New Zealand First wants and is looking to do — to go back to those days.

I will give members an example, because I think what they are trying to do is so sad. I just refer back — it is Māori Language Week — to the tribunal report of, I think, 1985 that used the principle of active protection to make sure that te reo Māori was an important and significant language. That led directly to the 1987 Māori Language Act, which states that Māori language is a protected and official language of this country. Let us just go back to 1979, before the implications and use of that principle, when Dun Mīhaka ended up with a decision from the Court of Appeal saying that although Māori language in New Zealand was a matter of public importance, the Treaty had no legal bearing on the matter. The court based its decision on the English common law that applied in New Zealand because there were no tools for it to make any other decision.

The principles are flawed. We would like to see a hapū-based decision-making process in place, but unless New Zealand First or any other party is prepared to enable the signatories to the Treaty — the hapū signatories who are entitled to rangatiratanga — to make those decisions and have a process, there is no room in this Parliament, and certainly not with support from the Greens, to eliminate the only tool that Māori has ever had to be able to ensure we have legal recognition in this country.

Kia ora.