OPEN LETTER TO HON. PAUL GOLDSMITH
(Re Front page article Issue 1209 18 May 20 million in redress for iwi)
Tēnā koe Minister Goldsmith,
We are pleased for those iwi who have finally received recognition and redress through the Hauraki settlement process. Every iwi deserves justice for historical breaches of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
However, while some celebrated, Ngāti Huarere ki Whangapoua mourned.
We mourned because through the Hauraki settlement process the Crown has inflicted upon Ngāti Huarere many of the very injustices for which it now apologises to other iwi.
At the same time as Crown Ministers stood before the nation acknowledging the wrongs of the past, the Crown was forcing Ngāti Huarere’s Wai 475 claim into a settlement against the express wishes of the Ngāti Huarere. At the same time as the Crown spoke of honouring rangatiratanga, it denied Ngāti Huarere the right to determine who could negotiate its claim. At the same time as the Crown spoke of restoring mana, it trampled ours.
The irony is impossible to ignore.
Ngāti Huarere is now in a far worse position because of the settlement than it was before it.
Under your leadership, and that of your predecessors, the Crown has acted contrary to its own settlement policies, disregarded recommendations of the Waitangi Tribunal, failed to uphold principles of natural justice, and acted inconsistently with domestic and international human rights standards.
One of the most serious examples concerns mandate.
Crown settlement policy recognises that the authority to negotiate a settlement belongs to the claimant group itself. The Crown cannot confer a mandate. Despite our sustained and unequivocal opposition, the Crown effectively conferred the mandate to negotiate Wai 475 upon representatives of six other iwi.
This occurred despite the Crown requiring rigorous mandating processes for other claimant groups and excluding Ngāti Huarere and other affected claimants from meaningful participation in those very processes.
Those six iwi have never sought authority from Ngāti Huarere. They have never consulted us about the settlement of our claim. Yet they have been granted redress that includes Ngāti Huarere’s ancestral lands, wāhi tapu, urupā, commercial assets, and financial redress.
The Crown’s response has been that Ngāti Huarere members may access this redress through the “appropriate whakapapa”. That assertion is hollow when the claimant definitions of the recipient iwi do not recognise Ngāti Huarere as a whakapapa they represent.
The most offensive aspect of this process is that Ngāti Huarere is expected to be grateful.
We are told that we may access our reparation through other iwi. We are told that we may register under whakapapa that is not our own. We are told that matters fundamental to our identity, history, and cultural inheritance have been adequately dealt with by people who neither sought nor received authority to represent us.
Ngāti Huarere are direct descendants of Tamatekapua, captain of the Te Arawa waka, and have maintained ahi kā in Hauraki since the arrival of Te Arawa. We do not cease to exist because Crown officials decide we are inconvenient to a settlement model.
No settlement that requires a people to abandon their identity in order to access their rightful redress can be regarded as just.
There are many other examples of Crown conduct that have compounded this injustice.
The Crown refused to be bound by orders of the Māori Land Court in proceedings brought under section 30 of Te Ture Whenua Māori Act 1993, despite promoting section 30 as an appropriate mechanism for resolving representation and mandating disputes. The Crown’s refusal rendered those proceedings effectively non-justiciable and denied Ngāti Huarere an independent determination on representation.
The Crown also strongly opposed Ngāti Huarere’s application for recognition of its interests in the Whangapoua Forest under section 8A of the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975. In doing so, the Crown acted in direct contravention of the agreement between the Crown and Māori that both parties would use their best endeavours to enable the Waitangi Tribunal to identify and process forestry claims and make recommendations within the shortest reasonable period.
Repeated requests from Ngāti Huarere that Wai 475 be removed from the Hauraki settlement have consistently been refused.
As a lawyer, Minister, you will appreciate the fundamental principle that parties cannot be compelled to enter contractual arrangements against their will. While Treaty settlements are ultimately implemented through legislation, they are founded upon negotiated agreements. Ngāti Huarere neither authorised nor consented to the inclusion of Wai 475 within the Hauraki settlement framework.
The Crown nevertheless proceeded as though others possessed authority to negotiate and settle our claim. In our view, that strikes at the very heart of the settlement’s legitimacy.
As a consequence, Ngāti Huarere ki Whangapoua considers the Hauraki Deed of Settlement to be void ab initio insofar as it purports to settle Wai 475. The claim was included in the settlement without our authority, without our consent, and contrary to our clearly expressed wishes.
While other iwi celebrate the completion of their settlements, Ngāti Huarere grieves the loss of ancestral lands, wāhi tapu, urupā, forests, and other taonga that have been vested in others. We also grieve the damage caused to our identity, whakapapa, and mana through legislative assimilation into six other iwi of Hauraki.
The Crown often speaks about reconciliation. Reconciliation cannot be built upon coercion. It cannot be built upon the confiscation of a people’s negotiating mandate. It cannot be built upon the transfer of one tribe’s redress to another. And it cannot be built upon forcing claimants into a settlement they repeatedly and unequivocally rejected.
Ngāti Huarere considers the purported settlement of Wai 475 to be fundamentally defective. We did not authorise it. We did not consent to it. We repeatedly objected to it.
The Crown proceeded anyway.
That is why Ngāti Huarere continues to challenge these actions through its contemporary Treaty claim before the Waitangi Tribunal and will continue to oppose this injustice until it is remedied.
Heiō anō
Wanda Brljevich, Chair
Ngāti Huarere ki Whangapoua Trust
