GHOSTBUSTERS

Last month, Te Runanga-a-Iwi o Ngāti Kahu lodged an application formally asking the Waitangi Tribunal to order the Crown to return all Crown forest and State-owned Enterprise lands in the Ngāti Kahu rohe. A mere four days after the application had been lodged, the Tribunal issued a memorandum in which it directed the Crown to respond by 5th August.

When the application was lodged I had fully expected a two-pronged attack from the Crown. First, it would claim Ngāti Kahu was holding up other iwi in the region from settling their claims. Second, it would try to delay any hearing so it could sort out the details of settlement with the other iwi this month, before parliament shuts for the general elections.

Sure enough, media reports quickly appeared saying that the other iwi’s settlements would be jeopardised if the Tribunal agreed to hear Ngāti Kahu’s application. These reports are total kaka. There is nothing stopping other iwi settling their claims. What they cannot settle are claims over lands in which Ngāti Kahu has an interest.

But it gets better. By the end of the month the Crown had sent a memo to the Tribunal saying it couldn’t respond to the application until Ngāti Kahu had provided further information. Quite apart from the fact that it is not for the Crown to dictate the Tribunal’s direction, it actually already has all the information it claims it needs.

Then, just four days after that delaying gambit, the New Zealand Herald ran a story saying that, so rarely is the power of binding recommendations used by the Tribunal, ‘that some have likened it to a “kehua" or ghost.’

Such a claim is astonishing. I have been intimately involved with land claims for almost three decades now, and I have never, ever heard anyone refer to the Tribunal’s power to make binding recommendations as a ‘ghost.’ Who are these nameless ‘some’ quoted by the Herald? They can only be Crown stooges. Certainly no self-respecting Māori would ever say such a thing.

However in the same report the Herald does quote another iwi’s leader saying he believed [Ngāti Kahu] was on a "hiding to nothing" with its application, because ‘the Haronga decision applied to land which originally belonged to a Māori incorporation.’

That is such utter gobbledegook that I must assume he has been misquoted. Anyone who has actually read the Haronga decision knows it applies solely to the duty of the Waitangi Tribunal to hold a hearing and make a decision on an application.

What next? Well, I expect the Crown to carry on trying to delay the hearing, to continue painting Ngāti Kahu as ‘bad’ and the other iwi as ‘good’, and to persist in urging those other iwi to settle fully and finally on Ngāti Kahu lands. I also expect the Tribunal to hear Ngāti Kahu’s application and make a decision based on law, not on politics.

Now that the kehua has been well and truly busted, the Crown should just get on with preparing itself for the hearing.

Kei a rātou.