THE MINISTER AND THE MANDATE

Te Rūnanga-a-Iwi o Ngāti has held the Ngāti Kahu mandate for treaty settlement negotiations since 2000.  In that time we have dealt with four different Ministers— Margaret Wilson, Mark Burton, Michael Cullen and Chris Finlayson. 

Apart from  Minister Cullen with whom we managed to negotiate an Agreement in Principle in 2008, none of them have shown good faith.  Instead they have continued to try and strip Ngāti Kahu of more lands and resources.

To illustrate, Minister Wilson was an architect of the Foreshore and Seabed Act which attempted to steal our takutai moana in 2004; Minister Burton oversaw a Crown attempt to sell off part of Rangiputa in 2006; and Minister Finlayson presides over the Marine and Coastal Areas (MACA) Act 2011 and the current reforms being attempted on Te Ture Whenua Māori Act.

To further illustrate, in a 2010 TV interview on mainstream TV Minster Finlayson told Ngāti Kahu to “go to hell” when one of our hapū repossessed a tiny part of their lands at Taipā that the Crown stole from them in the 1850s. Then in 2011, immediately after meeting with and telling Ngāti Kahu that he would consider our draft Deed of Partial Settlement, he met with and told the other Te Hiku Iwi leaders that he had rejected it.    

He followed this in a 2015 TV interview by calling on Ngāti Kahu to remove our leadership and replace it with ‘fresh eyes’.  Within weeks our people not only renewed their mandate for our leadership, they did so unanimously.

Then in a series of letters questioning our mandate, the last of which was received in August 2016, the Minister advised that he had decided to require us to reconfirm our mandate by following a five stage mandate reconfirmation process  that was complicated, expensive and completely Crown set.  If we did not agree to complete this process in nine months, he wrote that he would have to “consider” whether it remained “appropriate” for him “to recognise” our mandate to “represent Ngāti Kahu in treaty settlement negotiations with the Crown.”

There were several major flaws in the Minister’s approach to our mandate, not least being that we were not and are not in negotiations to settle but are pursuing binding recommendations through the Courts and Tribunal.  Furthermore, it is Ngāti Kahu and not the Minister who give us our mandate, and we do not need his recognition of our mandate to take him to court.  

To help us understand his reasoning we made an Official Information Act (OIA) request for all documentation on which he had based his decision. 

The resultant release arrived in late 2016, and detailed analysis of the documents contained in it revealed that officials from the Office of Treaty Settlements (OTS)  had been giving the Minister very poor advice, including fabrications about our mandate.    

The OIA release also showed that those officials had been working with a separate group in Ngāti Kahu who wanted to accept the Crown’s ‘full and final’ settlement offer that had already been rejected by 12 of the 15 Ngāti Kahu marae.  Some of that separate group  only wanted to settle their own claims.  However the OTS officials had told them they had to be prepared to settle all our claims, and the OIA release revealed that at least one of them (an employee of the Crown) had indicated he was willing to do that by “wresting the mandate from the Runanga.”

Te Rūnanga-a-Iwi o Ngāti Kahu regularly test our mandate under our tikanga, and are doing so again at this time.  However we let the Minister know in February that if he also wanted us to follow the Crown process, then the Crown had to pay for it, and it would take at least 18 months to do properly.  

In response he tried to blackmail us into dropping our legal action and accepting $94,400 to conduct the mandating reconfirmation process he had designed.  We declined, and the Crown suspended its recognition of our mandate.  

Hei aha.  When we apply the same tests to the Crown and the Minister as they did to us, they lost our mandate years ago.  And as already stated, we don’t need their recognition of our mandate to take them to the courts or the Tribunal.  Haere tonu tatou.