|
MEDIA RELEASE: Iwi withdraw from negotiations
The mandated negotiators for two Muriwhenua iwi have withdrawn from settlement negotiations citing the Crown’s continued
breaches of its terms of negotiation.
Ngati Kahu and Te Aupouri last week asked the Waitangi Tribunal to urgently reconvene the Muriwhenua panel so they could seek
binding recommendations for the compulsory return of several major assets, including the land under Aupouri State Forest, all
Landcorp properties (including the Rangiputa Block, on the Karikari Peninsula), and a large number of smaller properties and
sections, some of them coastal.
Ngati Kahu negotiator Margaret Mutu said the good faith provisions of the formal terms of negotiation had been severely stretched
in 2004 by the passing of the Foreshore and Seabed Act. More recently the Crown had advised that land contained within the
Rangiputa Block was being put up for public sale by Landcorp, despite strong protests from Ngati Kahu and without recognition of
the iwi’s interest in the land, notwithstanding the existence of a Section 27B memorial on its title.
The Office of Treaty Settlements had since advised that it would not landbank the property, or provide the iwi with a first right of
refusal to purchase it.
“As well as these breaches, Maori have struggled with the Crown negotiation policy from day one because it has been decided
without their input and attempts to force them into a position of having to accept an average of 0.06 percent of the value of the land
they lost to Crown breaches of the treaty,”
Professor Mutu said.“On top of that, the Crown has steadfastly refused to consider the social, economic, political, psychological
and spiritual violence it perpetrated against Maori of the Far North, which the Waitangi Tribunal noted in its 1997 Muriwhenua Land
Report had left them in a state of `physical deprivation, poverty, social dislocation as families dismembered in search of work
elsewhere and loss of status during long years of petition and protest.’
“Instead, under its policy, the Crown expects Maori, as part of the settlement process, to condone and legally validate its wrongful
and illegal confiscation of nearly 250,000 acres in the Ngati Kahu rohe alone.”
It had become clear, therefore, that the Crown was not negotiating in good faith, that it could not and would not recognise and
acknowledge the nature and extent of the breaches of its obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi and its principles, and could not
demonstrate and record that it had acted in good faith in reasonably negotiating the settlement, as required by the terms of
negotiation.
Professor Mutu said the Ngati Kahu negotiators had done their best to progress the negotiations but had not been successful, and
now believed there was no basis from which the Crown’s honour might be restored and developed.
The grounds for a remedies hearing by the tribunal, she added, were based on the 1997 Muriwhenua report, in which the Tribunal
found that Muriwhenua claimants were `entitled to a very large compensation to enable their re-establishment in the future’, and
that relief `... should include binding recommendations in respect of the Crown Forest and State Enterprise assets.”
Two other Muriwhenua iwi, Ngati Kuri and Ngai Takoto, who were not currently in negotiations, were supporting the position taken
by Ngati Kahu and Te Aupouri, she said.
|
|
