Rapua ngā tuhinga ruku tātari

The Waitangi Tribunal’s three-volume Te Kāhui Maunga: The National Park District Inquiry Report covers 41 claims spanning the area of Tongariro National Park and selected lands surrounding the park. The Tribunal refers to the people whose claims it heard as ngā iwi o te kāhui maunga. This name acknowledges their close whakapapa ties to one another and to the chiefly cluster of mountains: te kāhui maunga, which include Tongariro, Ngāuruhoe, Ruapehu, Pīhanga, Hauhungatahi, and Kakaramea and which dominate the inquiry’s landscape.

The Tribunal panel for the inquiry was made up of Waitangi Tribunal chairperson Chief Judge Wilson Isaac, the Honourable Sir Douglas Kidd, Professor Sir Hirini Mead, and Dr Monty Soutar. The panel convened 10 hearings between February 2006 and July 2007.

The claims of nga iwi o te kāhui maunga concerned two issues above all: the establishment and management of Tongariro National Park and the creation and operation of the Tongariro power development scheme. In his letter of transmittal that accompanied the final report, released on 12 November 2013, Chief Judge Isaac said that ‘Both of these matters are of national importance and are at the heart of the inquiry’.

The Tribunal found that it was a myth that Horonuku Te Heuheu made a noble gift to the Crown of the peaks of Tongariro, Ngāuruhoe, and Ruapehu. Rather, it found that Ngāti Tūwharetoa made a tuku of their sacred mountains, inviting the Crown to share their taonga as joint owners and trustees. Ngāti Tūwharetoa wanted to work with the Crown, to protect the mountains forever.

The Tribunal found that the Crown did not honour the partnership intended by Horonuku Te Heuheu. Instead, it took the title to the mountains for itself, and established the national park without properly consulting ngā iwi o te kāhui maunga. The Tribunal found that the Tongariro National Park Act 1894 as a whole failed to meet the legitimate expectations of Ngāti Tūwharetoa and was a clear breach of Treaty principles.

The Crown gave no recognition to the interests of Whanganui iwi. The Tribunal found that the Crown ‘effectively confiscated’ lands in which Whanganui and Ngāti Rangi had interests, which included sacred places such as Te Waiamoe – the crater lake on Mount Ruapehu – and Te Ara-ki-Paretetaitonga – the main peak of Mount Ruapehu.

For more than a century now, the Crown has not enabled ngā iwi o te kāhui maunga to exercise their rangatiratanga – their authority – over the park.

The Tribunal found that these actions of the Crown have breached the Treaty principles of reciprocity and good faith and the Crown’s duty of active protection.

The Tribunal recommended that the Crown honour its Treaty obligations and restore the partnership intended by the 1887 tuku by making a new partnership arrangement for the national park. Under this partnership arrangement, Tongariro National Park would be made inalienable, removed from Crown ownership, and taken out of the control of the Department of Conservation. The park would then be held jointly by the Crown and by ngā iwi o te kāhui maunga under a new Act and in a new title. The park would also be managed jointly by a statutory authority comprising representatives from the Crown and ngā iwi o te kāhui maunga.

The second matter at the heart of the claims before the Tribunal was the Tongariro power development scheme, which diverts water from the Whanganui and Tongariro River systems into Lake Rotoaira and releases it downstream to generate electricity.

The Tribunal found that the waterways diverted by the scheme are taonga of great importance to ngā iwi o te kāhui maunga, which never knowingly and willingly gave up possession and control of their waterways. The Tribunal found that the iwi retain development rights in those waterways and that they are entitled to compensation for the past and present use of their taonga to generate electricity, particularly in the case of Lake Rotoaira.

When the Crown set up the Tongariro power development scheme, it met only with Ngāti Tūwharetoa. It did not consult the trustees who administer Lake Rotoaira (which is critical to the scheme) or Whanganui iwi. Because of these failures to consult, the Tribunal found that the Crown did not act honourably, fairly, or reasonably when it established the scheme.

The Tongariro power development scheme has meant losses in water quality, habitat, and kai. Lake Rotoaira, which is a significant taonga of ngā iwi o te kahui maunga, has suffered irreversible damage. Yet, the Crown did not compensate the lake’s owners for the use of their lake for storage or for the impacts of the scheme.

The Tribunal made particular findings about the Crown’s 1972 agreement with the trustees of Lake Rotoaira. Under that agreement, Māori retained title to the lake bed, but the owners had to surrender control of the lake for electricity generation, without compensation. The Tribunal considered that Ngāti Tūwharetoa signed this deed because the Crown both kept them in the dark about the true environmental effects of the Tongariro power development scheme on their lake and fuelled fears that it would take the lake. The Tribunal found that the Crown breached the principle of partnership and considered that it would be unconscionable for the Crown now to refuse to put aside the deed. The Tribunal also proposed a package of measures under which the Crown, local government, and ngā iwi o te kahui maunga might manage waterways together.

The Tribunal’s extensive report covered many other issues, including Crown laws and practices regarding the alienation of land, the operation of the Native Land Court, public works takings, land development, customary fisheries, waterways, and the geothermal resource.

The urgent inquiry was triggered by the publication in 2011 of the report of the Early Childhood Education Taskforce, which, the claimants said, had not been consulted with them and had seriously damaged their reputation. The report, and Government policy development based on it, would cause irreparable harm to the kōhanga reo movement. The Tribunal endorsed the conclusion of the Wai 262 Tribunal’s report, Ko Aotearoa Tēnei, that urgent steps were needed to address recent Crown policy failures if te reo is to survive. The Tribunal noted that survival requires both Treaty partners – Māori and the Crown – to collaborate in taking whatever reasonable steps are required to achieve the shared aim of assuring the long-term health of te reo as a taonga of Māori.

This stage 1 report concerns a claim about Maori proprietary rights in freshwater bodies and geothermal resources and the Government's plan to sell shares in State-owned enterprises.

Released in September 2012, the Port Nicholson Block Urgency Report is the outcome of an urgent inquiry into Crown actions during and after negotiations to settle the historical claims of Taranaki Whānui ki te Upoko o te Ika (Taranaki Whānui) in the Port Nicholson block.

Claim 2235 was lodged in December 2009 by the trustees of the Port Nicholson Block Settlement Trust (PNBST), the post-settlement governance entity of Taranaki Whānui. In the course of negotiations, Taranaki Whānui agreed to release the Wellington Central Police Station from their proposed settlement package. This enabled the Crown to offer the police station to Ngāti Toa Rangatira (Ngāti Toa) as commercial redress. The claimants alleged that, in return for the release of the police station, the Crown ‘committed itself to recognise and uphold the mana whenua of Taranaki Whanui over the Port Nicholson Block by not offering any other property within the Block to Ngati Toa or any other iwi as commercial or cultural redress’.

The claimants further alleged that, in offering Ngāti Toa a number of items of commercial and cultural redress in the Port Nicholson block, the Crown had broken the undertakings that it gave to Taranaki Whānui to secure the release of the police station. They argued that this constituted a breach of Treaty principles that would become irreversible once the deed of settlement between the Crown and Ngāti Toa was finalised and redress enacted.

The Tribunal constituted to hear the claim comprised Judge Stephen Clark (presiding), the Honourable Sir Douglas Lorimer Kidd, Basil Morrison, and Sir Tamati Reedy. A hearing was held in June 2012 at the Tribunal’s offices in Wellington.

The Tribunal did not uphold the claim of Taranaki Whānui. However, it did find that the Crown, in exchange for the release of the Wellington Central Police Station, gave Taranaki Whānui undertakings not to offer Ngāti Toa any cultural redress and no further commercial redress within the Wellington CBD.

The Tribunal found that the Crown broke those undertakings. The Crown had offered Ngāti Toa a plaque at Parliament as cultural redress and a right of first refusal (RFR) over Crown properties and New Zealand Transport Agency administered properties in Wellington City, potentially including the Wellington CBD, as commercial redress. In so acting, the Crown breached the principles of the Treaty by failing to actively protect the interests of, and to act reasonably and with the utmost good faith towards, Taranaki Whānui.

In relation to the offer of cultural redress, the Tribunal stopped short of making a recommendation since Taranaki Whānui knew before signing their deed of settlement that there was an offer of cultural redress in the Wellington CBD to Ngāti Toa. The offer of a plaque at Parliament had also been withdrawn.

In relation to the offer of commercial redress, the Tribunal made a series of recommendations to the Crown to rectify the situation it had created, namely:

• That it review the offer of RFRs to Ngāti Toa over core Crown properties and New Zealand Transport Agency administered properties in Wellington City.
• That, if necessary, it amend the offer of RFRs to Ngāti Toa, to ensure that no commercial properties were made available via the RFR mechanism to Ngāti Toa within the Wellington CBD. The Tribunal was not concerned about properties located outside the CBD.
• If, as a result of implementing the above two recommendations, the commercial redress package on offer to Ngāti Toa was in any way diminished, the Crown should identify and offer alternative substitute commercial redress for Ngāti Toa.

The Tribunal also pointed to flaws in the Crown’s negotiation processes of the time, including the use of the ‘silo’ approach (whereby communication between different teams of Crown negotiators was minimal) and a lack of clarity in the language that Crown officials used. In the Tribunal’s view, both led to confusion and potentially created new grievances in the Port Nicholson block.