Maori Claims Pile Up

New Zealand

An avalanche of land claims clog the economy.

MAORI LAND claims now threaten to slow down or even stop important functions of the New Zealand economic engine. Aside from blocking the transfer of SNZIS bil lion worth of taxpayer-owned assets to the new Government corporations until Maoris are guaranteed that future claims won’t be prejudiced, the growing logjam of grievances over alleged injustices in Maori ownership of land or water is start ing to hurt.

Public works programs are held up or frozen. Important commercial decisions about offshore fishing rights have been de layed. (One claim affects 80 per cent of NZ’s commercial fishing area.) Local authorities in many parts of the country are unable to effect basic house cleaning regulations because of uncer tainty over land ownership. Manganui County Council in Northland, for exam ple, cannot tidy up rights of access on a commercially critical route the only road to the major tourist attraction of Cape Reinga on the tip of the North Island because of a claim. It is one of hundreds of parallel examples in the country.

Commercial fishermen await the out come of disputes over fishing rights fol lowing the lodging of exclusive harvesting claims for large areas of coastline. Major tourism projects such as the construction of resorts are on hold until land ownership is sorted out.

And the High Country farming leases are subject to uncertainty until the mas sive claim by the Ngaitahu tribe for about 10 per cent of the South Island runs its lengthy course through the Waitangi Tri bunal, the arbiter on these complex dis putes. Though the claims aim at Crown land and do not target individual farmers, they of course directly concern their live lihood. Until they know what form of re dress or remedy, in legal terms, the claims will seek, farmers must have a compelling disincentive to develop their land or otherwise undertake necessary efficiencies.

The issue of remedies poses one of the largest uncertainties. So far, most claims have sought financial compensation or the return of land. It is a fraught question. The biggest claims over land and/or sea often put a financial value on the extent of the grievance by way of underlining the legal point, and they are large numbers. If the Government, which is committed to righting alleged wrongs under the Treaty of Waitangi, paid out on the claims, the country would be bankrupt. Just one of the

Ngaitahu claim’s disputed blocks has a grievance value of about SNZ3OOm. “You would soon reach a figure that would be quite comparable to the national debt,” explains Dr Maarire Goodall, senior re search officer of the Waitangi Tribunal and a member of the Ngaitahu people.

Fortunately most claims are looking for something less and the tribunal is inclined to restore justice by providing the means to recover a lost way of life rather than by offering cash. In some cases, for example, in whole blocks of land held by the Min istry of Works, the Waitangi Tribunal has seen fit to hand back the acreage.

Dollars and cents have been more dif ficult to assess, and so far there have been no precedent-setting awards. It may be that future claims will seek royalties, a slice of the action, like Australian aborigine tribes sitting on mining lodes.

While these overhanging issues re main, the Maori land claims clog up mun dane but important areas within the economy. And with the claims piling in on top of the existing case load of over 120 un

settled disputes, there isn’t much prospect for speedy redress. The rate of settlement is a lot slower than the pace at which the problems are pouring in. That’s the main reason why the Government is consider ing a lump of financial aid to assist the tri bunal in reducing its paper mountain.

Otherwise the present backlog is likely to take a decade to sort out.

The decisions of the Waitangi Tribunal have already shown that many claimants deserved redress the land should never have been appropriated. The Govern ment, in the form of the Ministry of Works, has been a major offender in acquiring a lot of land it didn’t need or else allowed to lie fallow against some vaguely defined fu ture purpose. The verdicts have also fi nally provided some validity to the 1840 Waitangi agreement between the Maori chiefs and the British Crown that was sup posed to protect tribal land. It’s this treaty which the Waitangi Tribunal is designed to implement.

One reason for the tribunal’s stately progress is that its seven members, a ma jority of whom are Maoris, are trying to read the minds of the long-dead people who framed the treaty. That interpretative process is taking time. Until the tribunal comes fully to grips with its case load, the economic engine is misfiring. □