Maori Party should break with National over water rights, but won't – Harawira
The Maori Party should abandon its supply and supply agreement with National over water rights, but won't Hone Harawira says.
The Mana MP compared the situation to the Foreshore and Seabed issue which saw the Maori Party formed amid Maori discontent with Labour (and from which Mr Harawira later broke away).
The National-Maori Party accord has come under fire from both left and right recently. From the right, the water rights claim is seen as a threat to the partial privatisation programme; while critics on the left claim Maori Party MPs have let "the baubles of office" cloud their judgement.
"I think the Maori Party should have walked over the Marina Coastal Area Bill," Mr Harawira said on TVNZ's Q+A programme yesterday in a reference to to the legislation that replaced Labour's Foreshore and Seabed Act last year," Mr Harawira said.
"They should walk over this. They didn’t then; they won’t now."
He added, "Look, you can’t talk about the prime minster’s comments as being corrosive and insulting and inflaming and then stay at the table."
With his comments over the Maori Council's claim on water rights, Prime Minister John Key had insulted the judicial process and attacked the Waitangi Tribunal.
Maori have the opportunity to use the Treaty to provide a lead for New Zealanders to stop the asset sales, Mr Harawira said.
Speaking later on the same programme, fomer Reserve Bank Govenor and ACT leader Don Brash said, "I’m someone who has always supported Treaty settlements – the payment of compensation when property rights have been confiscated or expropriated in some ways, and I still believe that, no matter who’s had their property confiscated.
"But to claim that any one racial group owns the right to water in New Zealand I think is a nonsense."
Mr Key says he will meet with Maori Party co-leaders Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia on water rights this week at a time yet to be scheduled (or at least made public).
Watch Hone Harawira's full interview on Q+A here.
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Comments and questions17
If anything the water rights issue will only make National stronger because there is no way in the world the average New Zealander wants resources like that being controlled by one racial group.
What "radical group" - Maori Council water rights bid is supported by the Maori Party, National's coalition partner
Who mentioned anything about a "racial group"? and how do you know what the "average new Zealander, wants" or doesn't want? Do you know them ALL personally?
If anything, the "average New Zealander has been out in force all over the country this weekend, regardless of the weather and not prompted by any one particular "racial group" but just as ordinary, "average New Zealander[s]" against the partial sales of our energy companies.
You know nothing about Maoridom, control is a pakeha concept, not a Maori one...My people welcomed the colonialists here to SHARE our resources for their sustenance and to cohabitate alongside one another...but the pakeha and maori definition of Sharing is Caring have two totally different definitions.
It is quite obvious that you have no knowledge whatsoever on the subject matter of the Treaty of Waitangi and the continuation of reconciliation, truth, peace-building and above all, the healing of a unique culture of people whose forebears were traumatised through conflict, dispossession and a population of people that were clearly angry, were in denial, suffered helplessness and whom engaged in a degree of internalised violence and what’s more compounding is that that population passed that anger on to generation to generation.
The trauma was exacerbated by the transactional processes that took place after 1868 and 1869 when the actual warring ceased. So that the poverty, which followed from landlessness and it’s cause in conflict in the trauma that it created.
Currently the claims being heard before the Waitangi Tribunal (open to the public by the way, is primarily a process for communities dealing with those traumas. A process for those communities, coming to terms with those historical losses, when they sometimes occurred 5 or 6 generations ago, but the pain is still felt and one can see it in the eyes of the people, you see it in the way they act, one can certainly see it in the evidence they give, not just as individuals but often professional historians evidence corroborate what they say.
Your the racist and you are part of "one racial group" that has no standing anywhere because you have no ethics, your culture is one that steals by stealth and robs investors of millions of dollars...Not a culture to be proud of...We must have inherited the British convicted overspill dross from Aussie - YOU!
Hear Hear, Well said
Absolute rot. Keep the gravy train rolling!
You've been spouting the victim card for so long Siena that you're actually starting to believe it's true. Nobody believes the 'trauma' & 'but the pain is still felt and one can see it in the eyes of the people' lines, but they might if you try bring in the violins. The BS is bringing a tear to my eye at this very moment.
Everyone knows what this is about & it's maori wanting something for nothing - asset sales are bad, unless we can get a free cut of the profits bro.
Why doesn't that drongo Hone get a real job, so that he can buy his own water?
society is based on water as as life. we all own the government which act on our behalf.therefore we all own the water currently ,even maori, which the treaty guarantees. anything more is lawyers exploiting a dodgy translation to be paid money indefinitely on behalf of greedy activist maori. wheres all the money coming from to pay these lawyers? i also charge courts in general as being incapable of deciding this sort of thing based on pecuniary advantage.
This is just another opportunity for the lawyers to mint more coin for themselves.
Don Brash said, "I’m someone who has always supported Treaty settlements.
At Orewa he effectively denied the constitutional validity the Treaty of Waitangi.
Don Brash has dis-credited himself many times over. He does not deserve the oxygen of publicity.
Maori to sit on the losers benches in Parliament. Hope so,sooner than later. They can join the guy called Hone who called all non Maori White mother *******> For some reason he stills gets media oxygen.
Isn't it amusing to read all this justification by Maori for being agrieved and therefore justification for taking from every tax payer in this country in order to satisfy their self indulgent whims. That is what the treaty 'gravy train' is about. Maori if you feel so agrieved, I suggest you go to the Queen of England, your sovereign leader (The Treaty says so) for compensation. As for ownership of water...you don't own it and never will... No one owns what falls from the sky...rain. Where does the water actually come from to feed the springs and rivers..the sky!!! Does this follow on that the next Maori claim will be for ownership of the very air we breath?? That about sums up the water grab. OH I forgot .....there is the small matter of compensation (that word again)..Hydro Power companies use copious amounts of water...what an opportunity to 'clip-the-ticket'. By the way, Maori, you have just devalued the shares in the SOEs with this show of greed...and you wanted to have 'a-bob-each-way' by claiming shares in sales process as well as the water ownership.... AGAIN TAKING FROM YOUR FELLOW TAX PAYER...When will this self indulgent, greed based compensation, looser mentality stop? Answer; Only when a government with a steely, no-nonsense attitude steps up to the plate and declares the grievance industry is over. Do you hear that John Key!!
How do you own rights to water? Pretty sure the river is connected to the ocean at some point. So are they going to try claim the rights to the worlds oceans next or the air we breath. This is just to make money and gain power. Taking advantage over the treaty.
The National Party has always pandered to apartheid, they invented 'Waitangi Day' while everyone calls it New Zealand day, National started bulk funding apartheid with Ruth Richardson's never ending "fiscal envelope", and the National Party will privatise water ownership for apartheid supporters.
This country needs Nelson Mandela.
The apartheid era government in South Africa was also called the National Party
we should do a trade off here , give them the water but take back the social welfare department and welfare payments to Maori.
I wonder which Maori tribe, 'owning the water'; is going to compensate the property owners on the West Coast, who have been flooded by rivers of maori owned water, pouring all over non maori private property yesterday..???