Family refusing to leave farm

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A Wairoa family has vowed to continue to fight to stay on land they believe is “rightfully” theirs despite the High Court ruling police can break down their doors and arrest them in a week’s time.

Bruce Smith, wife Ruby and children Kreslea, Jarna and Cole (who is based in Australia) originally had until yesterday to leave the 790-hectare block Waipaoa 5A2, near Wairoa, or the court would issue an arrest warrant giving the police the power to break into the house to arrest the family.

At a hearing at the High Court in Wellington yesterday, Justice Christine Grice refused to stop the arrest warrant and instead gave the family until June 4 to seek legal advice and to leave the land before further arrest warrants were issued.

The land, once leased by Bruce’s late father Francis Smith, is now jointly owned by he and six siblings who hold a 60 percent share.

The other 40 percent is owned by more than 500 shareholders, including Bruce Smith, in his own name, and administered by Te Tumu Paeroa (the Maori Trustee).

Bruce Smith has farmed the land since 1997.

In 2015, a family dispute saw four of Bruce Smith’s brothers take a case to the Maori Land Court to get him to allow them access to the farm and a share of the decision-making. It followed a decision by the trustee to put the lease out to tender.

Smith’s brother Tim Smith’s application for the new 10-year lease on the land was the preferred one.

Tim Smith said the property, worth more than $2 million, was bequeathed in the 1950s to eight siblings by their father. It was meant to benefit them all. Instead, Bruce Smith has been running it alone and blocked their involvement by establishing a company (with one of their siblings, who is now deceased) that excluded the others.

Tim Smith and his brothers had been waiting a long time to have a chance of involvement in the property again. After taking their case to the land court in 2015, there were further delays caused by several counter applications and injunctions sought by Bruce Smith and his family.

In November 2016, the court ordered Bruce and his family remove themselves and their possessions from the property within seven days.

The following year, after subsequent applications for rehearings by Bruce proved unsuccessful, the court issued an injunction prohibiting the family from entering or occupying the land.

The Maori Land Court removed Bruce Smith as a trustee of the estate and removed him as a director in 2017.

Weeks later the trustee found the Smiths had continued to live at the homestead and had even put a gate across a bridge, blocking access to the land.

The situation deteriorated when the trustee was countered with a trespass order from the Smiths to stop Maori Trustee staff going to the property.

The trustee, Te Tumu Paeroa, declined to comment yesterday.

— Hawke’s Bay Today, additional reporting by The Gisborne Herald