Letter to the Editor, Tuesday July 7, 2015

What's he done?

Christopher Findlay's letter (In good faith, July 2) talks up the Te Hiku claims settlements, but it leaves me wondering if he really knows what good faith is or what on Earth he has done.

He gets his officials to rewrite the Maori history of the Far North so that the government atrocities look like unfortunate mistakes.

He gets his iwi negotiators to buy back a few thousand hectares of the hundreds of thousands of hectares of their land that was stolen from them, and then tells us, the public, that the money they paid for them will end up in the Northland economy.

He lets the iwi have their names on the titles of some of their whi tapu but he makes sure that the public still gets to trample all over them.

And Te Oneroa-a-Tohe, that the Court of Appeal said belonged to Maori, he places firmly under the control of the Northland Regional Council and Far North District Council. In a magnanimous gesture he allows some iwi representatives to be appointed to a council committee to provide some governance advice for the beach.

Looks to me like Maori in the Far North have been ripped off - yet again. But this time it's full and final and there'll be no coming back to revisit it through the courts and tribunals in following generations, no matter how unfair and how unjust it may be.

These settlements are supposed to be enduring. So why do I get the feeling that they will all come back to haunt us and our descendants in other ways, outside the courts and tribunals, long after both Finlayson and his iwi negotiators have fallen silent?

DOUG GRAVES

Kaitaia