Tapu Misa: Never mind beach access, what about some respect?

COMMENT

Normally, around this time of year, I'd be contemplating my family's Far North beach retreat with unalloyed pleasure. Well, maybe a little alloyed given the sandflies and mosquitoes.

But not this year. This year, it's impossible to think about that beach holiday without visions of that most explosive of issues encroaching on my plans of undisturbed peace and tranquillity. And, frankly, I blame the Government.

For one thing, it has rather unhelpfully chosen the week before Christmas to release its foreshore game plan, thereby forcing people like me to concentrate diminishing brain cells and shopping time on coming to grips with a devilishly complex issue at the height of the festive season.

Sure, the Government is in a tight corner - but I can't help thinking it's a problem largely of its own making.

How many iwi and hapu would realistically have succeeded in proving full customary title and ownership to the satisfaction of the Maori Land Court if the Court of Appeal's unanimous decision had just been allowed to stand? Not many.

How ironic that the same Government, which had so much faith in our judiciary that it gave us our own Supreme Court, should have baulked at allowing the courts to decide what foreshore and seabed rights belong to Maori.

Still, if the moves signposted last week are anything to go by, my resentment will be nothing compared to those who went through what Te Tau Ihu chairman John Mitchell called the "silly theatre" of "stupid consultation hui".

Some, like Huhana Smith, whose relatives own land that includes Kuku Beach, south of Levin, aren't angry as much as dismayed by the indecent rush toward "blanket legislation", and disheartened by the lack of reasoned debate.

I first talked to Smith two years ago, when she was looking into the Queen's Chain on behalf of her relatives, the people of Te Rangitawhia and Matiawa, hapu of Ngati Tukorehe. They'd been having problems with the public assuming the Queen's Chain entitled them to unrestricted use of Kuku Beach, which Huhana's old folks had always regarded as ancestral property, of which they were the unquestioned kaitiaki, or guardians.

So they put up a sign. A very nice sign, carefully worded in both English and Maori. They hadn't needed it in the old days when Maori ownership had been recognised and respected by the Pakeha farming families in the area.

Such was the goodwill that at one stage, probably in the 1970s, the iwi even agreed to a road being built, to make beach access easier for their neighbours. But some time later, an official AA road sign went up and, as people moved on and a new community took root, everyone gradually assumed that Kuku was a public beach.

That would have been fine if it hadn't been for the damage caused by four-wheel drives and trail-bikes racing over the dunes, destroying middens, shellfish beds, and the nesting ground of birds. The elders looked on helplessly as visitors burned rubbish on the beach, dumped cars in the riverbed, and - in contravention of the iwi's tikanga - cooked fish and shellfish on the beach.

Any suggestion that they should respect the tribe's customs was met with outraged resistance. Their visitors argued that the Queen's Chain guaranteed them the right to be there.

Of course, it didn't, as Huhana found. That 20m strip of land around the coastline, which was set aside apparently at Queen Victoria's request for the creation and amusement of the inhabitants, applied only to Crown land, not Maori-owned land.

That's when the sign went up, along with a new carpark where people were asked to leave their vehicles. The sign made it abundantly clear that everyone was welcome to enjoy the beach, but that there were rules. It reminded visitors that Kuku was treasured as wahi tapu and its borders and ancestral lands, with riparian rights, deserved to be respected.

It asked them not to light any fires or dump rubbish, and to take their shellfish and fish home to cook. It told them there was a major coastal ecological restoration project under way - which the iwi had instigated in partnership with the local regional council - and to please keep off the areas being replanted, the dune systems and nesting grounds.

And most people have been pretty good about it. A few, though, have adamantly stood their ground. That presumed right, says Huhana, was too strong - and it's become even stronger with the foreshore and seabed debate.

This is land that can't legally be sold off, by the way, unlike the coastal property in the hands of other private owners, or vested in public bodies like Ports of Auckland, which is even now in the process of selling off Westhaven Marina, a prime harbour-edge site, to the highest bidder.

For Huhana's people, it's never been about denying anyone access.

"What it is about, if I could sum it up in one word, is 'respect'. Respect for the environment, respect for the Maori cultural landscape and respect for our rights."

* Email Tapu Misa