Ngāpuhi chairman Mane Tahere. Photo / Supplied
When politicians and Māori leaders come face to face at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds this week to exchange sharp words over the Government’s past year in power, a decades-long issue will continue to bubble away in the background.
Successive governments have sought to negotiate a settlement with Ngāpuhi, the country’s largest confederation of hapū, based in Northland, but, so far, none has come close.
Where is the Ngāpuhi settlement at? Is this Government any closer than the one before to reaching redress? And why is it taking so long?
“I think this Government is not on the right track in terms of how they are going about the mandating process,” Ngāpuhi chairman Mane Tahere told the Herald.
“A lot more work needs to happen in terms of engaging with hapū [sub-groups] and whānau ... so that marae and whānau are comfortable with what’s going on.”
The mandate process, the first step of an iwi settlement, involves an iwi or hapū group receiving authorisation from members to negotiate on their behalf with the Crown. These groups prepare a mandate, which then needs to be approved by the Crown.
Tahere said some hapū felt rushed to reach a mandate and others were preparing for it. Ngāpuhi has around 185,000 members and more than 100 affiliated hapū.
“They clearly had deadlines and dates to achieve things. One has to question the impacts of such deadlines and if or when it starts to marginalise our people and erode hapū authority.”
Treaty Negotiations Minister Paul Goldsmith said officials were not working to a particular deadline and describing the mandating process as rushed was “stretching it”.
The Government’s preference was for one commercial settlement alongside cultural settlements to different groups but that was something to be negotiated, he said.
“Our preference is not just to let things slide for another three, four or five years also. We want to try to make some progress if we can.”
Goldsmith said there was a “wide variety of opinion” across the hapū affiliated with Ngāpuhi.
“Some want to get on with it, some worry about speed, some never want to settle.
“In no settlement do you have 100% agreement on anything. It’s a matter of trying to build on the momentum that we are seeing but doing it at a pace that tries to bring as many people along with us as we can.”
Negotiations with large iwi are long and recent hurdles thrown into the mix by the Government could slow the process further: the Government has banned “sovereignty clauses” in settlement deeds (under the previous Labour Government, a deed with Te Whānau-ā-Apanui was drawn up that included the first case of a clause agreeing to disagree on who holds sovereignty) and NZ First says it is drafting a member’s bill that would force Ngāpuhi into a single commercial settlement rather than “confetti” payments to individual hapū.
(Goldsmith stressed NZ First’s bill was a member’s bill rather than a government bill and was not current Government policy.)
Both could potentially produce a stalemate further down the line: the iwi is staunch in its rejection of the claim Ngāpuhi ceded sovereignty (and have a landmark Waitangi Tribunal report to point to concluding Ngāpuhi did not cede sovereignty in 1840) and hapū groups within Ngāpuhi are not united on what a final settlement - or settlements - should look like.
“Ultimately, it’s the difference between listening carefully to Ngāpuhi and their hapū, the last biggest iwi settlement to be had, and genuinely working through matters such as constitutional arrangements and sovereignty or just ploughing ahead," Tahere said.
“Simply tabling these matters for another day won’t suffice. I believe Ngāpuhi must hold strong to our bottom lines and not compromise one bit. We do have to hold our ground even if it means we should wait until the next Government if [this one] doesn’t suit us.”
Tahere said it was far too early to say what a Ngāpuhi redress package would look like in the end. It could be clusters of hapū forming regional groupings for their own cultural redress and one overarching commercial settlement. Or those groupings could seek their own commercial settlements.
“It should be up to hapū. For the moment, though, let’s be grateful that conversations are happening no matter the sides.
“I know certain parts of those clusters, like Ngāti Hine, they’re very keen on their own commercial redress so that’s what I mean; we shouldn’t be rushed into that.”
Many of these hapū groupings are preparing to present their mandate to the Crown or discuss what the structure of their regional group should look like.
One cluster representing four Ngāpuhi hapū groupings secured a mandate with the Crown in July last year – the first for a group of Ngāpuhi hapū.
“A part of our job as the rūnanga (Te Rūnanga ā iwi ō Ngāpuhi) is really to support the hapū and what they want and how they want [the settlement] to look. We are not going to doublecross our hapū.”
Tahere is well aware of what settlement could mean to the region’s economy. Although it took some years of investment, post-settlement entities like Auckland’s Ngāti Whātua and Waikato-Tainui and the South Island’s Ngāi Tahu have built billion-dollar-asset empires.
In April 2024, six months after the coalition Government had come to power, Tahere gave an interview to TVNZ’s Q&A with Jack Tame where he said Ngāpuhi redress seemed likely within the next five years.
“I had really high hopes, actually, at that time. In hindsight, hell no, I didn’t think it was going to [be] that bad the next couple of years. It hasn’t been a good two years since that interview.”
Tahere said responding to Government policy, often through select committee submissions, had taken “a lot of time and energy” away from what he considered his team’s main responsibility: “service to our people”.
“It has caused fractures in relationships [with the Government] because on the one hand we don’t agree all the time on certain legislation and even projects or the way the Government is working and then on the other hand we rely on [Government] contracts to service our people – it’s a really fine balance.”
One of the higher-profile eruptions of those tensions in public was when Ngāpuhi leaders walked out of a meeting with the Prime Minister in August 2024. At the time, Tahere said the delegation would not sit in a room in silence with a Government he believed was running roughshod over Māori, citing policies like introducing referendums for Māori wards, changes to foreshore and seabed legislation and the then prominent Treaty Principles bill.
Four days later, hundreds of Ngāpuhi iwi members gathered outside Parliament to oppose the repeal of Section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act. And three months after that, the country’s largest protest hīkoi in opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill arrived at Parliament.
Ngāti Hine leader Pita Tipene, former chairman of the Waitangi National Trust and newly elected chairman of the Northland Regional Council, says the Government “and our society in general refer to Ngāpuhi as though it is an omnibus” as if “we are all going to go from A to B and arrive in the same place together”.
“That couldn’t be further from the truth. My analogy of it is there are minibuses that are leaving point A and they will reach point B in their own time,” he said.
“I think that the Government has reluctantly come to the conclusion that they need to deal with the minibuses. It is not for the Government to say ‘This is how you are going to move, folks’. They [the hapū] will move forward because they want to, not because they have to.”
Tipene said Ngāti Hine reaching redress in the next five years was likely.
“There’s a growing mood of being progressive and getting past this and moving on and putting our energies and our efforts into other key kaupapa because this really weighs us all down.”
Julia Gabel is a Wellington-based political reporter. She joined the Herald in 2020 and has most recently focused on data journalism.