Maori Land Claims

Press, Volume LXXIX, Issue 23971, 11 June 1943, Page 4

Maori Land Claims

In a curiously placed paragraph in the Financial Statement, the Hon. W. Nash announced that " preliminary inquiries with a view to "arriving at a definite and early " settlement of the Native claims " are in progress." This ought to be an encouraging statement. It can only be said that too many like it have been heard before, and that nothing has come of them. Every successive assurance, every successive failure to make it good, deepens the Maori's sense of grievance and his distrust of the politicians who have let it live and fester. The Ngaitahu claim was adjudicated, in favour of the claimants, more than 20 years ago. It was not settled. The Coalition Government offered to settle for a very much smaller sum than the Jones Commission had declared to be just; the offer was—with reason —refused. The present Government early began to promise that this and other claims would be promptly met. A meeting at Tuahiwi in 1937 heard several Ministers on the subject. At Ngaruawahia more was said, though more cautiously; and conferences with tribal representatives followed early in 1938. Yet so little progress was made that in 1939 Maori representatives began,

not very wisely, to talk of boycotting the centennial celebrations in protest. No such action was taken; but in 1940 Sir Apirana Ngata, with force and justice, chose the Waitangi celebrations as an occasion to utter the Maori people’s sense of injury and its fears for the I future. It is enough to say now, j without traversing any of the claims, of which the Ngaitahu and the Waikato are the chief, that their facts are all clearly established, and by competent judicial authority, and that there is no doubt of their foundation. It is to be hoped, therefore, that Mr Nash’s “ inquiries ” are not inquiries pursued over old and well worked fields of evidence. The 'only questions outstanding are questions of the amount of monetary compensation—and some of these have already been plainly answered—of the way in which the money is to be paid and' used, and, besides, of the deeper and better sort of restitution which cannot be reckoned in financial terms at all, but only in a wiser and more sensitively co-oper-ative native policy. If the Government is really on the verge of a settlement which will, in that full sense, be complete, it was worth while to say so. Otherwise, it was not.