Harmony the big issue

Press, 27 July 1988, Page 6

Harmony the big issue

The issue of harmonising individualistic and tribal societies was one of the greatest problems faced today in New Zealand, a historian acting fpr the Crown in a Maori land claim, said yesterday.

“We certainly do not want anything that smacks of apartheid or denies the rights of the individual,” Mr Gordon Parsonson told the Waitangi Tribunal. He was speaking on the question of Maori reserves during a hearing of the Ngai Tahu land claim in Otago. "Making specific reserves for local Kai Tahu or Maori genuinely would raise very difficult matters and the question of whether we were making specific racial reserves, which most people would step back from.”

A tribunal member, Professor Hugh Kawharu, asked i Mr Parsonson whether the Crown had consulted sufficiently with Maoris and pakehas in accommodating two different viewpoints within the country.

“I think not. This is one of the reasons the Waitangi Tribunal has been set up. “There has undoubtedly been very little consultation. I think that is one of the matters the tribunal is trying to rectify.” The Deputy Chief Judge on the Waitangi Tribunal, Judge Ashley McHugh, asked whether the Crown would have been obligated to carry out promises for Maori reserves.

Mr Parsonson referred specifically to Otago where the tribe believed it had been promised a reserve in Princes Street, Dunedin.

There was no evidence of such a promise and attempts to secure a reserve became the victim of a settlement battle between Scots settlers and the British Government agents, he said. “I get the impression that you are speaking with a Dunedin accent and perhaps an anti-Well-ington accent,” said the Judge. “I have lived here for a long time,” said Mr Parsonson. A tribunal member, Mrs Georgina Te Heu Heu, asked Mr Parsonson whether he interpreted the Treaty of Waitangi as obliging settlers to reserve land for Maoris. “The treaty simply guaranteed tribal rights to lands, estates, forests and fisheries for as long as the tribe wished to retain them,” said Mr Parsonson. He said it would have been inappropriate for reserves to be allocated automatically when land was bought. “The treaty provides for two distinct societies. The protection of one and the possessive individualism of the other,” he said. Mrs Te Heu Heu suggested that such an acknowledgement meant that the tribe had a right to a reserve within the area sold. “The Government obviously thought that,” said Mr Parsonson.