Treasury paper ‘leaked to friends’

Press, 15 September 1988, Page 4

Treasury paper ‘leaked to friends’

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Parliament

The Minister of Maori Affairs, Mr Wetere, was accused in Parliament yesterday of leaking a confidential Treasury document to his friends while keeping it from his departmental officials.

This was a deliberate leak and a clear breach of Cabinet confidentiality, said the Opposition spokesman on Maori affairs, Mr Winston Peters. He called for Mr Wetere’s resignation, because “any other Minister at any other time” would be required to go. “It is only inverted racism by the Labour Government that is keeping Mr Wetere in office,” Mr Peters said. The Treasury document Mr Peters referred to (“The Press” September 14) was a 12-page report predicting that if the Government accepted Waitangi Tribunal recommendations on Maori land claims it would require tax increases or spending cuts. Mr Peters, at a meeting yesterday of Parliament’s Maori Affairs Select Committee, asked senior officers of the Maori Affairs Department if they had seen the Treasury report. The Secretary for

Maori Affairs, Dr Tamati Reedy, and his senior staff denied having seen it, even though it was dated May 13, 1988. Mr Peters later tabled in the House a letter from a Maori not a member of the department’s staff — Professor Ngatata Love, of Massey University — to three associates involved in Taranaki Maori land claims to the Waitangi Tribunal. The letter said he was enclosing a copy of the Treasury report, which he described as “highly confidential” and as setting out "Government thinking on the issue of claims.” Mr Peters said this letter showed that Mr Wetere had given his nondepartmental confidants access to a document to which his own staff had not had access. "Why is the Minister engaged in sabotaging the taxpayers’ position?” he asked. Mr Peters alleged that other Maori negotiators taking cases to the Wai-

tangi Tribunal were privy to the document. “Do the Prime Minister and his other Cabinet colleagues know of this deliberate leak and clear breach of Cabinet responsibility?” Mr Peters asked. Two of those who had had the Treasury document — Professor Love and Mr Bob Mahuta — were close associates of the Minister in his Western Maori electorate. Mr Peters said the Treasury report also showed that it was the Treasury that was running the Maori Affairs Department and not its Minister. “Not content with mucking up the rest of the country, the Treasury is out to screw Maoridom as well,” he said. The people who had access to the document had been the Minister’s friends, the same people who had been at the heart of the Manawatu-Rangi-tikei Maori Access scandal that had been critic-

ised by the Audit Office after an investigation. “The Minister made this document available to a person involved in land claims against the Crown,” Mr Peters said. “It is a document that outlines the Government’s stance, thinking and attitudes towards those negotiations. “As such, the Minister is engaged in sabotaging the taxpayers’ position,” he said. Mr Wetere dismissed the allegations as “totally ridiculous.” The paper had been referred to his department for comment, and had since been superseded. A general policy on the settlement of Maori land claims was being developed by a working party comprising officers of a number of departments, he said. In the normal circulation of Cabinet papers, his department, with others, would have received the Treasury report.