Dept ‘contributed to version of report’

Press, 15 September 1988, Page 4

Dept ‘contributed to version of report’

The Treasury maintains that the Maori Affairs Department did get a copy of the report. Treasury sources said last evening that the department had seen the report in draft form and contributed to its final version. This had then gone to the Cabinet policy committee in May and been distributed to six departments, including Maori Affairs. The Treasury paper was dismissed as out of date by the chairman of the Ngai Tahu Trust Board; Mr Tipehe O’Regan, yesterday The paper had singled out the Ngai Tahu as one tribe that would be disappointed if its recommendations on settling land claims were accepted. Mr O’Regan said the report had not been very well researched or thought out, and he rejected the Treasury view

that spending cuts or tax increases would be required to meet land claim settlements. The Government now had access to better advice than the Treasury report contained, but he would not say what advice. The Leader of the Opposition, Mr Bolger, said he was taking it so seriously he had called a special meeting with his spokesman on Maori Affairs, Mr Winston Peters, and his spokesman on finance, Miss Ruth Richardson. “The secrecy over this paper makes one wonder about the Government’s motives,” Mr Bolger said. “Treasury suggests the costs of settling land claims could be hundreds of millions of dollars, and it clearly has estimates of expenditure but has been instructed not to release those figures.

“Now we have a privileged few Maori land negotiators with access to a Treasury report that will have major effects on future personal taxation rates,” he said. Mr O’Regan said the treasury report had implied that considerable sums would need to be found, and he rejected that. Miss Richardson said the Government and the Treasury were trying to do “a snow job” on the public about secret plans to raise taxes to pay for Maori land claims. The Treasury had evaded questions when telling a Parliamentary select committee that “no estimate of the posible total cost of the claims could be made with any degree of precision” three months after it had prepared just such an estimate. “It is obvious the Gov-

ernment was flying blind on the cost of meeting land claims when it allowed a backdating of grievances to 1840,” she said. Dr Bruce Gregory (Lab., Northern Maori) said the Treasury report had been only a discussion paper and things had moved a long way since then. The Ngai Tahu legal counsel, Mr David Palmer, was reluctant to comment about the Treasury’s policy on the settlement of Maori land claims. He had not yet seen the report to respond to details, he said. “However, I believe the report was made six months ago and a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. “In the end it will be the Waitangi Tribunal which determines . the claims, not the Treasury,” he said. .