Fisheries bill has ‘tacit accord"

Press, 7 October 1988, Page 1

Fisheries bill has ‘tacit accord"

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Wellington

Tacit agreement on what the controversial Maori Fisheries Bill now before Parliament should contain has been reached by Maori and Crown negotiators.

The agreement will not become part of the bill until it has passed through the select committee process and public submissions on it have been received and heard. That was the outcome of a series of meetings held at Parliament yesterday between the four Maori negotiators, the National Opposition and three Labour Cabinet Ministers. The Maori negotiators spent an hour with the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Bolger', discussing the legislation. Mr Bolger has said National would “repeal or substantially amend” the bill unless significant changes were made to it and afterwards he said he had not drawn back from that position. He said there were a variety of options on how to resolve Maori fisheries claims, but the National Party did not want to canvass them in public at present. The Maori negotiators told him and later the three Labour Cabi<net Ministers — the Minister of Justice, Mr Palmer, the Minister for State-Owned Enterprises, Mr Prebble, and the Minister of Maori Affairs, Mr Wetere — that there were three elements of the bill they found particularly objectionable.

One of these, the provisions on freshwater fisheries, is now expected to be withdrawn from the bill as a separate issue. The issue of a permanent ban on court action on Maori fisheries matters is expected to be withdrawn by the select committee as unconstitutional. But the third, on the issue of commercial flexibility, will be the subject of an officials’ report with a meeting of Maori negotiators and officials set for Monday.

Mr Palmer said he expected discussions between the Crown and the four Maori negotiators to be ended by the end of the month.

There was still a great reluctance by the parties to take the matter to the courts, he said. Mr Bolger said it would be “bumptious” for National to put its own Maori fisheries package on the table at this time, and it would not do so. Resources should not be allocated and taken up on the ground of race, he said. Something as contentious as Maori fisheries claims needed to be talked through and no settlement reached that did not have wide public support. When asked how the National Party would deal with Maori claims and compensate them for genuine grievances under the Treaty of Waitangi without treating them differently on the ground of race from non-Maoris, Mr Bolger would not say. One of the four Maori negotiators, Mr Tipene O’Regan, said the meeting with Mr Bolger had been initiated by his group. "We told him these are not Maori claims but claims under Article 2 of the treaty by tribes,” he said. “It was the tribes who signed the treaty, not Maoridom. “If we do it as Maori claims that injects the element of race and fear, inflames people and makes the whole thing political,”

Mr O’Regan said. One of the good things about the Maori Fisheries Bill was that it acknowledged the rights as tribal rights under the treaty. Maoris should not be subjected by the bill to greater fishing restraints than non-Maoris, but it was fair to say that the Maori negotiators accepted that tribal members should be "substantially involved” with their quotas as the bill suggested.

It was a question of getting the wording right, said Mr O’Regan. Further reports, page 4