Jonathan Milne: Settlement deadline a bad idea whose time has come

It was in the end days of the last National-led Government that deadlines on Treaty settlements last came before Parliament. The Act Party had introduced a bill that would have set a deadline of 2000 for Maori to lodge claims, and 2010 for the Crown to settle them.

The House was appalled.

National MP Nick Smith, then associate minister for Treaty negotiations, compared Act with Australia's incendiary One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, holding a gun to the heads of Maori. "I have to give Act credit, they have a damn sight more brains than Pauline Hanson. But with this bill they are hunting after a similar constituency."

Across the House, Labour Treaty settlements spokesman Jim Sutton said the bill was contrary to the principle of fair play and would deny Maori access to due process.

Jim Anderton's deputy, Sandra Lee, said no one was more "Treaty fatigued" than Maori, but the bill was not the way forward. Act's proposed 2000 deadline has passed, and one might have expected its policy would now be yellowing gracefully in the big filing cabinet in the sky.

But no. The policy had the support of United MP Peter Dunne. And when no one was looking, NZ First and National dug it out, updated it with marker pens, and slipped it into their manifestos.

Last year new National leader Don Brash who, we rather suspect, would not welcome any comparison with Pauline Hanson, included a deadline in his portfolio of post-Orewa policies on race relations and the Treaty.

And on Thursday, Prime Minister Helen Clark announced that one of Labour's seven key election pledges would be to close off historic Treaty claims by September 2008, and settle them all by 2020.

Even the Maori Party and the Greens hinted at support, conditional on the Government adequately funding the Waitangi Tribunal and negotiations process. 

Problem is, it's been tried before. Settlement opponents love to cite the Ngai Tahu land settlements of first 1944, then the $170m settlement of 1998, as an example of Maori returning to the grievance table. But it reflects more poorly on the Crown of 1944, which pushed that original settlement through in haste without addressing many of the key grievances, or ensuring the iwi negotiators spoke for all Ngai Tahu.

Similarly with the Rotorua lakes, where a 1922 settlement fell over, and now the final settlement negotiated by this Government is jeopardised by National's opposition.

There is every incentive for iwi to prepare and lodge their claims expeditiously: the elders who hold much of the knowledge of how they lost their land are dying every year. They do not need their arms twisted behind their backs by vote-hungry politicians as well.

Maori and Pakeha are largely united in frustration at the amount of time and resources absorbed by lawyers and quasi-judicial processes in the so-called Treaty-industry gravy train that precedes every settlement. But it is important that settlements be done once, and done right. It is in nobody's interest to settle half-baked, poorly researched claims that will come back to haunt later generations.

Parliament's across-the-board support for imposing arbitrary deadlines on settlements is bad policy, written with an eye to next month's election but little thought beyond that.

Settlement deadlines are a flawed idea whose time, nonetheless, seems to have come.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY