Govt should pay more for Treaty bills, says Tamihere

The Government should assume more of the funding burden for processing Treaty of Waitangi claims, a former Cabinet minister says.

John Tamihere says the single biggest contributor to claimants preparing and negotiating settlements, the Crown Forestry Rental Trust, has for too long shouldered a disproportionate amount of the bill.

The trust is forecasting it will spend $50 million to keep up with the pace of settling all claims by 2014. Up to $30 million of its total forecast will be deficit spending. Spending will also be affected by growing iwi demand for specialist advisers, which cost the trust $20 million last year.

Mr Tamihere said that when the trust was set up in 1990 to receive rents from Crown-owned forestry land set aside for Maori for Treaty settlements, no one envisioned it would be around for 20 years because research was supposed to quickly sort out ownership.

The complexity of that process had dragged out, delaying the return of assets to Maori. But how the trust morphed into the largest single funder of the process by using the interest from those assets held in trust had always rankled, Mr Tamihere said.

Successive governments should have paid for the process, and if the trust ran out of money, future governments might have no choice, he said.

The lead iwi negotiator for the recent $450 million Central North Island Treelords deal, George Asher, said changes to the way the trust funds claimants could make a huge difference in efficiency. Instead of claimants continually having to go back to the trust to ask for support, it should simply identify an amount a group would be entitled to.

Over the last year the trust's funding of the CNI iwi was $20 million. The Crown's contribution would have been "insignificant" by comparison, he said.

A spokesman for Treaty Negotiations Minister Christopher Finlayson said he was "aware" of wider funding issues.

This year's $39.5 million Treaty negotiations budget has nearly $18 million for policy advice, negotiation and implementation of historical Treaty claims for the Office of Treaty Settlements.

The Legal Services Agency paid $9.7 million worth of bills last year.