Editorial: Is anyone happy about the Lakes settlement?

Winston Churchill once likened the Soviet Union to a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. He would surely have had something similar to say about the process that has been gone through to define resource ownership in the Te Arawa Lakes settlement. Title to 13 lakebeds in the Rotorua area has been transferred to Te Arawa, but not the water and airspace above. Unsurprisingly, this puzzled and exasperated the Maori Party MPs, who this week split their votes on the settlement legislation.

Said Te Ururoa Flavell: "What is this thing called a lake if it does not contain any water?" His colleague Hone Harawira was more intent on probing the implications. Had the Crown considered what it would do if Te Arawa asked it to remove its water from the lakes, and how would the Crown ensure the water it claimed to own never settled on Te Arawa-owned lakebeds, he asked Treaty Negotiations Minister Mark Burton.

Alternatively, said Mr Harawira, did the minister think this was as silly a notion as that of Crown stratum and its ownership of water? Such queries called for adroit footwork. Mr Burton obliged. The water would not, he said, be owned by either the Crown or Te Arawa. It would continue to be regulated in accordance with the Resource Management Act.

Mr Harawira pressed on, asking a couple of desultory supplementary questions. He might as well not have bothered. The minister's answer remained the same.

Suffice to say more than a little lateral thinking was required when a Treaty claim had brushed up against assertive non-Maori residents who feared restrictions on public access. It was difficult enough for the Government to jump forward through a series of hoops. And it was not of a mind to revisit, or reassess, them.