Pita Sharples this morning accused National of betraying the Maori Party over the Foreshore and Seabed Act. Photo / NZ Herald
Pita Sharples on Marae this morning rather extravagantly accused National of betraying the Maori Party for not supporting Tariana Turia's bill to repeal the Foreshore and Seabed Act.
That would be fair only if National had misled the party. But it has not and he and his colleagues
made that clear in their press conference on Tuesday. National has not changed its position.
It opposed Labour's Foreshore and Seabed Act. National's reasoning was pretty confusing at the time but one thing was clear: it did not embrace the Court of Appeal's Ngati Apa decision in 2003, allowing freehold title in the F & S to be claimed through the Maori Land Court.
And it would be suicide if it did.
Tau Henare said on Agenda this morning that the law following the Ngati Apa decision was "a mess" and National wasn't prepared to support a bill that took the country back to that "mess".
His view is that if you are going to tackle a law like that, you need to do from Government. It makes a lot of sense, for National. And if National is looking for a sensible way through, it need look no further than to the reasoned views of Jock Brookfield, Emeritus Professor of Law at Auckland University, who wrote on the issue for the Herald earlier this year.
His solution would see the claims for freehold title remain closed - no law-maker ever intended that - but reinstate the right for common law customary title to be pursued the courts, which was extinguished in the Foreshore and Seabed Act.
The danger in re-opening the issue is that it reinforces all the misconceptions about what the Court of Appeal actual judgment did. Many Maori believe it confirmed that Maori owned the foreshore and seabed, which it did not.
