Kevin Moore has been illegally occupying Māori coastal land for the past 11 years.
Kevin Moore has been illegally occupying Māori coastal land for the past 11 years.
A desperate final attempt to fight the eviction of a veteran Black Power member from the coastal Māori land he has been illegally occupying for the past decade is being considered - alternately, he’ll have a fortnight to move on.
“It’s not necessarily over,” Kevin Moore’s lawyer Graeme Minchin said today, two days after the Court of Appeal dismissed his latest bid to keep Moore on the Taranaki beachside property.
Moore, who moved to the Waitara site in 2013, has long argued he is a descendant of the land and it is his right as tangata whenua to live there. He has built himself a house overlooking the ocean and has continued to ignore orders to leave by the Rohutu Block Trust that manages the area.
After unsuccessfully representing Moore in appeals in the High Court and the Court of Appeal, Minchin told NZME he had handed the case to Auckland lawyer Charl Hirschfeld who was considering taking it to the Supreme Court.
Minchin said if it was decided the case could be taken further, an application for leave to appeal would be filed within two weeks, and he would assist Hirschfeld where he could.
There was no other legal recourse beyond the Supreme Court - the final appeal court of New Zealand - for Moore, who is legally aided.
The last-ditch effort was one Moore backed, Minchin said.
“This has been his home for more than 10 years and they’re going to pull it down,” he said.
“He wants to try everything to keep his house.”
However, Minchin has warned Moore, a former gang president who has been affiliated with the Black Power for more than three decades, that he needed a backup plan.
In 2018, the Māori Land Court approved Moore’s eviction but also gave him immediate leave to file further information in relation to establishing his links to the land. A stay regarding the eviction was granted, which the trust agreed with.
Kevin Moore has argued he is tangata whenua and has a right to live there.
Minchin said the eviction stay would automatically lift if they did not pursue the Supreme Court, or if they did and failed, and Moore would have two weeks to pack up and move.
He had not told Minchin what he would do if that scenario played out.
“It’ll be tough for him. He probably doesn’t have anything else. He’s not a wealthy man.”
Minchin acknowledged the drawn-out nature of the case but said, in reality, it went right back to the Taranaki land wars, which began in Waitara in 1860.
Moore, in his 60s, has argued that his tīpuna was wrongfully omitted from the 1884 Crown grant, which listed the holding’s beneficiaries.
In 1958, a partition order was made by the Māori Land Court in respect of the same block. The beneficiaries identified in that order were the descendants of most of the original owners named in the Crown grant, but do not include Moore or his tīpuna.
The trust, which manages about 8ha of Māori freehold land at the beach under Te Ture Whenua Māori Land Act 1993, said Moore was a “squatter”. It has argued he was not a beneficiary of the land nor did he have a lease to reside there.
Even if he could prove he was tangata whenua, the trust was not obliged to give him a lease.
The home he built himself was without consent from the New Plymouth District Council and he has not paid anything to be there.
There are about 30 homes in the Rohotu Block at Waitara's East Beach.
According to trustees, Moore has entertained Black Power members at the property and before he took up residency, the community at Rohutu was “low-key and harmonious”. They say the community was now “anxious and afraid”. Currently, there are about 30 homes in the Rohutu Block.
After Moore was given leave to apply to have the list of block owners amended to include his tīpuna, the Chief Māori Land Court judge rejected that application.
His application to the High Court to review the decision of the Māori Land Court was later dismissed, and this week, the Court of Appeal rejected his latest challenge.
Minchin unsuccessfully submitted that Māori Land Court Judge Layne Harvey suggested to Moore in earlier proceedings that he pursue an application different from the one he had intended, which amounted to an “officially induced error” relied on by Moore to his detriment.
But the Court of Appeal ruled, like the High Court, that there was no basis for finding that Judge Harvey induced Moore into error.
Minchin further submitted that Chief Māori Land Court Judge Wilson Isaac and High Court Justice Andru Isac were wrong to find that the section of law Moore relied on did not extend to reviewing the Crown grant.
Susan Hughes, KC, on behalf of the trust, contended the section was concerned only with errors by the registrar or the court, not errors in the Crown grant, which the Court of Appeal agreed with.
“I’m really not sure what else I can sensibly say. As your honours will appreciate, it’s been many years of similar arguments but ever-evolving arguments,” Hughes said at the hearing.
Tara Shaskey joined NZME in 2022 as a news director and Open Justice reporter. She has been a reporter since 2014 and previously worked at Stuff where she covered crime and justice, arts and entertainment, and Māori issues
