Treaty settlements halfway through

By PAULA OLIVER

The process of settling Treaty of Waitangi claims is halfway through and could be over in 10 to 15 years, a select committee heard yesterday.

The update on treaty claims came from Andrew Hampton, director of the Office of Treaty Settlements, as he addressed the Maori Affairs select committee at Parliament.

Mr Hampton said it was difficult to forecast how much longer it would take to settle all claims because it involved such issues as how many Maori groups agreed to joint negotiations, and how long the negotiations took.

The Crown preferred to negotiate with groups wherever possible.

The rate of settlements was increasing, and three would come before Parliament this year - more than in any other year, Mr Hampton said.

Two of them ranked as the third-largest and fourth-largest treaty settlements that the Crown had agreed.

National MP Wayne Mapp pressed Mr Hampton for an estimate of the finish date for settlements.

"At the rate of three a year, if there's another 30 or 40 settlements to go, the process could well be through in the next 10 or 15 years," he replied.

The office was about halfway through dealing with confiscation claims.

"The simple maths of it are that we've paid over nearly $600 million. We have got initialled deeds of settlement that account for another $100 million. So we're three quarters of the way through $1 billion."

Significant progress had been made on settling Central North Island claims. Far North progress was "reasonable". In that area, claims had overlapping concerns and there were also problems among claimants about issuing a mandate to negotiate.

"There are some very high expectations of settlement redress - not necessarily based on the nature and scale of the breaches that occurred up there, but more to do with some of the social circumstances of the people in those areas," Mr Hampton said.

If the Government's policy did not change there would be about another 40 or 50 claims left to settle.