period 1881 to 1897. The value of gold exported was worth some £7.8 million over the same period. This has led claimants to submit that the payments to Maori were far too low, and should have been based upon royalties on the quantity of gold extracted rather than upon the scales of fees (essentially rentals for rights of access) agreed in the cession agreements. It is not conceivable, in our view that either the Crown or the mining industry would have agreed both to royalties and to lease rentals, and it has not been shown to our satisfaction that the former would have been more advantageous to Maori than the latter, especially if the net rather than the gross value of gold were to be the basis of payment. As the Crown has submitted, no payment system would have been agreed that did not take into account the huge capital costs involved in mining matrix gold: demands for royalties that did not do so would soon have depressed investment. As it was, in a situation of high risk, Maori were paid in the order of £6 per acre per year in miner’s rights fees, plus other agreed fees, as long as miners were working the field, regardless of whether they were making profits. We have seen no evidence of Maori complaint at the time about the system as such, and various hapu continued to sign cession agreements under it throughout the nineteenth century.

(2) Erosion of the agreed levels of payment

The claimants have submitted that the Crown allowed the level of fees negotiated in the cession agreements to be eroded. Certainly, when the Auckland provincial government in 1868 introduced provisions for company leaseholds rather than annual individual miner’s rights, Maori owners’ entitlements were greatly reduced. However, the general government acknowledged the legitimacy of protests by Thames Maori and took steps to restore the mining revenues to the previously agreed levels. In 1886-87, though, the governments of the day succumbed to pressure from the flagging mining industry and reduced the fees payable to Maori by as much as 75 per cent (against the protest of Wilkinson, who had negotiated the Te Aroha agreement). We believe that the Crown should rather have renegotiated the terms with Hauraki Maori. Reducing the fees unilaterally breached the Crown’s Treaty duty to deal in good faith with Maori at all times.

(3) The Crown’s role in collecting and distributing agreed entitlements

The claimants have submitted that the Crown’s administration of the cession agreements was flawed and that officials did not collect and distribute all the revenues due to Hauraki Maori. We have noted the inherent difficulties of the task and are not persuaded that there was serious negligence by the Crown, at least before the 1890s. By that time, the growing complexity of Maori rights to land due to succession and absentee ownership led to entitlements become increasingly fractionated, and uneconomic. However, rather than negotiate a better system with the Maori beneficiaries, Ministers and officials of various Government departments shuffled the responsibility between them, letting the records fall into confusion and payments into arrears.