ES.6 Timber

‘Timber leases’, that is, the purchase of cutting rights, were made between Maori and timber millers, mainly in respect of kauri, notably from the late 1850s. These were technically illegal, or at least extra-legal, but were condoned or assisted by Crown officials. After 1865, fresh agreements were negotiated under the Native Land Acts, to formalise the previous ones, and some new agreements were also reached. Then, in the 1870s, the Government commissioned James Mackay to buy large areas systematically on the Coromandel Peninsula. Mackay was in many cases already acting for the timber millers in their lease negotiations and suggested that the Crown purchases be subject to the timber leases, in which the millers had invested heavily. Ministers agreed. The claimants have submitted that Mackay and the Government colluded to ‘drive down’ the price paid for the land. We do not consider that this case is made out. It is normal commercial practice to discount the price for land when the resource that constituted much of its value has already been sold. The fact that Mackay was acting both for the Crown and the millers certainly suggests a conflict of roles, but such multiple roles were not unusual in the nineteenth century. Crown land purchase agents were generally directed to pay low prices to Maori and it is not self-evident that Maori would have got better prices for the land had a different agent been employed. In our view, the low prices paid were more a consequence of the fact that the Crown was buying under proclamations of pre-emption.

There is insufficient evidence available to judge the fairness of prices paid to Maori for the timber. In addition to the prices recorded during the formalisation of the agreements in the 1870s, there were also payments during the period of informal agreements, not systematically recorded. Timber merchants also usually paid for the cost of surveys. The Native Lands Act 1867 allowed them to secure what was effectively a lien over the land for their advances, which commonly led to private purchases of the land, especially at Whangapoua and Mercury Bay, as Maori struggled to redeem the debt. We accept the Crown’s view that the prejudicial effects of this system are best seen, along with survey costs generally, as arising from the Native Land Acts rather than relating particularly to timber.