ES.7 Land Law and Land Purchase

We have received a great deal of evidence relating to the law affecting Maori land - the Native Land Acts - and land purchase policies which have left Hauraki iwi today with only 2.6 per cent of their customary land. The claimants submit that this was a consequence of deliberate Crown policies designed to acquire their land at low prices and make it available for Pakeha settlement. We have received many detailed block histories illustrating how these policies affected particular whanau lands.

The Crown has argued in defence that Maori could not escape all the pressures of the monetary economy and that the Crown policies aimed to strike a balance between giving some protection to Maori landowners while allowing them to participate in new economic opportunities. The Crown concedes that, in retrospect, more retention of Maori collective institutions would have been desirable, but that this perception owes a good deal to hindsight. Moreover, Maori society was not wholly collective traditionally but allowed considerable place for individual and family rights, and much land alienation occurred because individual Maori chose to transact land in order to seek higher living standards:

Having said that, the Crown does accept that the particular feature of the Hauraki inquiry, and a factor contributing to eventual outcome [s], is the combined effect of the facilitation of alienation created by the native land laws, and a vigorous Crown land purchasing policy.⁶

We welcome the Crown’s concession because in our view the evidence submitted clearly supports the claimants’ view that the alienation of nearly the totality of Hauraki land was the result of deliberate Crown policies, pursued - against widespread Maori protest - until well into the twentieth century. Moreover, it does not require hindsight to show that the empowerment of individuals to alienate their share of the tribal patrimony was deliberately favoured by Crown policies (rather than any ‘balance’ being sought). Indeed, this was pointed out by various settler politicians and officials from 1866 onwards, but any legislative changes in favour of stonger collective control were soon swept away if they resulted in a slowing of the rate of purchase of Maori land. In short, although the Crown arguments and evidence have refined our understanding of some matters, they have not modified in any significant way the interpretation of the Native Land Acts and Crown land purchase policies provided by successive commissions of inquiry since the 1870s, by a succession of academic historians in the last 40 years, and most recently by the Tribunals 2004 report Turanga Tangata Turanga Whenua. Indeed, we believe that the dislocation to Hauraki Maori society and the loss of control over their land arising from the land law had more damaging consequences even than war and raupatu.

In particular, we find that:

6. Document AA1, p 113