disadvantaged and needy people in New Zealand. The fact that many claimant witnesses testified to the satisfying community life they lived in that time, including harvesting the bounty of the bush and sea, cannot disguise the shocking impact of epidemic and endemic disease, closely related to poor housing.

Consideration of these matters is connected to the fact that Hauraki Maori have lost more of their customary land than most iwi. The Crown has argued that there is no necessary connection between land loss and poverty - that a community can possess a great deal of land and still be poor and that much depends on the quality of the land and its resources, and on the acquisition of skills to manage land productively. We accept that this theoretical position has a degree of validity. We accept also that much of Hauraki is too steep to cultivate or carry stock. Nevertheless, there are also rich river valleys and rolling hill country in the south of the district; harbours and islands, which brought early trade and settlement; and a coastline, which today has great value. Why have not Hauraki Maori been enabled to have a greater share of the opportunities that these provide?

We accept the argument of the claimants that the State did too little to assist Hauraki Maori and also created conditions which worked against them. We refer particularly to the system of land law which facilitated sale, did not include good management structures for land in multiple ownership, and divided communities in a perennial sequence of deals over individual or sectional interests in what was traditionally community land. It was not only that Hauraki Maori lost nearly all their land; it was the manner of losing it that divided and pauperised them. Subsequent owners of the land have benefited significantly from it since. The gold rushes and timber milling brought only temporary, and ill-distributed, prosperity. In many respects, gold proved a curse rather than a benefit, particularly in the way it led to auriferous land being targeted for purchase, with Maori then losing access to mining revenue.

Much of this is not due to geographical accident but to failings in Crown policy. As Professor Oliver has put it:

The loss, to such an extreme degree, of this economic base [the land] was not accompanied by the opening of reliable additional economic opportunities. The proceeds from land cessions, leases and sales, proved to be transitory and delusive. Even at the lower end of the socio-economic scale, in such activities as gum digging and road and rail construction, Maori workers suffered from unreliable returns, crippling competiton and discriminatory practices.¹⁰

Land loss does not necessarily lead to poverty, but for Hauraki Maori that became the case. History confirms for us that the transfer of asset value from land to any other form of asset is fraught with risk, and more often than not fails to preserve equivalent value. For centuries,

10. Document A11, p 58