free of other claims and potentially the subject of negotiations in settlement of Hauraki claims.

ES.5 Cold

Issues relating to gold have been a central feature of the Hauraki claims. A gold-mining agreement was first negotiated over land at Coromandel in 1852, whereby Maori owners ceded to the Crown the management of the goldfield in return for payment to the Maori landowners of revenues based largely upon the number of miners holding licences. Further cession agreements were negotiated in respect of various parts of the inquiry district until the 1890s, the most important being at Coromandel, Thames, Ohinemuri, and Te Aroha.

The claimants have submitted that they received inadequate payments for opening their lands to gold-mining and that the Crown used undue pressure and manipulation to secure some of the agreements. Moreover, in the later nineteenth century, the Crown arbitrarily reduced the agreed scale of payments and mismanaged the collection and distribution of revenues due. When the Crown systematically purchased the freehold of land subject to cession agreements, Maori lost the mining revenues they had previously received. The claimants further submit that they would have received much fairer returns had the Crown renounced the royal prerogative over gold and recognised Maori ownership of it. As it was, by the early twentieth century Hauraki Maori had lost most of the mining revenue and the land.

The Crown denies almost all of these claims. It has submitted that, although the royal prerogative was preserved in mining legislation, it was not applied. The key issue was not ownership of gold but control of access to mine it, and policy and law upheld the right of Maori to permit or forbid mining on their land throughout the nineteenth century. Only in respect of the Ohinemuri agreement of 1875 and the Te Aroha agreement of 1880 does the Crown concede that undue pressure or manipulation occurred. It concedes also that legislation in the late nineteenth century which unilaterally diminished the scale of payments due to Maori and allowed certain reserves within goldfields to be mined without explicit Maori consent was inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty. In mitigation, it submits that the changes were required by the downturn in mining and the economics of the industry at the time. The Crown further submits that the claimants’ assumption that the retention of ownership of gold by Maori would have resulted in a fairer return to Maori is highly speculative, and takes no account of the very high capital costs of quartz mining. The Crown adds, however, that the question of the extent to which the presence or suspected presence of gold was the primary motivation for the extensive acquisition of the freehold of Maori land in Hauraki is ‘important’.

Our findings on these and related matters follow.