Potaka launches review of Waitangi Tribunal

Newsroom

09-05-2025

Public law expert Bruce Gray KC will lead a review of the scope of the Waitangi Tribunal's jurisdiction, Māori-Crown Relations Minister Tama Potaka announced on Friday.
The review kicks off the process of fulfilling the commitment in the National-New Zealand First coalition agreement to 'amend the Waitangi Tribunal legislation to refocus the scope, purpose, and nature of its inquiries back to the original intent of that legislation'.
'Given the progress of historical claims and settlements and concerns about the Tribunal's current workload, it is timely to review the legislation that determines how it undertakes its inquiries,' Potaka said in a statement. 'The review will ensure the Waitangi Tribunal remains focused, relevant, effective and fit for purpose not just for today, but for the generations to come.'
NZ First MP and minister Shane Jones told Newsroom the policy falls short of what his party wanted, but that the Government doesn't have the mandate to do away with the tribunal entirely.
'New Zealand First was lobbied, prior to coming back into power, to put a sunset clause down to get rid of the Waitangi Tribunal altogether. That obvious is not the policy of the Government,' he said.
'We all agree it needs a reset but we don't have a mandate to bury it. The reset is ensuring it remains dedicated where it has a genuine body of competence.'
Jones didn't envisage a reduction of the temporal scope of the tribunal's inquiries. When it was established in 1975, the tribunal was limited to examining new breaches of the Treaty. A decade later, it was empowered to investigate claims of breaches dating back to 1840, when the Treaty was signed.
Both functions should still be held by the tribunal, but with tighter 'guardrails' around what amounts to a breach of the Treaty, Jones suggested.
The original, modern-oriented focus of the tribunal is what has consistently raised the ire of the governing parties since the coalition formed in 2023.
'I accept that for a lot of people, the Treaty is a living instrument. It's organic and its meaning needs to be recast as the economy and demography changes. The tribunal has risen to that challenge, because every policy that seems to be coming out of our manifesto that challenges the orthodoxies surrounding settled understandings of government policy, we've been dragged off to the Waitangi Tribunal to account for that,' Jones said.
'We need to get the balance right. The things we've brought forward, they've got their legitimacy from our democratic mandate. I personally have found it very, very frustrating.'
He pointed to the tribunal's urgent inquiry last year into the disestablishment of the Māori Health Authority by the Government, which had been created two years earlier under Labour.
'That's not a Treaty issue. That's a decision that was made by [Labour's then-health minister] Andrew Little to reconfigure the structure of the health department and create a bespoke unit. To suggest that somehow [scrapping that] violates the Treaty, I think that's right off. Governments should be able to come and go and reset our public funds, either branded, badged or how they're used.'
Alongside Gray, the review panel will include Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet deputy chief executive Kararaina Calcott-Cribb, Wellington lawyer and former tribunal member David Cochrane, and Te Ati Awa chief executive Dion Tuuta. A report is due back in September.
Jones promised the review 'will be a very independent review' and didn't want to prejudge its results. However, he did lay out his vision for the tribunal's ultimate fate.
'If the tribunal is to survive, I suspect over time it'll morph into some kind of standing assembly, as opposed to a sort of litigator's paradise. Judge Eddie Drury [chair between 1980 and 2004] in the past ran it more as a standing forum, but more recently it's become incredibly litigious.'
Jones and Act Party leader David Seymour were last year criticised by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon for threats they made against the Waitangi Tribunal. Jones had complained about the prosecutorial nature of the tribunal, saying it 'has no business running its operations as some sort of star chamber delivering pre-emptory summons for ministers to rock up and be cross-examined or grilled in some kind of wannabe American star chamber pulp fiction gig'.
Seymour suggested the tribunal 'should be wound up for good', in response to the tribunal summonsing Childrens Minister and Act MP Karen Chhour as it investigated changes to the Oranga Tamariki Act.
'I think those comments are ill-considered and we expect all ministers to actually exercise good judgment in their communications on matters like this,' Luxon said at the time.