Iwi-Crown relations on the line after scathing audit

RNZ News

30-04-2025

Tūhoe arriving for the final reading of the iwi's Treaty Settlement in Parliament, in 2014. Tūhoe's Treaty settlement was one of the focuses of the recent audit.
Photo:
RNZ / Diego Opatowski
The auditor general has put public agencies on notice to do a better job of ensuring iwi and hapū get what they are legally entitled to in their Treaty settlements, after a scathing report on their performance.
The agencies, from local councils to government departments and state owned enterprises, have been given a year by auditor general John Ryan after his audit showed that many public organisations are failing to fulfill their commitments on Treaty settlements.
Ryan says that is unacceptable and he warns that the public sector and the government face a greater risk of legal action because they have failed to fulfill the settlements.
He tells
The Detail
why this audit is one of the most significant projects in his time as auditor general.
"It's significant financially, it's significant constitutionally, and it's a big accountability question for the public sector to deliver against its commitments. And it's about resetting its relationship with iwi and hapū," he says.
Many people think that when a Treaty claim is settled with an iwi or hapū and the government has made its apology, it's done and dusted, but the settlements are actually "massively complicated and span a number of years".
The report makes it clear that since Te Tiriti o Waitangi was signed, the Crown has not met its obligations.
It says that about 150 public organisations have about 12,000 individual contractual and legal commitments under about 80 settlements, with about 70 groups.
To date, $2.738 billion of financial and commercial redress has been transferred through settlements.
The public organisations that it audited are responsible for 70 percent of individual commitments - more than 8000. The audit found that every one of the public organisations had difficulties meeting some of their commitments as the settlements intended.
"The types of things we've seen and pointed out in our report is that the government may have committed to relationship agreements and those are not being put in place [and] to letters of introduction which have not been put in place.
"But probably the more significant ones we talk to are things like rights of first refusal on particular properties where either they were not put in place and they should have been. Some properties we saw had been sold even though they should have had a right of first refusal given to iwi.
"We also saw Crown forest licensed land not being transferred within the timeframe that was given, which is five years."
Ryan says the public sector started late on the transfer and did not meet the five-year windows.
Once the deed is signed, a new phase begins, says RNZ Māori news editor Taiha Molyneux.
"It shifts iwi from one phase of navigating a system that wasn't created or designed by them to another phase of navigating a whole other series of processes, policies, acts to start progressing forward."
Many of the problems highlighted in the report stem from the leadership of the government agencies, most of whom are non-Māori and do not have key performance indicators (KPIs) or responsibilities that align with meeting the requirements of the Treaty settlements.
Molyneux says iwi and hapū leaders are pessimistic about the system changing, but the younger Māori are giving them hope.
"There is a much more powerful voice coming up because there's these young ones that are coming up through the kōhanga that are confident in te ao Māori and te ao Pākehā that are using tools to reach more people. That's definitely something I haven't seen of this magnitude before."
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