The House: Wake-Up Call To MPs Over Building Relationships After Treaty Settlements

The Auditor-General issued a wake-up call to MPs this
week during his briefing to Parliament’s Māori Affairs
Committee on how poorly public organisations are fulfilling
Treaty settlements.

Public organisations are treating
Treaty commitments like transactions, not relationships,
John Ryan told Parliament’s Māori Affairs
Committee.

“Fundamentally, this is the law, and we
should be complying with it.”

The briefing follows an
investigation from the Office of the Controller and
Auditor-General (an independent Parliamentary watchdog), who
wanted to see “how effective the public sector arrangements
for Treaty settlement commitments are”.

Appearing
before the Committee on Wednesday, Controller and
Auditor-General John Ryan told MPs that the report, which he
viewed as one of the most important in his seven year term,
found that the Crown was failing to honour its legal and
contractual settlement commitments, of which there are
12,000 across approximately 80 settlements.

“This is a
legal compliance issue. If you just take everything else
away from it, fundamentally, this is the law, and we should
be complying with it as public agencies. The Auditor-General
is normally a cold hearted accountant, but when I read this,
I felt like we needed to act on this,” Ryan told Māori
Affairs Committee MPs.

The report found that most of
the 150 responsible public organisations treated settlements
as one-off transactions, and failed to recognise that, at
their core, settlements are about resetting relationships.
Relationships which should be durable and
ongoing.

“The Crown, I think, has seen it like this
after the treaty settlement process – as a series of
transactions that needed to be managed rather than a
relationship that needed to be reset.”

Ryan and his
team suggested that public organisations are often inclined
to, at worst, just ignore commitments, and at best, treat
them with a bureaucratic tick-box KPI mentality.

The
Treaty Settlement process has been a defining facet of
Māori-Crown relations for decades. Since the first
settlements in the 1990s, $2.738 billion of financial and
commercial redress has been given by the Crown to
Post-Settlement Governance Entities (PSGEs), the term for
claimant groups, usually represented by a particular
iwi.

In a moment of reflection following Ryan’s
presentation, committee chair National MP David MacLeod
suggested that a lack of personal connection could
potentially be part of the problem.

“We have people
that represent the Crown in negotiations, on a daily basis
for a long time, they almost become emotionally tied to what
the settlement is all about,” MacLeod said. “Then post
settlement, that group of people move on to the next one,
and then there’s a whole fresh one that actually doesn’t
have any of that history [and] the relationship that’s being
formed in that.”

The Auditor-General said MacLeod’s
observation was probably a fair one.

“I think that’s
an interesting observation because I think what the public
sector does once the settlement been reached, is it looks
like a series of tasks to deliver rather than the bigger
intent that’s behind it, because as you say, there’s people
that go through the settlement process, I hate using the
phrase, but on a journey to get to the point of settlement,
legislation, deed of settlement. Then the public sector
picks that up in various agencies rather than takes that
intent that was formed here, and puts it in place over
here.”

Armed with insight from the Auditor-General’s
report and briefing, Māori Affairs Committee MPs may
perhaps think differently (and encourage their colleagues to
do the same) the next time a settlement comes through
Parliament. They didn’t need to wait long. The first reading
of the Ngāti Hāua Claims Settlement Bill, and all stages
of the Ngā Hapū o Ranginui Claims Settlement Bill were
also occurring at Parliament this week.

What are
briefings?

This meeting of the Māori Affairs
Committee and Auditor-General was a briefing. Briefings are
a less formal version of the inquiry function that
committees can initiate. In some cases, once members have
learned more about an issue through briefings they may
launch an inquiry to dig deeper. There’s no requirement
though.

Briefings give committees the chance to get
the low-down of an issue from subject matter experts. This
can be members of the public, a visiting overseas
delegation, or as in this case, an Officer of Parliament –
the Controller and Auditor-General.

*RNZ’s The
House, with insights into Parliament, legislation and
issues, is made with funding from Parliament’s Office of the
Clerk.

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