The coalition Government is reviewing Te Mana o Te Wai policy and there is a suggestion going around that they are intending to keep this policy, even though they promised as part of their election manifesto, to eliminate any type of race based regulation from our statutes.
Te Mana o Te Wai was introduced in 2020 under the last Labour Government; the door was opened for regulatory intervention by Iwi authorities on spiritual grounds.
What are Te Mana o Te Wai Statements?
They are statements which may allow Iwi a role in formulating water management policy throughout New Zealand.
They are statements which the nation’s more than 1200 iwi and hapū can issue; in fact, anything an iwi or hapū decides is consistent with their view of matauranga Maori or tikanga (customs) concerning a freshwater body in their territory.
Water is a basic necessity for all life and as such it does not and cannot belong to any one group or race of people, it must be controlled by the government equally on behalf of all people of New Zealand.
Iwi claim to have a special cultural relationship with water and that may be so, but water must be seen as a public good which belongs equally to all citizens of New Zealand.
With their current claims of having a special relationship with water I find it hard to accept; given the fact that the Waikato Maori in 1864 sold the land with its trees, minerals, waters, rivers, lakes and streams in the area as shown in the copy of the deed of sale translation above.
The reality is that water is of equal life-giving value to all, and any claims of ownership or management authority over water in the natural environment, will be highly detrimental to community relations and, potentially, the stability of New Zealand society.
Iwi through Te Ao Maori believe that water has a spirit; (“mauri” or “life force”) and the concept of Te Mana o Te Wai introduces vague, spiritual, and subjective frameworks.
The requirement of Te Mana o Te Wai to prioritise that spirit of water will lead to confusion, inconsistent interpretation, skyrocketing compliance costs, and an erosion of evidence-based decision-making.”
The management of our freshwater resources must be based on science and common sense. We cannot have a situation where Iwi authorities have a co-governance role based on their spiritual concepts, with the additional costs and cultural impositions this will involve.
This would only perpetuate and exacerbate the current situation where we have Iwi groups extorting money from resource consent applicants by the monetisation of their support for any such application.
Prime examples of such monetisation are seen in the recent huge payments made in relation the consent renewal applications for the Waitaki River Hydroelectricity dams and the payments made in relation to the water take from the Waikato River for the Auckland City water supply.
Public concern and anger over future water management in New Zealand becoming race based as a result of the adoption of the concept of Te Mana o Te Wai across the country.
Management of water in our natural environment should not be based on spiritual arguments from any single cultural authority. It must be science- and evidence-based, and this management must not incur costs that rest on cultural or spiritual beliefs. Such beliefs should be respected but not be embedded within our water management policies and processes.
It is a responsibility for everyone to ensure that water quality is preserved. We delegate this responsibility to government and local government, but Iwi do not have special knowledge that is otherwise unavailable through environmental science advisors to our elected officials.
Iwi authorities will be able to effectively hold the country to ransom if imposed costs from cultural or spiritual beliefs are part the management of the health and use of our water resources.
Monetisation of the control of water resources has already occurred. The ownership of the Lake Taupo lakebed passing to Tuwharetoa, the Waikato River Authority receiving $40m over the next 20 years from Auckland ratepayers and the Waitaki River payments, are examples of Iwi action on co-governance and its monetisation around the country.
New Zealand can’t afford for our economy and society to be stifled by this sort of arrangement. It is seen by the wider community as further examples of the use of cultural claims being used to justify payments to a small elite section of Iwi seeking to get their snouts in the public trough and make money from the water in our natural environment.
The coalition Government was elected with a mandate to restore the democratic processes in New Zealand and eliminate any type of race based regulation from our statutes and to achieve this in relation to our natural waterways would be to scrap any requirements relating to Te Mana o Te Wai.
The Government must also put in place rules to restrict Local Bodies who are currently enabling this gravy train culture to develop around the nation’s water resources. Water is a basic necessity of life and as such no single group in our society should be able to control it on cultural grounds, or derive income from it without adding value.
A clear example of how this is being allowed to occur is seen in the Recent decision by the Taranaki Regional Council in relation to their monitoring of water quality in the Taranaki Region.
The Taranaki Regional Council, whose area of responsibility includes Mt. Egmont and the city of New Plymouth, has for decades carried out water quality monitoring at 13 sites. But as of 2023, the Matauranga Maori notion of Mauri has been added to the usual measures of water quality, and will be monitored.
The Taranaki Regional Council has (with national government assistance) allocated funding of $4.95million for a 5-year period of monitoring for this.
The normal scientific indices of water quality which have been measured up to now, all have appropriate measuring techniques and instruments, but there are no techniques, much less instruments, available for measuring mauri in water or in water environs and as a result of that there is no baseline for measurement.
So who is going to do the actual monitoring and how? I presume, given that the Mauri of the water is a spiritual concept of Iwi, that Iwi will be the ones doing the monitoring. Another example of the monetisation related to control of the water.
At the end of five years and with the expenditure of nearly five million NZD, how does anyone know whether mauri has gone up, down, or remained constant? And, of course, once Taranaki has succeeded in getting grant money, it would be expected that the other ten regional councils in the country will do the same thing with the corresponding need to employ Iwi members to monitor the waters in each region.
The Six Principles of Te Mana o te Wai mean that, through their statements, iwi representatives will have wide-ranging powers that lack strict definitions and limits — or democratic protections. They include:
• Mana whakahaere, which gives tangata whenua “the power, authority and obligation to make decisions that maintain, protect, and sustain the health and well-being of, and their relationship with, freshwater”.
• Kaitiakitanga describes the obligation of tangata whenua “to preserve, restore, enhance, and sustainably use freshwater for the benefit of present and future generations”.
• Manaakitanga is the process by which tangata whenua “show respect, generosity, and care for freshwater and for others”.
These three principles alone offer a very expansive brief and iwi will have wide latitude in formulating their monitoring policies and consequently, they will be able to wield immense power over control of the waters.
The Maori view of water has an indivisible interlocking of the practical and spiritual, the Maori King, Kiingi Tuheitia, in his speech at the 16th anniversary celebrations of his coronation in Ngaruawahia made it clear how important spiritual considerations are for Te Mana o Te Wai, saying:
“Te Mana o Te Wai belongs to us, to our iwi. It is about our relationship to our taonga [treasures] and about the wairua [spirit] of our water.”
This means that we could well see spiritual values such as the home of Taniwha influencing water policy under Iwi issued Te Mana o Te Wai statements or as a result of the monitoring.
Non-Maori, who make up approximately 83 per cent of the nation’s population, are denied the right to issue Te Mana o Te Wai statements no matter what their own views may be on water management, or indeed the spiritual beliefs they may hold about it.
It is now widely understood that “co-governance” means equal numbers of representatives from mana whenua and councils forming the groups which will oversee the regions water assets.
But, in fact, co-governance at the Local Body level is just one element of the comprehensive control of water being granted to iwi alongside others including requirements in relation to; the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi; and perspectives of mana whenua, matauranga, tikanga, and te ao Maori”.
Those requirements will in fact mean that iwi have the final say on running the nation’s water infrastructure and in fact given these requirements, it is not co-governance at all; it is direct iwi governance — and Te Mana o Te Wai statements are the primary mechanism for enabling that.
There are no defined criteria as to what the statements may contain and as such they give the Iwi total power over and control of water throughout New Zealand.
What will be the outcome from these Statements?
Given that the water infrastructure which has been built up and paid for over many generations by ratepayers and taxpayers, both Maori and non-Maori alike, the fact that 17 per cent of the population will get to decide exclusively what is best for the remaining 83 per cent in the management of water and the infrastructure is outrageously divisive and entirely undemocratic.
The proposed transfer of control of the water infrastructure and management of the water to Iwi, through these proposals is no more than theft of our assets and implementation of “Apartheid” into the management of water in New Zealand.
The coalition government made many promises from the constituent parties, (both before and after the election) that they would make every effort to eliminate racial preferences from government decision making, in a commitment to equal citizenship under New Zealand’s democratic system of government.
Yet we still see them showing support for the handing over of control of our water resources to tribal interests under these Te Mana o Te Wai statements.
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By Andy Loader, Poke the Bear