Matua Kahurangi: Whānau Ora funnels millions to iwi

It’s 6.30pm. The state-funded propaganda machine, otherwise known as 1News is droning on in the background while I’m half-listening, half-scrolling, slowly eating my dinner and getting sidetracked like usual. Then I stumbled across this little gem on RNZ that stopped me right in my tracks…

Ngāti Toa has just launched a new Whānau Ora commissioning agency to funnel “health and wellbeing” funding to Māori and Pasifika only. Not the poor. Not the vulnerable. Not the struggling. Just Māori and PI. If you don’t tick the right ancestry box, you can get stuffed.

Bob Edlin: The outdoor swimming issue in Whanganui....

Psst! A citizens’ assembly (behind secrecy masks) will dive into the outdoor swimming issue in Whanganui

In Porirua, the citizens’ assembly concept was translated into an exercise in co-governance.

In Whanganui, it has become an exercise which will be conducted in secrecy.

Roger Childs: An appropriate name for the Transmission Gully Motorway?

The obsession with giving government departments, new buildings and now highways te reo names continues.

The latest to have a name “gifted” to it, is the long awaited but recently opened Transmission Gully motorway linking the Kapiti Coast with the Tawa Valley. But is anyone actually going to call it by the new Maori name?

Which way are you driving to Wellington?

I’ll save time if I go via Te Ara Nui o Te Rangihaeata.

What’s that?

John Robinson: Killing rewards rubber stamped

A truly bizarre Treaty settlement Bill which is moving inexorably through parliament provides Wellington region tribe Ngati Toa with a wide range of special powers, holding reserves in fee simple, granting of governance arrangements with 11 councils giving special involvement with planning and control of large swathes of the coast.

One “redress instrument” is the right to apply a nga paihau or an overlay classification that “acknowledges the traditional, cultural, spiritual and historical association of an iwi with certain sites of significance”, and thus to set out limitations for access and use by others.

Mike Butler: Ngati Toa villainy rewarded

Descendants of the villainous old Cook Strait area chiefs Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata have agreed on a record treaty payout without any consideration of an unpunished atrocity that took place in the Nelson area in 1843, and while ignoring a plan by both chiefs to wipe out the fledgling Wellington settlement in 1846.

Claims by Ngati Toa, a small tribe with 4500 members in 2001 that asserts rights over a tribal area spanning Cook Strait from Rangatikei in the North Island to Marlborough in the south, relate primarily to what they describe as “loss of land and resources” in both the South and North Islands, which refers to territory that their forebears sold. The tribe complains about exclusion from the Tenths estates in Nelson and Wellington, and the loss of the Ngati Toa maritime domain, which refers to the tribe’s habit of paddling canoes around coastal areas to raid weaker tribes.

Mike Butler: Tribes clash over settlement spoils

Tribes clashing over settlement spoils seemed inevitable. One such clash between the Port Nicholson Block Settlement Trust and Ngati Toa over Wellington commercial properties played out last week before the Waitangi Tribunal. The row involves a last-minute land swap done by the Office of Treaty Settlements - taking the Wellington central police station from the trust in exchange for land in Greta Point and Kelburn so they could offer the police station to Ngati Toa.

Inclusion of the police station in the Ngati Toa deal, along with the Police College and surplus Kenepuru Hospital land, was announced on February 12, 2009. Ngati Toa had expressed concern in 2008 that the Port Nicholson trust was getting all the best Wellington land, the tribunal was told.