Q+A’s Paul Holmes interviews Winston Peters.

Points of interest:

- Whanau Ora is separatist and “will not work here”

- Peters gives Turia no credit for political achievements

- Foreshore and seabed: “We’ve gone from legal certainty to total uncertainty”

- New bill will open up “decades of strife” between Pakeha and Maori and Maori and Maori

- Maori “being deceived” by Maori Party who are telling them they will have ownership

- Customary title is easily converted to freehold title and has been done so for years

The interview has been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can also be seen on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

Q+A is repeated on TVNZ 7 at 9.10pm on Sunday nights and 10.10am and 2.10pm on Mondays.

WINSTON PETERS interviewed by PAUL HOLMES

PAUL Well finally we have the government's solution to the Foreshore and Seabed Act, they're going to repeal it, and the Foreshore and Seabed will go from Crown ownership to the public domain, as the Maori Party have demanded, well the repeal is what the Maori Party have demanded. Nobody will own it, hapu will have their day in court and there will be guaranteed public access. The Leader of New Zealand First, Winston Peters was one of the architects of course to the Foreshore and Seabed Act as it stands, and he is not particularly impressed by the new proposal, he's calling it a compromise that reflects the worst of all worlds. Good morning to Winston Peters, Happy Easter, thank you very much for coming on the Q+A.

Let's talk about Whanau Ora first of all. Mrs Turia's been talking about that this morning, what do you make of it?

WINSTON PETERS – New Zealand First Leader

Well look, it's a very romantic view but this conversation thus far has avoided the real issue here and that is the cultural collapse in the Maori world, a significant family collapse in the increasingly mother led society, and we've got problems with social welfare, with our medical system, our healthy system, then let's fix it up, but the idea of separatism as a solution has no evidence of ever working and will not work here.

PAUL Well to be fair that misrepresents it, she said it's not exclusively for Maori.

WINSTON That’s what she said but then that’s the whole thing that’s being told on the Marae that Whanau Ora is for Maori, Mr Key's trying to save bacon by saying it's for everybody, then she (Tariana) says oh okay then it's for everybody, but here's the real essence here. If you look at the Army it's been a massive successful integration of Maori in this country, the New Zealand Army, but in every other area, most other areas we've had significant failure of recent policy, because the idea you can deliver a separatist system where Maori are one tenth of the population, regardless of the excellence of that system, is never gonna be good enough.

PAUL Well the system that we've had goes back to as Matt McCarten says back to really the 1930s and it ain't working. Whanau Ora is a one stop shop, maybe it's an integrator.

WINSTON Yeah I know I heard what Matt McCarten said, cos he's a Maori Party member these days, but the reality is that if you want to improve Maori education, the first thing that’s gotta happen is imbue the Maori parent and the Maori world with the need to be educated successfully. If you don’t do that every other measure's gonna fail. We have people that come from Vietnam and from China who've been here four years and top our exams, why – because they believe in the escalator that education can be, and Maori have to do that first, as they do in sport and as they do in culture, as they do in music, but you will not get there by some romantics in the Maori world thinking oh well we can deliver better.

PAUL The Foreshore and Seabed proposals, you of course as I said in the intro were one of the architects of the Foreshore and Seabed Act.

WINSTON No not the Act, now we fixed the Act, the bill proposed by Labour was bound to fail, New Zealand First corrected it so that the coastal tribes of this country like Ngati Porou and Ngati Wai and others said, this satisfies us. That’s what New Zealand First's initiative was.

PAUL Right but you were very much part of the …

WINSTON The solution yeah.

PAUL The solution Mr Peters. As a politician, as a political achiever yourself, can I get your opinion of how you would rate Mrs Turia's achievements this week in getting the Foreshore and Seabed Act repealed, which was the reason the Maori Party was formed, and also the announcement the government's commitment to Whanau Ora. As a politician how do you rate that achievement?

WINSTON I don’t I'll tell you why. We've gone from legal certainty to total uncertainty, we've gone from a solution to potential train wreck, we've gone from the 200 mile limit, that’s what we're talking about, owned by all to now owned by none. What legal basis in the first world of any country would that be.

PAUL Is it going to make any difference at all?

WINSTON It's gonna make a huge difference, because what you’ve got here is when you had Api Mahuika from Ngati Porou and many of the coastal tribes who are after all the only people who could possibly have entitlement, saying they were satisfied with the legislation that’s already in place, to open up this again you're going to see decades of ….strife between Maori and European and between Maori and Maori, until some wise government resolves it again.

PAUL But the point is I think it has remained a festering sore, it is the reason why the Maori Party was formed, the Maori Party are now part of the government and are very influential.

WINSTON Now stop right there. The Maori Party was formed on the original proposal but not on the legislation as it came through parliament which we set to solve, that’s why between 2005 and 2008 they did not campaign on this issue, why, because Ngati Porou and others were saying if you go that way we're not backing you. Now after the 2008 election they dealt with John Key and got this awful compromise.

PAUL Either way the Act is going to be repealed and hapu will either get their day in court, the coastal hapu will get their day in court, or they’ll be able to negotiate directly with the government about customary title.

WINSTON The Maori have been awfully deceived here, they’ve been told on the Marae all round this country that this is a solution where they get ownership, Mr Key says no they don’t, now either the Europeans and non Maori are being lied to, or the Maori are. But here's the real issue, look even the highest court of this country said that they could go to the Maori Land Court, but they couldn’t conceive of a case where they'd win. Well we fixed that up with the Foreshore and Seabed legislation to the satisfaction of coastal Maori, and now it's all back in the melting pot.

PAUL So what you're saying is the expectation of Maori is going to be much greater than Mr Key …

WINSTON I'm not saying it, you know it's true.

PAUL Because when we're talking about the Foreshore and Seabed we're talking about tourism, who's gonna build the hotel on the beach, we're talking the minerals aren’t we, we're talking …

WINSTON You're talking ownership. Now let's be honest here, Mr Finlayson has made a terrible blue for such a well educated lawyer, you can take customary title straight into freehold title, everybody in the law knows that, and yet he's saying you can't.

PAUL Do they?

WINSTON Well that’s what he said.

PAUL Well what to you understand customary title to mean?

WINSTON Well customary title can shade and materialise into freehold title and has been doing so for years.

PAUL Well let's put it to you this way, if Maori owned it in 1840 when Mr Hobson, Governor Hobson arrived.

WINSTON Really?

PAUL And they never sold it, why should they not have the Foreshore and Seabed returned, why should they have to negotiate what only 160 years ago was taken from them?

WINSTON Well the answer to that's very simple, because 197 of those miles had not at that time passed to New Zealand, it came by international treaty included in the exclusive economic zone international understandings, that’s how we got the 200 mile limit, and you're saying now quite improperly against history and the law and international agreements that that must have been Maori. Okay if that’s the case the Ross Sea dependency must belong to Maori as well, let's be honest about it, and that’s not stretching it, in fact a Maori once wrote to me and said yeah in our history we went down there. But here's my point here, you're not going to advance Maori who desperately need to be uplifted educationally, in employment and equality and all these other things by giving them ....... and myths for a solution.

PAUL So is this simply a distraction for Maori?

WINSTON Well it's worse than that, a party with dramatically far less than half of the vote from the Maori people as a party vote at the last election is now misleading the mass majority of Maori, and the country as a whole, and there's no future in us going down this path.

PAUL Can you see huge competition, huge dispute coming over mineral rights, over who's gonna build the hotel on the beach?

WINSTON Well of course that’s all part of the mix now.

PAUL This is what it's about?

WINSTON No it's not what it's about, what's it's about is for cheap political reasons and naïveté, selling policies which have got no hope of every being delivered upon, in the expectation that you'll last as a political party, when that’s not what you're telling the public. What the Maori have been told on the Marae by the Maori Party is not what you just saw on TV regarding Whanau Ora, not what you’ve heard about the Foreshore and Seabed.

PAUL So the country's being snowed?

WINSTON Yeah being snowed by Mr Key in his naïveté and his assurances, and snowed by the Maori Party and their demands

PAUL Mr Winston Peters I thank you as always for coming on the Q+A. Kia ora.

ENDS

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