The problem is that Iwi don’t have the capability, nor the experience nor the knowledge to use their ‘rights’. Before the state abrogates those responsibilities, the iwi should demonstrate that they have the ability to contain their liabilities and the knowledge to know how to.

At little paternalistic, don’t you think? I mean, have Pakeha demonstrated their superior ability to manage the lakes?

To me, if it’d been land I wouldn’t have had an issue with taking it to the courts – there are relatively limited effects for neighbors from land based issues. Much of those are confined to waterways, and that has a reasonably strong legislative framework. Incidentally, a large part of the waterway contros is actually based on the effects on the state owned foreshore…. That is going to cause legal issues in its own right. On earth water is damn near the universal solvent and main eroder. That to me is of far more importance than legal rights.

The problem is that it is that the coast is the main erosion area in NZ. Because there hasn’t been a issue with who has final control until the court case, there hasn’t been a legal framework. That meant that there are few controls apart from some pretty limited and local acts. For instance are you allowed to use ‘your’ seabed as a dumping site for fill from building sites? Allowing massive aquaculture farming? Mining the offshore berm?

Water currents would spread the effects of these far and wide, outside of the area under private control?

If it went off into private control, a whole new legislative framework would be required. Leaving it up to the courts about what you could or could not do would be time consuming and remarkably ineffective. We’d wind up with a serious of disasters for the next 50 years while they sorted it out and it wouldn’t have a particularly good coverage.

So there will have to be a frigging great pile of legislation removing or restricting the rights of ‘ownership’ because to date the state has restricted those rights to themselves. Those acts would be fought hard by the prospective ‘owners’ defending their rights.

This is simply an area where changes in usage will have widespread and often incalculable effects.

It has taken close to a century to restrict the rights of private owners to dump sediment (and everything else) into waterways, stop developers stripping fore-dunes to get a better view for developments, etc. Many of these decisions and acts depended on the effect on the foreshore and seabed that the state ‘owned’……

As I said earlier, I hear a lot about ‘rights’, I don’t hear much about the responsibilities. I hear even less about the other downstream effects on existing controls. Pretty much I don’t hear much thinking going on, especially from the Maori party which formed around this issue.

Morally; you’re right, in a very strict sense. This is why my parents returned their (confiscated) land to the descendants of those from whom it was confiscated. But having done that, I and my family now have an inalienable stake (granted by those descendants) in the that land. Because legally and practically, it’s not so simple as ‘simple nullity’, a term which was used once before, as I assume you’re aware. The crown and its parliament and laws and courts have legitimacy granted them by successive generations of tangata whenua. The treaty was a major part of this. That’s real.

Nobody sane expects a pure, strict solution; that way lies ruin. This is why the negotiated solutions (of which the Foreshore and Seabed Act was not one) are the only way the issue will ever be settled, once and for all. When all parties are happy with the outcome — or at least tolerably unhappy.

L

If all title the Crown has conferred is on land that was alienated by virtue of conquest, confiscation or sale (which nowadays seems open to perpertual re-negotiation) … and in your own words mostly unjust… then logically all private title issued by the Crown must also be both unjust and therefore subject to being legally struck down.

Alienation is a fancy word for theft is it not?

If aboriginal title not only predates, but takes legal and moral ‘preeminience’ over all of this continent, then the Crown, Parliament and the entire NZ Govt, is a framework of simple nullity because it literally has not ground to stand on.

It’s partly property rights, but not solely in the sense in which you’re talking about them. Aboriginal title is the preeminent state of all territory in Aotearoa — this is another matter of English common law which predates the Treaty, was well understood by the Treaty’s signatories (on both sides), and which has been affirmed by the courts of this land many times since. The legal status of all land, including that on the coastal margins prior to the FSA was that it was assumed to be held in aboriginal title unless alienation could be proven. The court case which the FSA circumscribed (Ngāti Apa) was a test of alienation.

The title isn’t legally conferred by the crown because it predates the crown’s jurisdiction over these lands. In order for title to be conferred, the land would first have to have been alienated — by sale, confiscation, conquest or whatever, many of which means were themselves unlawful but are nevertheless legitimate since ‘alienation’ is a less strict test than ‘disposal’. If it had been alienated, it could no longer be held in aboriginal title, by definition. So that’s why you can’t find it in the LINZ database, and perhaps why you can’t seem to comprehend it: it predates your frame of reference.

L

Curious to know just when the govt of NZ sold this asset in the first place, like the airline and railways?

And if it’s a property right, just where do I find it in the LINZ database, like all other title legally conferred by the Crown? Oh right, it’s nothing to do with sovereignty.

It is about property rights. It is about the jurisdiction of the Courts to determine, in any particular location, and according to its facts, whether Maori still hold property rights over the foreshore and seabed.

The last Labour Government didn’t renationalise Air New Zealand without compensation. They didn’t renationalise the railways without compensation.

But somehow, when it comes to Maori property rights, the last Government chose to nationalise the foreshore and seabed without compensation.

Cullen has acknowledged the error in that, albeit when he had already decided to depart Parliament.

Goff has not, and his speech yesterday reveals him as, if not a racist prick himself, someone who is prepared to exploit racism for political gain.

There are certain economic and historical realities, so as much as we all hate to make concessions a legal compromise and politically tenable compensations etc have to be made to provide for social harmony and benefit of society.

Hence we have a planning system and a legal framework to spell out who can do what with their land who has legal rights etc.. However fair or unfair you may feel that is.

In short I doubt whether the iwi’s will obtain anywhere near total authority over their lands even if the court cases that follow the repeal of the F and S Act give recognition. It is not even certain they will get more than they have now under the current arrangement.

L

As for ‘legal strictures’, they’re Parliament creatures, not the other way around.