Q+A: Marama Fox interviewed by Corin Dann
Q+A: Marama Fox interviewed by Corin
Dann
Māori
Party warning over RMA changes: ignore iwi at your “own
peril”
Māori Party
co-leader Marama Fox says this is a new New Zealand where we
celebrate our diversity and sit at the table together and
make collaborative planning moves in our towns, in our
regions, our councils and at our central government.
Speaking on Q+A this morning to our political editor Corin
Dann, Mrs Fox says if Māori had been at the table of local
and regional government, “then I’m damn sure that our
rivers would not have degraded to the state that they
are.” “Iwi have been in the RMA consenting process for
a long time now. They’ve worked very hard on how they do
that. They’re pragmatic about it. They come to the local
council table when they’re invited and when they’re
notified to do so. But they’re only notified 5% of all
notifications. So actually it is ad hoc, but it’s not just
ad hoc by Maori; it’s been ad hoc by councils,” she
says.
END
Please find attached the full
transcript of the interview and here is the link on our webpage.
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Q +
A
Episode
5
MARAMA
FOX
Interviewed by CORIN
DANN
CORIN Welcome back to Q+A, well the Government finally passed its RMA reform bill this week after eight years of wrangling over this controversial law and it was with the support of the Maori Party that got it over the line, well co-leader Marama Fox is in the studio she joins me now welcome to you.
MARAMA Kia
ora.
CORIN Kia ora,
I wonder first if we could start with Grant Robertson and a
potential new finance minister if Labour win. What do you
make of him? Is that somebody you could work with? Do you
like what you
heard?
MARAMA Look,
we’ve always said that we could work with anybody. What
I’d like to see from Labour is simple messaging to our
people about how they’re going to get real money back in
their hands. Is it raising the minimum wage and keeping it
there, indexing it to the median wage. Are we going to index
benefits to the median wage? Just simple stuff that people
can recognise and understand, ‘This is going to be
beneficial to me.’ Because I listen to him, and I’m not
sure that that was motivational for
somebody.
CORIN To
be fair to him he did say to me that he wanted to increase
the minimum wage by $1 or $2 quite quickly. So, I mean,
that’s something they’re definitely going to be focused
on. Is that enough for you to potentially support
them?
MARAMA There’s
a number of things that need to happen if we’re going to
eliminate poverty. We need to put real money in people’s
hands. Minimum wage is one. We need to index benefit rates
to the median wage. We also need to look at the Working For
Families tax credit. That needs to be paid universally. That
would put $70 in the hands of everyone on a benefit now if
that
happened.
CORIN And
you’re only a part of two MPs at the moment. You obviously
don’t have the leverage to get that out of Bill
English.
MARAMA I’ve
tried. I’ve
tried.
CORIN You
have tried. What sort of leverage, if you had four or five
MPs, would that be a top demand? That you could get that out
of a Bill English,
potentially?
MARAMA Absolutely.
New Zealand is signed up to the Sustainable Goals Agenda, of
which poverty and eliminating it is one of those goals.
There’s a target of eliminating poverty by 50% in the next
15 years. To actually do that, we need to have real fiscal
injection into people’s hands. We can’t tinker around
the edges and alleviate hardship forever. We actually need
to do
something.
CORIN This
is why Andrew Little said you weren’t kaupapa Maori,
wasn’t it? Because he said you’re supporting this
National government and they aren’t doing that stuff for
poverty.
MARAMA Yeah,
he said that on the day before we went to
Matatini.
CORIN You
are propping this government
up.
MARAMA We’re
not propping any government up. They can do anything they
want without us if they have the votes, but like with the
RMA, when they need to get that across the line, then
we’re going to walk in, we’re going to hold our line,
we’re going to say, ‘These are out bottom lines. If you
want our vote to support you, then this is what we
need.’
CORIN The
RMA, how significant is this new iwi participation part of
it? Now, Bill English was saying this just formalises an ad
hoc type arrangement at the moment around the country. Is
that what it
does?
MARAMA Listen,
iwi have been in the RMA consenting process for a long time
now. They’ve worked very hard on how they do that.
They’re pragmatic about it. They come to the local council
table when they’re invited and when they’re notified to
do so. But they’re only notified 5% of all notifications.
So actually it is ad hoc, but it’s not just ad hoc by
Maori; it’s been ad hoc by
councils.
CORIN A
significant change, isn’t
it?
MARAMA Yes.
CORIN So,
in future, the onus shifts. The council has to go to local
iwi and say, ‘We need to draw up some terms here for when
we want a major consent. We have to talk to you
guys.’
MARAMA That’s
right. And it formalises, as Bill said, the arrangements
that are there, but they’re variable depending on capacity
across the nation, and what we want to do is make sure that
we remove the variability, that everybody has an onus to
front up at the beginning of the process and say, ‘These
are our sacred places. If you’re going to do something
here, please come and let us
know.’
CORIN But
you can’t stop the council doing something, can
you?
MARAMA If
you have an arrangement that says for notifications over
things like fracking, over things like GE, over things like
putting the sewerage from your council tanks into our
rivers, then we want to have a greater say about
that.
CORIN You
have a say, but the council makes the final
decision.
MARAMA But
it’s collaborative planning, right? So we collaboratively
get around the table, we say, ‘These are the things that
are important to us.’ If they ignore that, then they do it
at their own peril. This is uniting regions and councils to
work
together.
CORIN What
does ‘at their own peril’
mean?
MARAMA Well,
because imagine if you go to Wairarapa, for example, you
start dumping sewerage into our sacred river, people are
going to not stand for that for very long before they come
out and force the local council to
change.
CORIN So do you see in practice,
in future, as this evolves over time and we have these
formal agreements set up and there’s even potential for
mediation if you can’t make these agreements, that they
become set in stone and that there is a real power there for
Maori?
MARAMA I
do believe that that’s a real power for Maori. Because
we’ve been left out of lots of conversations across
consenting around our environment. Before there was the
Green Party, there was Maori. We are, through whakapapa,
linked to mother earth. Now, kaitiakitanga is about making
sure we look after it. If Maori had been at the table of
local and regional government, then I’m damn sure that our
rivers would not have degraded to the state that they are.
But we’ve been left out of that consultation and if we are
in the consultation, sometimes we’ve just been tick-boxed,
‘thank you very
much’.
CORIN That’s
not going to happen any more. And of course, Winston Peters
attacked this policy this week, calling it ‘brown-mail’,
says effectively you’re creating a separate system here,
that Maori get a special right over council consent
decisions.
MARAMA Yeah,
but that’s an irrational fear. What is the fear about
having a Maori voice at the
table?
CORIN But
you’ve just said they will have a
power.
MARAMA The
power is to collaboratively plan what is best for our
environment around consenting. How is that something to be
feared? That’s unifying. That’s not separatist.
CORIN Well,
he’s arguing that it’s a power to one group over the
rest of the
community.
MARAMA Well,
not if you have to sit around the table together in a
collaborative planning process. What’s happened in the
past for the last 60 years is that Maori have been left out
of the conversation. When we’ve had water allocation, look
what’s happened to our water. They say nobody owns it, but
they allocate it, and once it’s allocated, you can sell
it.
CORIN You
did say yourself that it would be at their own peril if
council ignored those Maori
views.
MARAMA I
think it’s at their own peril if they ignore the
collaborative planning process with Maori not there. We need
to have all the stakeholders at the table make real plans
for the future of our environment and of our consenting so
that our water and our land is held in its pristine state
for our future generations.
CORIN So
what’s Winston doing here?
MARAMA Oh,
Winston is going after the vote. He’s doing the divide and
conquer.
CORIN Is
it iwi/Kiwi
racism?
MARAMA Of
course it is. Of course it is. That’s why Hobson’s
Pledge is aligned to Winston Peters and the New Zealand
First Party. Ron Mark stood up in the house and said, ‘Our
goal is to destroy the Maori Party, take Treaty out of every
bit of law, make sure that Maori is ignored in the law.’
That’s going straight back to colonisation, isn’t
it?
CORIN We
went through this with Brash and the Orewa speech.
MARAMA Yes.
CORIN Do
you think New Zealand has moved on?
MARAMA Yes.
CORIN Do
you get the same
sense…?
MARAMA No.
I don’t get the same sense that happened back then. I
think New Zealand has moved on. Our young children are
coming up in a generation where they have a lot more
understanding about Maori and Maori world, they are doing
more te reo Maori in schools now. And when those young
people come up and their parents go with them, they look at
the type of rhetoric that Winston spews out and says,
‘That’s not the New Zealand we
want.’
CORIN So
are they out of touch? Are they, in a way, the gasps of
perhaps an older generation? That this is a new New Zealand
you’re representing here?
MARAMA I absolutely believe that this is a new New Zealand. Celebrate our diversity and sit at the table together and make collaborative planning moves in our towns, in our regions, our councils and at our central government. They are harking back to the Stone Age of colonisation. We can celebrate diversity. We don’t have to be all in the same melting pot, actually.
CORIN One other issue with the RMA was the genetic modification issue. So you’ve effectively said that the ministers can’t step in if a local council wants to grow GM crops, that the councils have control to be GM-free. What is the Maori Party’s position on GM, though? Are you opposed to GM or was this about a council decision-making process?
MARAMA Both things, really. First of all, the Maori Party has been about GE-free Aotearoa since 2004. It’s appeared in our policy manifesto. So, uh, what we want is that if a local council wants to be GE-free because it’s beneficial to their local growing environment, if they’re wine producers or fruit producers to the world and they get an added benefit of being organic, then that’s going to benefit them and the local council.
CORIN So what if it’s the Auckland council and it’s the university and they’re doing a vaccine that’s got GMOs in it? Have you got a problem with that?
MARAMA No, we don’t. Anything that’s GE has to go through the Environmental Protection Agency. You’ve got to ask; you’ve got to go under the HSNO Act. The RMA is not about defining the standards for GE. That’s where the EPA is and that’s what the HSNO does.
CORIN But I wonder whether this has just created more confusion. And New Zealand is going to need to rely on GM science in the future. It already is with Scion, with pine, ryegrass – all sorts of agricultural advancements from science and GM in the future and the new wave of GM. Hasn’t this created an awful lot of confusion, going to push scientists offshore and damage us?
MARAMA No, not at all.
That can continue. If you want to do anything with GE in
this country, you’ve got to go and, under the HSNO, get
permission to do that, right? That’s where the protection
comes from to decide whether it’s good or not to do. But
if you’re a local council whose region benefits from
having an organic produce that is marketed to the world, we
need to allow them to do that. If you want to do GE pine
forests somewhere, and your local council is OK with that,
then you can do it there. But in Hawke’s Bay, in
Northland, they have clearly said, ‘We benefit from having
a GE-free environment. It adds value to our product and we
can market it
overseas.’