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Salient Māori News Items – 13 October 2017 (edition 34/2017)

Whakaki 2N Incorporation in Iwitea has received a $40,000 grant from the Ministry for Primary Industries to find the best sustainable use for its 466 hectares adjacent to Lake Whakaki.

Auckland University is undertaking a survey of Māori adults on financial attitudes. The focus is to better understand Māori financial choices, and how these interact with Māori cultural values, and Māori views of wealth and security. We note this is a very large survey, (with 100,000 survey forms dispatched), and is being supported by The Marsden Fund, and undertaken by Māori academics. In our view this work probes into an area where there is limited research knowledge presently, and has the potential to improve policy outcomes. (I.e. research we have reviewed to date appears to focus only on the value of culture, or financial deprivation/wealth, but it does not readily link the two areas. Without such linkages matters such as whether Kiwisaver accounts should be able to be pulled together by whānau members to purchase housing cannot be probed in policy work, etc.)

Te Puni Kōkiri has published a one-page info-graphic on Māori in Te Waipounamu. This sheet brings together existing quantitative data from a variety of Government sources to provide a snapshot of the region. Most of the indicators (bar Te Reo and household overcrowding) are showing gains for Māori in the region. In our view this is a well-presented summary of these data sets, although adult health and social welfare data should be added for completeness.

Wellington City Council has agreed to sell or lease council-owned land at Shelly Bay for a development being undertaken by the Port Nicholson Block Settlement Trust and the Wellington Company. This will see circa 350 dwellings, a hotel and shops built on the former air force base – and may finally allow the Trust to gain a reasonable financial return from its largest asset, (its own Shelly Bay land), which to date as failed to make any decent return for the iwi.

Ngātata Love (former Chair of the Port Nicholson Block Settlement Trust) has now been released from prison after serving about a year of his original two-and-a-half year sentence. Ngātata Love was jailed for fraud relating to the Wellington Tenths Trust (Pānui 18/2017 provides details).

Professor Tracey McIntosh from the University of Auckland has been awarded the Te Rangi Hiroa Medal from the New Zealand Royal Society for her research into understanding the social injustices experienced by Māori, such as poverty and incarceration.