The Auditor-General issued a wake-up call to MPs this week during his briefing to Parliament's Māori Affairs Committee on how poorly public organisations are fulfilling Treaty settlements.
Public organisations are treating Treaty commitments like transactions, not relationships, John Ryan told Parliament's Māori Affairs Committee.
"Fundamentally, this is the law, and we should be complying with it."
The briefing follows an investigation from the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General (an independent Parliamentary watchdog), who wanted to see "how effective the public sector arrangements for Treaty settlement commitments are".
Photo: VNP/Louis Collins
Appearing before the Committee on Wednesday, Controller and Auditor-General John Ryan told MPs that the report, which he viewed as one of the most important in his seven year term, found that the Crown was failing to honour its legal and contractual settlement commitments, of which there are 12,000 across approximately 80 settlements.
"This is a legal compliance issue. If you just take everything else away from it, fundamentally, this is the law, and we should be complying with it as public agencies. The Auditor-General is normally a cold hearted accountant, but when I read this, I felt like we needed to act on this," Ryan told Māori Affairs Committee MPs.
The report found that most of the 150 responsible public organisations treated settlements as one-off transactions, and failed to recognise that, at their core, settlements are about resetting relationships. Relationships which should be durable and ongoing.
"The Crown, I think, has seen it like this after the treaty settlement process - as a series of transactions that needed to be managed rather than a relationship that needed to be reset."
Ryan and his team suggested that public organisations are often inclined to, at worst, just ignore commitments, and at best, treat them with a bureaucratic tick-box KPI mentality.
The Treaty Settlement process has been a defining facet of Māori-Crown relations for decades. Since the first settlements in the 1990s, $2.738 billion of financial and commercial redress has been given by the Crown to Post-Settlement Governance Entities (PSGEs), the term for claimant groups, usually represented by a particular iwi.
In a moment of reflection following Ryan's presentation, committee chair National MP David MacLeod suggested that a lack of personal connection could potentially be part of the problem.
"We have people that represent the Crown in negotiations, on a daily basis for a long time, they almost become emotionally tied to what the settlement is all about," MacLeod said. "Then post settlement, that group of people move on to the next one, and then there's a whole fresh one that actually doesn't have any of that history [and] the relationship that's being formed in that."
National Party MP David McLeod listening to evidence in select committee. Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
The Auditor-General said MacLeod's observation was probably a fair one.
"I think that's an interesting observation because I think what the public sector does once the settlement been reached, is it looks like a series of tasks to deliver rather than the bigger intent that's behind it, because as you say, there's people that go through the settlement process, I hate using the phrase, but on a journey to get to the point of settlement, legislation, deed of settlement. Then the public sector picks that up in various agencies rather than takes that intent that was formed here, and puts it in place over here."
Armed with insight from the Auditor-General's report and briefing, Māori Affairs Committee MPs may perhaps think differently (and encourage their colleagues to do the same) the next time a settlement comes through Parliament. They didn't need to wait long. The first reading of the Ngāti Hāua Claims Settlement Bill, and all stages of the Ngā Hapū o Ranginui Claims Settlement Bill were also occurring at Parliament this week.
What are briefings?
This meeting of the Māori Affairs Committee and Auditor-General was a briefing. Briefings are a less formal version of the inquiry function that committees can initiate. In some cases, once members have learned more about an issue through briefings they may launch an inquiry to dig deeper. There's no requirement though.
Briefings give committees the chance to get the low-down of an issue from subject matter experts. This can be members of the public, a visiting overseas delegation, or as in this case, an Officer of Parliament - the Controller and Auditor-General.
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