The High Court has just ruled that the government has been violating one of the oldest Treaty settlements, the Sealord deal:
The High Court has found the Crown has breached one of New Zealand's oldest Treaty Settlements by appropriating Māori fishing quota without compensation.The full ruling is here. The breach is due to the technical details of the government's quota management system, but it basically meant that Māori quota was stolen by the crown and reallocated to other fishing companies to pay off its debts. Its been going on for decades, so the amount of quota - and therefore money - involved is substantial.It relates to the 1992 Fisheries Settlement, commonly known as the Sealord Deal, which funded the purchase of a 50 percent stake in Sealord and protected Māori fishing rights and interests in perpetuity.
The court found the Crown had breached the 1992 settlement and by extension the Treaty of Waitangi.
But while the court has found a breach, it hasn't ordered any relief, so the obvious question is what the government will do next: enter good-faith negotiations to make good its breach and compensate for the wrong? Or pass "fuck you" legislation because they don't really think Treaty settlements are binding on them? And if the latter, what do they think it will do to all the other settlements - and their claims of being "full and final" - that they have passed?
