Report of the Waitangi Tribunal on a Claim by PJ Hawke and Others of Ngati Whatua Concerning the Fisheries Regulations
Fisheries Regulations claim
In October 1976, Joe Hawke, Henry Matthews, Te Witi McMath, and Rua Paul became the first claimants to the Waitangi Tribunal with a claim relating to fishing rights in the Waitemata Harbour. Specifically, the claim concerned the matter of prosecutions brought by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries pursuant to regulations 106K(2) and 106KA(3) of the Fisheries (General) Regulations 1950.
The claimants had been apprehended by fisheries inspectors while in possession of a quantity of shellfish and had been subsequently prosecuted under the above regulations, though at a hearing at Auckland Magistrate’s Court, they had been discharged without conviction. The Tribunal was asked to determine whether in such a case article 2 of the Treaty of Waitangi protected the claimants from prosecution and, further, whether the regulations discriminated against Maori by ignoring both the fishing rights guaranteed under the Treaty and the importance of seafood in the diet of Maori.
It is essential that the Māori people be recognised as having different needs and values to their pākehā contemporaries. For over one hundred years now the pākehā has been telling Māoris what is best for them. But the time has come for the Māori people to decide these questions for themselves, and this is their inherited right.—Joe Hawke
The Tribunal constituted to hear the claim comprised Chief Judge Kenneth Gillanders Scott (presiding), Sir Graham Latimer, and Laurence Southwick QC, and the claim was heard on 30 May and 1 June 1977. The Tribunal’s report was released in March 1978.
The Tribunal found that it could not make a declaration in the manner of the Supreme Court that article 2 of the Treaty protected the claimants from prosecution because such a declaration was outside the Tribunal’s jurisdiction. And, while it could consider whether a prosecution under a regulation was, in the circumstances and as established by evidence, prejudicial to or likely to prejudicially affect a claimant, in the present case the discharging of the claimants made it impossible to allege prejudice or likely prejudice as a consequence of their prosecution. In regards to the claim that the regulations discriminated against Maori, the Tribunal found that there was no prejudice to be found in the Fisheries (General) Regulations 1950 because there was no evidence to show that the regulations had been interpreted in any prejudicial manner.
Accordingly, the Tribunal did not find the claim to be well founded and it therefore made no recommendations.
