Select Committee Presentation

Presentation to Māori Affairs Select Committee

On 23 June 2005, three senior staff from the Ministry of Justice appeared before the Māori Affairs Select Committee in response to the committee’s request for a briefing on the Waitangi Tribunal. Liz Sinclair (deputy secretary, Operations), Stuart White (general manager, Special Jurisdictions), and Darrin Sykes (director, Waitangi Tribunal) gave a presentation which included:

• a range of background information on the Waitangi Tribunal and the unit supporting the Tribunal;
• a high-level analysis of Tribunal claims lodged between 1975 and 14 June 2005;
• a high-level breakdown on the status of those Tribunal inquiries which were active as at June 2005;
• background information on the Tribunal’s casebook method of inquiring into historical claims (introduced in 1995); the modification of the casebook method known as the ‘new approach’ (introduced in 2000); and the variant of the new approach being trialled in the central North Island inquiry;
• background material on the different roles of the Tribunal, the Office of Treaty Settlements, and the Crown Law Office, and the liaison between them; and
• a list of the 90 Waitangi Tribunal reports issued from 1975 to 14 June 2005, including the names and Wai numbers of the claims reported on; the month and year of issue of each report; and the membership of the Tribunal that produced each report.

This presentation may be downloaded here.