Ngāti Awa Claims Settlement Bill

Madam Speaker, at the request of Mr Brownlee you have been recalled to the Chamber to rule on a matter that I have dealt with in the Committee. As part of a point of order raised by Mr Brownlee he spoke what we have referred to as recital (10A). He gave a very good rendition of that recital as it is, in Māori, and then requested that it be translated. The Hon John Tamihere offered to translate. I have confidence that he is able to do that, and I have asked him to translate it. But, besides that, the matter that Mr Brownlee has presented the Committee with is, in fact, translated in the bill itself, and there is a translation on a paper circulated by the Minister, which is actually a certified copy—that is, the English version of the Māori. Mr Brownlee sought to recall you to deal with the matter.

💬 Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you, Mr Chairperson. I have heard the debate.

I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. The difficulty that we are in is because of Supplementary Order Paper 327 put on the Table by the Hon Margaret Wilson, which asks the House to consider placing a new recital (10A) in the preamble to the bill. There is also a proposed amendment to that Supplementary Order Paper on the Table, in the name of the Hon Margaret Wilson to insert a further expression in the bill, that expression being “2002”. The bill itself refers to activities that took place in 2003. The question is further made complex by the fact that the Māori text is to be numbered (10A) and we are told that the translation for that is (12) in the English version. The question that comes to mind is that if those recitals are translated one by one, why do the numbers get out of order? We are just keen to understand that what is written in the letter that was circulated today is what is in the bill. That is not unreasonable, and given that the insertion is going in because of a mistake and there is a mistake in the insertion itself, I think it not unreasonable that we ask for the translation, extraordinarily of just seven lines of text.

I refer you in the matter of interpretation to Speaker’s rulings 34/1 and 34/2, because although Mr Tamihere has generously volunteered to interpret my contribution to the Committee, he has done so while the Committee has its own interpreter here. You will see that Speaker’s ruling 34/3 states: “The interpreter is responsible to the Speaker (in committee, the chairperson). If members do not like the way the interpreter is rendering their speeches into English, they are at liberty to give their own interpretation. Members do not ‘own’ the interpreter’s contribution; it is controlled by the Speaker on behalf of the House. Members can seek to correct the subsequent Hansard translation in the normal way.”

I will not have access to Mr Tamihere’s translation in Hansard before it is published, so the question arises of why we have an interpreter in the House responsible to the Speaker, where members are able to reasonably consider how well that interpretation has been given, if we are to have the Chairperson of the Committee determine that we will not use the interpreter provided to the House. Rather, the Chairperson has said we will use a member in political opposition to the person who has spoken to interpret that member’s words, thereby denying the member who has spoken in Māori the opportunity to check that the Hansard record is correct or to take issue with any aspect of the interpretation that a political opponent may like to put upon the originally stated words. In other words, the situation would be a little like Parekura Horomia, as Minister of Māori Affairs, coming to the House to make a ministerial statement, choosing to do so in his chosen language, te reo Māori, someone on the Opposition side of the House being asked to interpret what he has said, and the House leaving him with no opportunity to question whether that interpretation was totally accurate.

I would like your view on whether, if we proceed with this particular course of action, we will create a new Speaker’s ruling that will do away with Speaker’s ruling 34/3, which was given to the House in 1999, at about the time the interpreter’s services were required in the House on each and every sitting day. So the real question is why my rights as a member to have my speech interpreted by the official interpreter are being usurped in this case.

I am ready to rule on the point of order. I heard the debate. There are three things that I want to say. It is the Chairperson’s absolute right to call on a member to interpret. He or she is perfectly entitled to do that, and a member’s word in the House is to be taken. But the most important thing about this matter is that there is no translator in the House. There is an interpreter. The interpreter is here to interpret words used by members in the course of a debate, not to give definitive translations of the texts of bills. If members are not satisfied with the words in a Minister’s amendments, they should vote against them. The interpreter is an official of this House, not a person to be brought into the debate. Where a Minister has an amendment, questions about the amendment should be addressed to the Minister. What I would say, though, is that in future it would be helpful if Ministers, in moving an amendment on a Supplementary Order Paper, included the translation in the explanatory note of the Supplementary Order Paper. Had that been done, I do not think that this issue would have arisen.

In Committee

Debate resumed.

Preamble (continued)