Waatea News: Māori Radio Station

I whakaputa te Rōpū Kākāriki i tētahi pire hei aukati i ngā hokomaha ki te haoa a pūtea nui i te nui o ngā utu mō ngā kai i ngā hokomaha.

E ai ki te Kaiarataki takirua i te Rōpū Kākāriki e ai ki a Marama Davidson, kei kō atu i te kotahi miriona tāra te huamoni ka tau ki roto pū i ngā pūkoro a nga kaiwhakahaere matua o ngā kāporeihana nei,

Hei tāna anō, kāore i te tika kia nui ngā hua ki ngā hokomaha, i te wā e rongo kaha nei ngā whānau i te ngaukino o utunui.

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I tukuna e ReoPol tana rarangi hai mahi hai whakatutuki mā ngā pāti tōrangapū , ko te whāinga matua o te kaupapa nei ko te whakamātāmua i te reo Māori hai kaupapa tōrangapū kore.

E ai ki te Kaikōkiri o Reopol e ai ki a Takuta Vincent Olsen-Reeder ko te tūmanako ka whai kaupapa here te reo Māori i ngā pāti tōrangapū, e whai ake nei ko te whānuitanga.

The post Dr. Vincent Olsen-Reeder | Ehara te reo Māori i te take tōrangapū! appeared first on Waatea News: Māori Radio Station.

I te nuinga o ngā kaunihera, me mātua mōhio ngā tia o ngā hui kaunihera e rua rā i mua, mēnā rānei ka kōrero Māori i tētahi hui, kia whai wā ai rātou ki te āta whakarite i tētahi kaiwhiti reo.

E ai ki te Manukura o Te Hiku o te ika, e ai ki a Moko Tepania, ko tana tūmanako, hei te tau 2040, i te wā e whai ana a Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori kia kotahi miriona ngā kaikōrero Māori, ka māori noa te noho o te reo Māori i ngā tari kāwanatanga o te motu.’

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I unuhia e te Kāwanatanga te Pire Whakatikatika i te Ture Ahumoana, ā, kāore taua pire e kōkiri whakamua.

Heoi, e ai ki te Minita mō ngā Tini a Tangaroa, e ai ki a Shane Jones, mēnā ka tū anō rātou hei Kāwanatanga, ka tirohia anō te pire, ka whakarerekēhia, ā, ka ngana anō rātou ki te whakamana i taua pire.

The post Shane Jones | Ki te tū anō hai Minita, ka kōkirihia tētahi anō pire whakarerekē i ngā ture Ahumoana. appeared first on Waatea News: Māori Radio Station.

Kei te tautohetia te āhua o te mahi a Te Rōpū Whakamana i te Tiriti o Waitangi. Kua puta ngā hua o te arotakenga i kōkiritia e te kāwanatanga, engari kāore anō aua kōrero kia tukuna ki te ao.

E ai ki te Minita Whanaketanga Māori, e ai ki a Tama Pōtaka, he wānanga ā-motu tēnei, ā, mā taua wānanga tahi a te kāwanatanga me te motu, ka āta whakaritea te anga e hāngai ana ki ngā āhuatanga o ēnei rā.

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Ka tū anō te Huihuinga o te Ao mō te Ārai i te Whakamomori o ngā Iwi Taketake ki Aotearoa, tekau tau i muri mai i te whakarewatanga tuatahi o te Whakapuakitanga o Tūramarama ki Rotorua.

Nō taua wā, kua horapa te kaupapa ki ngā tōpito o te ao, ā, kua kawea e ngā hapori taketake o Ahitereiria, o Kānata, o Amerika ki ō rātou ake hapori.

E ai ki te Heamana Tuarua, e ai ki a Michael Naera, he mea nui whakaharahara te whakahoki mai i te kaupapa ki tōna mātāpuna.

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A major review of Aotearoa’s aged-care system is calling for sweeping reform, but for Māori health researcher Dr Joanna Hikaka the conversation also raises a more fundamental question: what does growing older actually look like for Māori, and is a system largely designed around Western definitions of ageing capable of meeting the needs of kaumātua?

Dr Hikaka, Director of the Centre for Co-Created Ageing Research, joins Radio Waatea as the Government considers the findings of A Place to Grow Old: Securing the Future of Aged Care, the independent Aged Care Ministerial Advisory Group report released this month.

The report contains 40 recommendations and describes an aged-care system facing mounting pressure from bed shortages, service closures, struggling carers, fragmented services and rapidly increasing costs. The advisory group warns aged-care costs could almost double during the next 20 years without substantial reform.

But for Māori, the challenge is not simply building more rest-home beds.

It is ensuring the system understands who our kaumātua are, how Māori experience ageing and what whānau-centred care should actually look like.

The question sounds simple.

What does growing older look like for you?

But the answer can be very different depending on culture, health, income, whakapapa and whānau.

Within te ao Māori, becoming a kaumātua is not simply reaching an arbitrary birthday.

Kaumātua, kuia and koroua can hold important roles as repositories of whakapapa, mātauranga, tikanga, reo and collective memory.

They can be leaders, teachers, carers and connectors between generations.

That means an aged-care system focused predominantly on frailty, dependency and the management of disease risks overlooking the contribution older Māori continue making to whānau, hapū and iwi.

Ageing well for Māori can therefore mean more than remaining medically stable.

It can mean maintaining mana, whakapapa, whanaungatanga, cultural identity, connection to whenua and the ability to participate in whānau and community life.

There is also an equity problem with defining aged care almost entirely around chronological age.

Māori experience significant inequities in health across the life course, meaning illness, disability and the need for additional support can occur earlier.

That creates an obvious policy challenge.

If access to services is designed around assumptions about when an average New Zealander becomes old, Māori experiencing age-related health needs earlier can potentially find themselves poorly served by the system.

The Government itself has previously acknowledged that access to appropriate aged-care services is inconsistent and inequitable across different populations and parts of the country.

The issue is therefore not simply whether Māori live as long as other New Zealanders.

It is whether the health system recognises the different journey Māori may experience getting there.

The wider aged-care challenge is substantial.

The Ministerial Advisory Group describes the existing system as fragmented and under increasing financial pressure, with shortages capable of flowing directly into hospitals, general practice and whānau care.

Its recommendations include creating a more integrated and people-centred system, strengthening services that allow people to remain at home, reforming contracting and regulation, changing funding arrangements and creating additional residential-care capacity.

The report also emphasises something many whānau already know — most people want to remain independent and close to those they love for as long as possible.

That requires substantially better home-based support and greater recognition of the people providing unpaid care.

For Māori, that can mean designing services around whānau rather than expecting whānau to navigate a collection of disconnected providers.

The report puts significant emphasis on ageing well in place.

That is potentially important for Māori.

But it also raises another question: what does place mean?

For one person, it may simply mean remaining in their existing house.

For Māori, place can carry much deeper relationships involving whenua, marae, hapū, whakapapa and whānau.

Keeping a kaumātua technically living at home while they become increasingly isolated from those relationships may not necessarily represent successful ageing.

A genuinely Māori approach needs to consider not only where someone lives but whether they remain connected to the people, culture and places that sustain their wellbeing.

That is why the future of aged care cannot simply involve taking the existing model and attempting to make Māori fit into it more comfortably.

There is an opportunity to build more Māori-led and kaupapa Māori models of ageing and care.

That could include greater investment in Māori providers, culturally grounded home and community services, papakāinga and kaumātua housing, stronger whānau support and services connecting clinical care with cultural and social wellbeing.

The Advisory Group itself sought input from Māori expertise as part of its work, alongside aged-care specialists, clinicians, consumer representatives and other parts of the health system.

The next test is whether that expertise is reflected in what governments actually implement.

Aged-care policy also needs to recognise that a substantial amount of care never appears on a hospital roster or rest-home payroll.

It happens inside whānau.

Adult children support parents.

Mokopuna help grandparents.

Whānau organise appointments, medicines, transport, kai and household tasks.

As formal aged-care capacity comes under increasing pressure, there is a danger governments simply assume whānau will absorb more responsibility.

The new report instead recommends better support for carers and whānau as part of strengthening the ability of older people to remain at home.

That distinction matters.

Whānau involvement should be enabled and supported, not treated as free capacity capable of filling gaps in an under-resourced system.

Then comes the difficult question of money.

The Advisory Group recommends reconsidering how the costs of aged care are shared between individuals and the State, arguing those who can afford to contribute should do so.

Its modelling estimates the broader reform package could avoid more than $830 million a year in unnecessary growth in taxpayer costs by 2037/38.

But any move towards greater individual contributions will require careful scrutiny through an equity lens.

Wealth is not distributed evenly across generations or communities.

For Māori, historic land alienation, income inequalities and lower accumulated household wealth mean apparently neutral financial rules can produce unequal consequences.

A sustainable system therefore also needs to be a fair one.

Perhaps the most important shift required is in the language surrounding ageing itself.

An ageing population is frequently discussed primarily as a cost.

More hospital beds.

More carers.

More residential facilities.

More taxpayer funding.

All of those pressures are real.

But reducing older people to a future fiscal liability misses what kaumātua represent within te ao Māori.

They are holders of history.

They transmit language and tikanga.

They connect mokopuna with whakapapa.

They provide care, leadership and stability within whānau.

They are not simply recipients of services.

They remain contributors to the wellbeing of generations around them.

That is why the question facing Aotearoa is bigger than how many aged-care beds we will need in 2040.

It is about what kind of ageing we want to make possible.

For Dr Joanna Hikaka and those working to rethink ageing through Māori and co-created approaches, the starting point may be deceptively simple:

What does growing older look like for you — and have we actually built a system that allows our kaumātua to grow older with mana, connection, choice and dignity?

#AgedCare #Kaumatua #Kuia #Koroua #JoannaHikaka #AgeingWell #HauoraMaori #MaoriHealth #HealthEquity #WhanauOra #Whanau #Manaakitanga #Whanaungatanga #MataurangaMaori #KaupapaMaori #MaoriLedHealth #OlderPeople #HealthyAgeing #AgeingInPlace #HomeCare #ResidentialCare #Carers #HealthWorkforce #HealthReform #APlaceToGrowOld #HealthNZ #MinistryOfHealth #Aotearoa #MaoriNews #HealthNews #NZNews #WaateaNews #RadioWaatea #WaateaDigital

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A major Māori-led Whānau Ora development is taking shape beside Middlemore Hospital, bringing together kaumātua housing, primary healthcare and wraparound whānau services in what its developers hope will become one of the largest integrated health and wellbeing precincts in the country.

Te Whānau o Waipareira and Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki are partnering on the Hospital Road development in Māngere, responding to two of South Auckland’s most persistent challenges — access to appropriate housing and increasing pressure on healthcare services.

The project is being developed across two strategic sites adjacent to Middlemore Hospital, with one dedicated to housing and the other intended to become a major Whānau Ora Health and Wellness Centre. The development has been facilitated through the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development’s housing programme.

At the heart of the development is purpose-built housing for kaumātua, kuia and whānau living with physical disabilities.

Waipareira’s published project information identifies plans for 124 mixed-typology apartments for people aged 55 and over, while other stages and earlier descriptions of the development have referred to different total unit numbers as plans evolved.

The housing includes a mixture of one, two and three-bedroom apartments, providing options capable of recognising that kaumātua housing does not mean isolating elders from their wider whānau.

A whare manaaki is also planned as a communal space where residents can gather, access support and build relationships with one another.

That reflects a fundamentally different approach to housing older people.

Rather than simply constructing apartments, the precinct is being designed around whānau connection, community and access to support.

Across the development, the second major component is significantly more ambitious.

Waipareira plans a large integrated Whānau Ora Health and Wellness Centre, drawing on more than four decades of experience delivering health and social services in West Auckland.

The organisation says its existing Henderson Whānau Ora Centre supports around 30,000 whānau each year, while the proposed Māngere precinct has been envisaged with substantially greater capacity.

Plans have included approximately 22,000 square metres of care and auxiliary space, compared with around 5,000 square metres at the existing Henderson operation.

The vision includes primary healthcare alongside specialist and wraparound services, with previous planning identifying potential capacity for diagnostics, scanning and day surgery, with specialist providers able to operate from the precinct.

Waipareira’s annual reporting has also identified potential services including after-hours urgent care, elective surgery, pharmacy, radiology, audiology and dental services.

Location is a critical part of the strategy.

The precinct sits immediately alongside Middlemore Hospital, serving communities across Māngere, Papatoetoe, Ōtāhuhu and the wider South Auckland region.

Waipareira says the health centre is intended to provide direct primary and community healthcare while helping reduce pressure on Middlemore.

That matters in one of Aotearoa’s fastest-growing and most diverse urban areas, where demand for healthcare continues to increase.

It also demonstrates a different way of thinking about hospital pressure.

Rather than waiting until whānau become sick enough to require emergency or hospital treatment, an integrated Whānau Ora model aims to bring healthcare, prevention and social support closer to where people live.

The project also recognises something increasingly apparent across the health system — housing is healthcare.

Living in insecure, overcrowded or inappropriate accommodation can worsen physical and mental health.

For kaumātua and disabled whānau, unsuitable housing can create additional barriers to mobility, independence, social connection and accessing treatment.

Putting appropriate housing alongside health and social services allows those issues to be addressed together rather than forcing whānau to navigate multiple disconnected systems.

That principle sits at the centre of the Whānau Ora model: instead of asking whānau to fit themselves around government services, services are organised around the needs and aspirations of whānau.

There is another important dimension to the Hospital Road development.

This is not simply a government health or housing project targeted at Māori.

It is Māori organisations developing infrastructure and delivering solutions themselves.

Waipareira is a registered Community Housing Provider, with its Housing for Social Benefits subsidiary responsible for the housing development. The wider project combines that housing capability with Waipareira’s experience across health and Whānau Ora and its partnership with Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki.

The development therefore represents an increasingly important shift in Māori social and economic development — from being contracted to deliver individual services towards owning, developing and controlling the infrastructure from which those services are delivered.

That can build both community outcomes and long-term Māori assets.

Waipareira’s existing health infrastructure provides an indication of the model it wants to expand.

Its Wai Health service in Henderson delivers accessible primary healthcare through an integrated approach connecting physical and social wellbeing.

In May this year, Waipareira also opened a community oncology service with four chemotherapy chairs, bringing specialist cancer treatment closer to West Auckland whānau.

Hospital Road represents an attempt to take that community-based philosophy and build it on a significantly larger scale in South Auckland.

The project has been several years in development and its scope and timelines have evolved.

Earlier Waipareira material anticipated the housing being occupied before the health and wellness centre, with the latter targeted to operate in 2027.

What has remained constant is the underlying vision.

Housing for kaumātua and disabled whānau.

Healthcare close to home.

Wraparound support.

Spaces for whānau and community.

And a major Māori-led investment sitting alongside one of New Zealand’s busiest hospital environments.

At a time when Aotearoa continues debating how to address Māori health inequities, housing shortages and pressure on hospitals, the Hospital Road development offers another proposition:

instead of continually asking Māori communities what is wrong, invest in Māori organisations already building the solutions.

#WhanauOra #TeWhanauOWaipareira #NgaiTaiKiTamaki #MiddlemoreHospital #Mangere #SouthAuckland #TamakiMakaurau #KaumatuaHousing #Kuia #MaoriHousing #AffordableHousing #SocialHousing #HauoraMaori #MaoriHealth #HealthEquity #WhanauHealth #PrimaryHealthcare #CommunityHealth #HousingIsHealth #WhanauOraPrecinct #MaoriDevelopment #MaoriEconomy #ManaMotuhake #TinoRangatiratanga #Kaumatua #Whanau #Aotearoa #MaoriNews #HealthNews #HousingNews #WaateaNews #RadioWaatea #WaateaDigital

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Te Pāti Māori president John Tamihere is defending the party’s controversial strategic voting campaign as a legitimate attempt to maximise Māori representation and change the Government, while taking direct aim at ACT leader David Seymour over justice, fairness and what Tamihere sees as selective outrage over the rules of New Zealand politics.

As Te Pāti Māori heads towards the 7 November general election, the party is attempting to move the conversation beyond the internal turmoil that has dogged it over the past year and towards a much bigger question — how Māori political power can be used strategically under MMP.

Speaking with Radio Waatea, Tamihere backed the strategy unveiled by Te Pāti Māori calling on supporters in the Māori electorates to give their candidate vote to Te Pāti Māori while using their party vote to support another party capable of helping remove the current Government.

It is an unconventional strategy and one that has attracted criticism from across the political spectrum.

But Tamihere’s argument is straightforward: Māori voters have two votes under MMP, and they are entitled to use both strategically.

At its campaign launch, Te Pāti Māori explicitly encouraged supporters to back its electorate candidates while directing their party vote towards an opposition party of their choosing.

The strategy is designed to maximise the number of Māori electorate MPs while simultaneously strengthening the wider parliamentary numbers available to parties capable of forming an alternative government.

It potentially takes advantage of MMP’s overhang provisions.

If a party wins more electorate seats than its share of the party vote would otherwise entitle it to, those electorate MPs remain in Parliament and the size of Parliament can temporarily increase.

Te Pāti Māori’s approach could therefore produce more opposition MPs overall than would result if its supporters gave both votes to the party.

For Tamihere, that is not manipulating democracy.

It is understanding how the electoral system works and using the votes available to Māori as effectively as possible.

The approach is not without considerable risk.

Critics warn deliberately creating an overhang could undermine public confidence in MMP and potentially provoke a political backlash against the Māori electorates themselves.

Labour’s Māori campaign chair Willie Jackson has also raised concerns about the strategy, despite acknowledging Labour would welcome party votes from Te Pāti Māori supporters.

The New Zealand Initiative has gone further, modelling scenarios in which voters on the political right retaliate with their own coordinated strategic voting.

It argues that if strategic vote-splitting became widespread, it could distort the proportionality MMP was specifically designed to deliver.

Te Pāti Māori is effectively betting that the benefits of maximising Māori electorate representation outweigh those political risks.

There is also a wider historical context.

New Zealand political parties have previously encouraged voters to think strategically about their electorate vote.

National supporters have been encouraged to back ACT candidates in Epsom, while Labour supporters were famously encouraged to support Green candidate Jeanette Fitzsimons in Coromandel in 1999.

What makes the Te Pāti Māori strategy different is its scale and explicitness.

Instead of tactical voting in a single electorate, the party is attempting to apply strategic voting across the Māori seats as a central component of its national election campaign.

That makes the Māori electorates potentially pivotal to the overall parliamentary mathematics on election night.

Tamihere also used his Waatea appearance to take aim at ACT leader David Seymour, challenging ACT’s attacks on Te Pāti Māori and its wider positions on justice and equality.

The exchange centred on what Tamihere characterises as a fundamental inconsistency in ACT’s political argument.

ACT frequently frames its policies around equal treatment, individual responsibility and opposition to what it regards as different rights based on ethnicity.

Tamihere’s counterargument is that genuine equality cannot be understood without confronting the historical circumstances that created unequal outcomes in the first place.

His challenge to Seymour is effectively about the difference between equality on paper and justice in practice.

For Māori, that includes the historic alienation of whenua, Crown breaches of Te Tiriti and the continuing economic and social consequences flowing through generations.

Tamihere’s message was that before ACT lectures Māori about fairness, it needs to understand the history of how Māori assets, authority and opportunity were lost.

The political confrontation between ACT and Te Pāti Māori is likely to remain one of the sharpest ideological contests of the election.

ACT has pushed strongly for what it describes as equal citizenship and a reinterpretation of how Treaty principles operate within contemporary government.

Te Pāti Māori is campaigning in almost the opposite direction.

It wants a stronger constitutional position for Te Tiriti o Waitangi, greater Māori authority over Māori affairs and stronger mechanisms for holding the Crown accountable.

The disagreement is therefore not merely personal political theatre between Seymour and Tamihere.

It represents two fundamentally different ideas about the constitutional future of Aotearoa.

For Te Pāti Māori, however, the immediate challenge is ensuring voters focus on those larger policy battles.

The party enters the campaign after a turbulent period of internal conflict and questions about its governance and structures.

That history has not disappeared.

But the party is attempting to pivot towards the election by emphasising kaupapa, candidates and Māori political representation.

Its strategic voting campaign is perhaps the clearest demonstration of that shift.

Rather than asking supporters simply to increase the Te Pāti Māori party vote, it is asking them to think about the entire parliamentary result.

That is a gamble.

But it is also an acknowledgment that under MMP, winning an election is ultimately about assembling enough parliamentary votes to govern.

With polls suggesting a potentially tight election, relatively small movements in voting behaviour could become decisive.

That makes the Māori electorates particularly important.

Te Pāti Māori believes winning electorate seats while directing party votes towards other opposition parties could maximise the collective strength of the bloc seeking to replace the Coalition Government.

Its critics believe the same strategy could create unintended consequences for MMP and ultimately the Māori seats.

That argument will now be settled where it matters most — among voters.

For Tamihere, the challenge is convincing Māori that strategic voting is not about giving away political power.

It is about using both votes to multiply it.

And as the campaign intensifies, his confrontation with David Seymour makes something else increasingly clear.

The 2026 election will not simply determine who governs for another three years.

For Te Pāti Māori, it is shaping up as a contest over Te Tiriti, Māori political power, justice and who gets to define what equality actually means in Aotearoa.

#JohnTamihere #TePatiMaori #Election2026 #NZElection2026 #StrategicVoting #TacticalVoting #MaoriSeats #MaoriElectorates #MMP #MaoriPolitics #MaoriVote #DavidSeymour #ACTParty #ACTNZ #TeTiriti #TeTiritiOWaitangi #TreatyOfWaitangi #ManaMotuhake #TinoRangatiratanga #MaoriLeadership #MaoriRepresentation #Justice #Whenua #NZPolitics #Vote2026 #EnrolToVote #Aotearoa #MaoriNews #PoliticalNews #WaateaNews #RadioWaatea #WaateaDigital

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A controversial new law restricting the ability to bring civil claims against companies over their greenhouse gas emissions has intensified a much bigger debate about climate accountability, the independence of the courts and where responsibility for environmental harm should ultimately sit.

The legislation follows the landmark Smith v Fonterra and others litigation brought by climate advocate Mike Smith of Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Kahu, whose attempt to hold some of New Zealand’s largest greenhouse gas emitters accountable through the courts had earlier been revived by the Supreme Court.

Joining Radio Waatea to examine what the change means for the legal system is Professor Barry Barton from the Faculty of Law at the University of Waikato, an expert in energy, natural resources and environmental law.

Smith began proceedings in 2019 against six major companies — Fonterra, Genesis Energy, Dairy Holdings, New Zealand Steel, Z Energy and BT Mining.

His case argued their greenhouse gas emissions contributed to climate change and resulting damage to whenua and other places of cultural significance to him and his whānau.

Among the causes of action was the long-established common-law tort of public nuisance, alongside negligence and a proposed new climate-system damage tort.

The case initially suffered setbacks in the lower courts, but in 2024 the Supreme Court unanimously allowed Smith’s proceeding to continue towards trial.

Importantly, that judgment did not decide that the companies were liable for climate damage.

Instead, the Supreme Court determined that Smith’s case should not be struck out before the evidence and legal arguments could be properly tested at trial.

That prospect has now been dramatically altered by Parliament.

The Government argued allowing climate-related tort claims against individual companies could create significant uncertainty for businesses operating within a national emissions regime.

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has maintained that decisions about the country’s greenhouse gas emissions should be determined through Parliament and the regulatory system rather than through potentially wide-ranging civil litigation against individual emitters.

The Climate Change Response (Tort Liability) Amendment Bill was designed to prevent civil liability arising simply from greenhouse gas emissions or activities producing them.

With the legislation passing its final reading, the pathway the Supreme Court had allowed Smith to pursue has effectively been closed by Parliament.

That makes the controversy about considerably more than climate policy.

New Zealand’s constitutional system allows Parliament to legislate and change the common law.

But Smith’s case raises an unusual sequence of events.

A citizen brought a case.

The country’s highest court determined that the arguments were sufficiently credible to proceed.

Before the substantive trial could determine whether the defendants were actually legally responsible, Parliament intervened and changed the law governing that form of liability.

The Government sees that intervention as providing certainty about where responsibility for climate policy belongs.

Critics see something much more troubling — Parliament effectively shutting down an emerging area of common law before the courts have been allowed to fully examine it.

That is one of the issues Professor Barton can help unpack: where should the boundary lie between Parliament’s legitimate power to legislate and the courts’ traditional role in developing the common law?

The legislation has not ended Smith’s legal campaign.

Instead, he has opened another front.

Smith has filed High Court judicial review proceedings challenging aspects of the Government’s decision-making process, including allegations surrounding lobbying by corporate interests and the transparency of the process leading to the legislative intervention.

That case shifts the argument.

Rather than asking simply whether major emitters can be held liable for climate damage, the new proceedings scrutinise how the Government decided to prevent those claims from being heard.

The allegations remain to be tested by the High Court and should not be treated as established findings.

But they ensure the legal battle surrounding Smith v Fonterra is far from finished.

Behind the technical legal arguments sits a fundamental policy question.

Climate change is created cumulatively.

No single New Zealand company causes global warming.

But major emitters collectively contribute to the greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere.

That creates difficulties for traditional tort law, which generally requires courts to establish relationships between conduct, damage and responsibility.

The Government’s position effectively places the primary responsibility for controlling those emissions with Parliament and regulatory mechanisms such as the Climate Change Response Act and Emissions Trading Scheme.

But opponents of the legislation question what happens if those mechanisms prove inadequate.

If government policy does not sufficiently prevent climate damage, and private litigation against major emitters is prohibited, the avenues available to people experiencing that damage become considerably narrower.

Smith’s litigation also carries particular significance for Māori.

His original proceeding is grounded partly in the effects climate change is having, and is expected increasingly to have, on whenua, moana and places carrying profound cultural significance.

Climate change can therefore involve more than financial loss.

Coastal erosion, rising seas and ecosystem damage can affect whakapapa relationships with whenua and wai, customary practices, wāhi tapu and taonga.

That raises difficult questions about whether conventional environmental regulation adequately recognises harms that cannot simply be calculated in dollars.

It also intersects with wider legal arguments now before the courts about Te Tiriti, tikanga Māori and the protection of fundamental rights in the face of climate change.

Climate litigation is not unique to Aotearoa.

Courts around the world are increasingly being asked to consider the responsibilities of governments and corporations as the consequences of climate change become more measurable and foreseeable.

Cases have tested human rights law, constitutional obligations, corporate disclosure, directors’ responsibilities and traditional civil causes of action.

New Zealand’s decision to specifically restrict climate tort liability therefore places an important marker around how far this country is prepared to allow its courts to participate in that developing international field.

The question is whether that produces necessary legal certainty — or removes an accountability mechanism precisely when climate impacts are becoming more severe.

For Professor Barry Barton, the issue therefore extends beyond whether somebody supports or opposes Mike Smith’s climate campaign.

It is about the architecture of New Zealand law.

Should climate liability be determined exclusively by Parliament?

What happens to the development of common law when Parliament legislates after the Supreme Court has allowed a novel case to proceed?

Does preventing litigation provide legitimate certainty to businesses, or remove an important check on major emitters?

And if people suffer increasingly serious climate-related damage but cannot pursue the companies contributing to emissions, where does legal accountability ultimately sit?

Parliament may have closed one courtroom door.

But Smith’s new High Court challenge demonstrates that the argument about climate change, corporate responsibility and the proper relationship between Parliament and the courts is nowhere near over.

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The post #national: Parliament Shuts the Door on Climate Lawsuits — What Does It Mean for the Courts? appeared first on Waatea News: Māori Radio Station.