Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays: Wai 13, Wai 14 and Wai 15

14/05/2026

He Waka Tē Ai Tahuri

Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays is where I return to the Tribunal’s early reports, not as history or as legal analysis, but as maps of how the state is designed and how its policy advisory, delivery, and regulatory systems work. After the Motiti Island report, we turn to three short reports in succession: Wai 13, Wai 14 and Wai 15. Read quickly and independently, they look like procedural housekeeping. Read in sequence, in their own context and alongside one another, they show something else: Lady Emily Latimer, Mrs Ringakapo Asher-Payne and Mr Tom Te Weehi, each holding the kaupapa for the leg of the relay that was theirs, each carrying it as far as they could before passing it on.

Rob Ruha’s Ka Mānu is on loop while I write this, a waiata for this kind of thinking. The way Massive Attack carried me through my reading of the early reports. Ruha wrote it in 2019 for Ihumātao and Mauna Kea, as a mihi to the long, sometimes-slow collective work of holding kaupapa across generations. Maisey Rika, Ria Hall, Bella Kalolo, Seth Haapu, Troy Kingi and Witch Dr are on the track with him.

Ka mānu, ka mānu tonu.

It is a waiata that floats and keeps floating well after it has finished. I like it because it has exactly the right register for the three claimants behind Wai 13, 14 and 15. Each of them was carrying something old. Each of them was carrying it with and for others. None of them was waiting for permission or for the Tribunal to tell them what they already knew. All of them were doing their specific work in the relay.

As I listen to the waiata on another loop, I am writing this on Ngāi Tūāhuriri whenua. I mention this because Wai 15 began about an hour and a half up the coast, at Motunau, where a Ngāti Porou shearer named Tom Te Weehi was gathering pāua for his whānau under a tuku moana from Henare Rakiihia Tau and Joe Karetai of Ngāi Tahu. I live in the rohe whose customary fishing right, in this case, was subsequently made visible in common law. So the pattern matters to me in concrete ways.

That pattern shapes how I read these three reports. On their own, their brevity could come across as dismissal. Read together, with their claimants, the short reports tell a different story.

Wai 13

Lady Emily Patricia Latimer née Moore of Te Whakatōhea, but at home at Te Paatu Marae, Pamapuria, filed Wai 13 on 14 February 1984 for the Tai Tokerau District Māori Council.

The claim concerned fisheries regulations in the north: it included conservation matters and restrictions on amateur and small-time commercial fishers that the Council argued might be contrary to Treaty of Waitangi guarantees. The Tribunal closed the file on 20 February 1990, on the basis that the substantive issues had been substantially addressed in the Muriwhenua Fishing Report (Wai 22).

It is worth pausing on who filed it. Lady Emily was Secretary of the New Zealand Māori Council while her husband, Sir Graham, was Chairman. Across the 1970s and 1980s, Lady Emily was a pou tokomanawa of the Māori Wardens.

It is important to note she was a co-litigant in the case that became New Zealand Māori Council v Attorney-General [1987] 1 NZLR 641: the State-Owned Enterprises case. She and Sir Graham mortgaged the family farm at Taipuha to fund the case. It was the case that secured section 9, the small clause that says nothing in the Act shall permit the Crown to act in a manner inconsistent with the Treaty of Waitangi.

By the time Wai 13 was closed in 1990, the Latimers had won in the Court of Appeal, triggered the Crown Forestry Rental Trust through a separate injunction Sir Graham filed the morning he read in the paper that the forests were being sold, and were negotiating what would become the 1989 interim Māori Fisheries Settlement and the 1992 Sealord Deal.

Wai 13 was one of many filings the Latimers carried over many years. In between that work, they kept the marae full of life. They built the Council into the most powerful Māori political body of its generation. They held the Wardens together when no one else could. They served on their Trust Board. All of this, in between taking the Crown to the High Court, the Court of Appeal and the Privy Council, and mortgaging the family farm at Taipuha to do it.

The work happened in the texture of ordinary days. The 4.30 am drive from Pamapuria to Brynderwyn before Sir Graham hitched on to Auckland and the train south to Wellington, while Lady Emily turned the car around in time for the morning milking at 5.30 am, the kids ready for school.

Most claims to the Tribunal are carried like this. Drafted at kitchen tables after the dishes are done. Negotiated for years between whānau and hapū before a single piece of paper is filed. Held by ordinary hard-working people who do their Tribunal work alongside everything else they are doing, often without thanks, often without rest, often without anyone watching.

I have often thought about Sir Graham, Lady Emily, and Wai 13. Five children of their own and more than twenty whāngai. Sixty-seven years of marriage. A working farm. Home fires and gardens that needed constant burning and tending. I like to think that is what was on the letterhead when Wai 13 was filed.

Wai 14

The same year, at the southern end of Lake Taupō, another wāhine rangatira was carrying her own kaupapa to the Tribunal.

Mrs Ringakapo Tirangaro Asher-Payne wrote to the Tribunal in August 1984 seeking advice on how to lay a claim about the flooding of Māori-owned building sections at Tokaanu. She was negotiating with the Ministry of Works at the time. By September 1984, she advised that those negotiations were continuing.

But the Tribunal heard nothing further. It closed the file on 20 February 1990 on the basis that Mrs Payne had moved away from her last known address.

The standard reading is that nothing happened. That reading mistakes the kaupapa. Mrs Payne was of Ngāti Kurauia, the Tokaanu hapū of Ngāti Tūwharetoa, born and raised in Tokaanu, daughter of John Atirau Asher OBE, who was on the team that negotiated the sale of the bed of Lake Taupō to the Crown in 1926, and of Paekitawhiti Ngākuru of the prominent Paurini family.

Mrs Payne was also a teacher and a published historian who would later write the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry on her father. The flooding she described had been occurring at the southern end of Lake Taupō for years, during which the Ministry of Works was operating the Tongariro Power Development scheme across Ngāti Tūwharetoa rohe. She raised concerns that the Tribunal would later examine in much greater depth in the Tūrangi Township Report (Wai 84, 1995).

The thinness of the file is therefore not evidence of any absence, nor of an issue resolved. It is evidence of a state archive that only briefly caught sight of a longer Tūwharetoa struggle already underway elsewhere. Her letter is one moment in a Tūwharetoa kaupapa that is already three decades old and continues.

Wai 15

Further south, in Ōtautahi, a Ngāti Porou shearer was preparing to defend a customary right granted to him by Kāi Tahu rangatira, and carried by mana whenua long before the Fisheries Act was written. Mr Tom Te Weehi of Ngāti Porou and Reremoana Hauraki, both of Ōtautahi, filed Wai 15 in September 1984.

The Tribunal sat at Ngā Hau e Whā Marae on 4 June 1985, then adjourned to await the outcome of the criminal proceedings. On 19 August 1986, Williamson J in the High Court held in Te Weehi v Regional Fisheries Officer [1986] 1 NZLR 680 that Mr Te Weehi had been exercising a customary fishing right preserved by section 88(2) of the Fisheries Act 1983 and grounded in the doctrine of aboriginal title. The Crown did not appeal. Counsel for the claimants sought leave to withdraw. The Tribunal closed the file on 6 May 1987.

Henare Rakiihia Tau, who, with Joe Karetai, had given Mr Te Weehi the tuku, called the High Court judgment a possible miracle (Tau, 2017). The week after it was released, in August 1986, Henare Rakiihia lodged Wai 27 on behalf of the Ngāi Tahu Māori Trust Board. Michael Knowles, the lawyer who had taken the Te Weehi appeal through the courts, was recruited as Ngāi Tahu’s lawyer on the strength of the win (O’Regan, 2018).

The relay of Wai 15 can be seen to run from Motunau through Wai 27 to the Ngāi Tahu Sea Fisheries Report 1992, the 1989 interim Māori Fisheries Settlement, the 1992 Sealord Deal, and the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act 1998. Customary rights were not created by these instruments. Both common law and institutional arrangements finally caught up to what Henare Rakiihia Tau and Joe Karetai’s tuku had already authorised.

What these three reports reveal

These three files show that the Tribunal was not the centre of this work. It was one venue among many. The marae, the Tai Tokerau District Māori Council, the New Zealand Māori Council, the Native Land Court, the courts, and the long tradition of petitioning Parliament, which ran almost from the day after Te Tiriti was signed and onward through every decade since, were all places where Indigenous rights were asserted. And the people carrying that kaupapa moved between those places as the work required. Lady Emily filed Wai 13 from inside work that had been thirty years in the making. Mrs Payne wrote to the Tribunal from within a Tūwharetoa kaupapa that was already three decades old. Mr Te Weehi was carrying a tuku moana granted by the Upoko of Kai Tahu into the High Court, which proved to be a faster route than the Tribunal had been built to provide.

The Tribunal closed each file because the claimant had gone elsewhere. That is not a failure of the Tribunal. It is evidence of a longer constitutional movement of which the Tribunal was, and is, an instrument.

As Miranda Johnson (2025) observes in her recent work on Māori petitioning, the Tribunal itself is a legacy of the older petitionary discourse, not a replacement for it. Paterson and Wanhalla’s (2017) He Reo Wāhine documents the same continuity, particularly for Māori women. Lady Emily writing on Māori Council letterhead in 1984 is the latest instalment of a 150-year practice, not a new one.

That practice continues because the Crown’s record continues. In April 2025 the Auditor-General reported on how public organisations are fulfilling Treaty settlements. Around 150 organisations. Around 12,000 commitments. Every one of the public organisations audited had difficulties meeting some of their commitments as the settlements intended. The Auditor-General’s own verdict: this reflects a tolerance, over many years, of a lack of accountability and transparency (Office of the Auditor-General, 2025).

Forty years after Wai 13, the Crown is still the slower party.

And many claimants are still carrying the kaupapa through whichever forum will hear them. The Tribunal is, as it was in 1984, one tool among many, albeit an important one.

Ka mānu, ka mānu tonu.

The work continues.

References

Johnson, M. (2025). Subjects of difference: Māori petitions and the late-nineteenth-century colonial state. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 53(3), 545–576.

Office of the Auditor-General. (2025). How public organisations are fulfilling Treaty settlements. Office of the Auditor-General.

O’Regan, T. (2018). Response to Rakiihia Tau transcript. Te Karaka, 78, Letters to the Editor.

Paterson, L., & Wanhalla, A. (2017). He Reo Wāhine: Māori women’s voices from the nineteenth century. Auckland University Press.

Tau, H. R. (2017). Volume 1: Te tīmatanga o te kerēme: Wai 27, lodged by Henare Rakiihia (Rik) Tau. Te Karaka, 75.

Waitangi Tribunal. (1987). Report of the Waitangi Tribunal on the Te Weehi claim to customary fishing rights (Wai 15), Department of Justice.

Waitangi Tribunal. (1990). Report on the fisheries regulations claim (Wai 13), Department of Justice.

Waitangi Tribunal. (1990). Report on the Tokaanu building sections claim (Wai 14). Department of Justice.