Text: Whenua Development with Pita Tipene

Pita Tipene: Is my name and I'm one of the seven trustees of the Ngāti Hine forestry trust acting in the position of Chair.

Text: The beginning of Ngāti Hine Forestry

I've been raised in Motatau and on our papakāinga, Te Hurihanga. When I was about 11 or 12 I was sitting at the table and my mum who had the shares in what was to become the Ngāti Hine forestry trust, was debating with our dad whether she should put her shares into an Amalgamated Trust. And she was saying things like, I think it would be a good idea because it'll provide employment into the future and economic sovereignty for the likes of Pita, who's sitting here having his boil up.

Dad was saying, I'm not so sure about those Pines. Environmentally they may not go with the land and the waterways, but eventually our Mother made the choice to have her shares as part of the amalgamation, what is now known as the H2 B Motatau block, commonly known as the Ngāti Hine Forestry Trust. So she, along with many others, made that decision. Funnily enough, all these years later, I'm now sitting as one of the trustees, one of the custodians of that very land.

Many of the things that our mother may have thought at the time certainly haven't come to pass here. As I as I sit here and speak. But I think certainly the potential is there for her aspirations and the aspirations of the many people who did amalgamate their blocks to happen.

Text: Developing the whenua

The owners of what were small blocks in some cases quite large blocks within the H2B whenua, weren't able to pay their rates, so they were at risk of losing their land to council. In an effort to safeguard the whenua, they did bring them together. They decided to put it into pine. Fast forward to when I became a trustee a little bit later on and we realized that it was quite a passive governance model of us almost watching pine trees grow, pine trees that belonged to somebody else, to people who leased the land, the companies who would eventually harvest the pine and take it away as logs.

Here we are now in 2022 and as trustees we've decided to diversify it into Manuka Honey. So going away from pine and not having all of our eggs in one basket, it's fine to take the whenua back to Native, but how are you going to generate income? So we've looked and we've already planted a whole lot of Manuka, otherwise known in Ngāti Hine as kahikātoa, to provide a nursery crop for other natives, but also provide income through Manuka Honey, Manuka Oil, or any other derivatives of Manuka.

Text: Good Governance

Sometimes there is a real impatience by our shareholders, but what we're really clear about is that there's no silver bullet to any of this. You have to really grow it slowly, surely and incrementally to make sure that it's built on solid foundations. Because there's a number of narratives from around the country about how some land trusts have gone belly up, and we don't want to be one of those.

I think a good trustee really needs to be absolutely fully committed and have the time to fully commit. Because if a trustee can't commit, that's much more than attending meetings. It's about attending all the meetings in between, doing the paperwork because it is not a real dedication and a passion towards the kaupapa. It's really not going to happen.

And you can bring all of your technical skills which are needed, call it aptitude, but really it's attitude that I think really makes a good trustee. And so that's on an individual basis. On a collective basis, it's about asking the right questions and having the debate and the discussion and bringing a perspective that brings about collective wisdom on the decisions and what we call Kia horo te ata haere or we want to move with urgency.

Be clear about the vision, but be very, very clear about how you're going to get there and work together.

Text: Oraruwharo Papakāinga - A Whānau Journey 

Text: Succeeding Shares

Ivan Hauraki - Oraruwharo Ahu Whenua Trust Chair

The whenua was farmed by my grandfather. I don't know how long ago, but a very long time ago. And then when he passed away, it just sat there for a while until my mum and her sister succeeded to it. They had a brother who had passed away as well. So they succeeded on his behalf. So that land you know, will start to come forward and they just used the systems available there through the Māori land court with their cousins and their uncles and aunties to transfer shares around so that they ended up with this block, which is 9.3 hectares.

What I can see there and it's a question that's sort of ask me all the time is that the opportunity is there because you have the whenua. But you know, we unfortunately we have, not a very good record in being able to come to an agreement as Māori on what to do with it. So, you know, the first thing that we got to do is settle down.

Text: Agreement and a plan

It's a matter of you can be around here arguing about your whenua in 15 years time and it's still got gorse and ti tree on it. Or, you can come to an agreement and end up with something like this in three or four years. You know, basically it all comes back to an agreement on the whenua. You know, when you can't agree about it, it just lingers on and on and on.

But I think at the early stages, if you have a plan on how you might be able to get these people together, you know, you've got to have the person that can put that together and try to motivate everyone and get on the same waka.

Text: Setting up governance

So first of all, we said, okay, we've got we've got whenua, we have nothing else. We don't even have a bank account. You know, because we weren't anything. And so our first step was to work out how we were going to go about this. We were aware of funding and the agencies, TPK and other things like that. We're aware of that. So the idea to find out how do we get there? And it become apparent very quickly that you had to be a certain type of trust before they would talk to you.

Text: Ahu Whenua Trust, Whenua Tōpū Trust, Māori Reservation 

So an Ahu Whenua trust was the way to go. That was one of the options when we did set out to get the Ahu Whenua trust set up. My idea was, and because of my background, I didn't want to talk to 180 people. So my family and like my mum's family, me and my siblings and our kids and our mokos, we had already had a whānau trust set up.

So we succeeded to her shares into that trust. So I went and talked to my cousins and explained to them what we had done and if that was an option they could follow and they agreed with it. Now all I had and the two brothers were my uncles. Now all I had, instead of maybe 180 owners, we had four owners, the two whānau Trusts and the two brothers.

So that didn't single out a lot of people. It just made it better for us to work with. We still listened to what beneficiaries said, saying we had a lot of input from there that we considered as we went along. So it just had to help us to make decisions quicker. It helped us that we didn't have to have meetings all the time with big crowds.

It just meant that I had to deal with because I was leading the project. By then, I had to deal with just more trustees. But, you know, whānau’s are big. And even in a whānau of 200 people, there's got to be two people in there that can lead. You just got to find those people, have the meeting, keep the minutes because you'll have to present those to court.

Text: Court Preparation

So we went down that process, had the meetings, there was two or three of them so that we could, you know, have all our applications filled out and filed into the court in for sitting. If you do it properly at the start, then you would get there and you wouldn't have much issues with the judge saying that you need to do this, that or the other thing.

Sometimes you can go there and the judge doesn't like anything he sees, so you just got to go away and start again.

Text: Whānau Whenua Whare

But when I turned up at Te Puni Kōkiri and started talking with them, showing them all our trust deeds and everything like that, there was, there was a little bit more stuff to do as far as the trustees were concerned. But basically we had a foot in the door so people would sit down and listen to us now.

As you can understand, as Māori you know, you had a lot of people right at the start scratching their head and saying, oh, I don't know about this. You know, can it happen? You know? And then as they saw the process going far and then when I finally got an answer back from Te Puni Kōkiri that they would be funding us, and I showed the whānau the letter, then all of a sudden, everyone, you know, that was the best time for me when everyone realised it was going to happen.

It hadn't happened. It was a long way from happening. But to get everyone on board before we even dug any ground up that was pretty good. I wanted people to know whether government ministers, government agencies, that us as Māori we can bring something like this. We can achieve something like this, like any other developer, you know, you don't have to be a developer, but as Māori doing a papakāinga we can, you know, and that's to me that's a big thing is that people don't trust us, people don't believe in us.

And I had to show them this is what we can achieve as Māori.

Text: Oraruwharo Papakāinga - Building the Dream

Ivan Hauraki - Oraruwharo Ahu Whenua Trust Chair

We wanted housing. Okay, now there's 180 people in our whānau that could do with housing. So we had to break it down. So we had to set up a kaupapa on how we could manage that. So we were more concerned about our old people living in cities. You know, they live in, the ones that come back here living in Auckland, Whangārei, Tauranga, Whakatāne, you know, all over the place.

And the idea and you know, unfortunately for Māori homeownership just got hard and for a lot of other reasons, you know people are moving through the systems and getting to 60 or 65 without homes living in rental accommodation, you know, which was spiraling up and the stressors that go with that and not knowing if the landlord's going to come along and say the house is sold and you've got to move on.

So, you know, the idea for me was to get our old people out of that situation into a better environment. And for me, wellbeing is probably the biggest part of everything. And to make sure that they were in a place like this where they might be paying rent, it's a very small amount of rent, but in actual fact they all own these houses, they own the whenua, they’re all beneficiaries to this place.

And it's just wanting to get them away from those stressful things and back into here, which we've achieved, which we've achieved. At the same time, we're also looking forward, looking ahead to try and get our younger generations to be able to build on this whenua as well. So we do have another stage coming up that we're going to have younger, more professional people.

You know, there's a few boxes they need to tick, but at the same time, they just, you know, they've got to be able to handle a mortgage and all that normal things, you know, if you take the whenua out of any house cost you're almost taking a third of the cost away. And then if you build like this, it becomes affordable and we can help them to achieve that.

Text: Feasibility and Infrastructure

We went through a feasibility study for funding first, so I got that funding. So we were able to put everything together. And then when it come to the normal process would have been infrastructure. And then beyond that, it's the capital build. He helped me set up my application for feasibility and at the same time it was a lot of the information and that was what we needed for resource consent.

So we put those two together and we got an application, all the same information and a resource consent out of that. And that was because Steve had the knowledge and on how to go about doing that. You don't want the place breaking down in five or six, seven years time. You know, we spent a massive amount of money on our infrastructure and our infrastructure was also futureproofed.

So what I build up there and we can fit right into the infrastructure that's already here. So plan it properly if you intend to extend onto it, which we know we were going to do. So we made sure we had the right sized pipes that could cope with the wastewater coming from up top into our wastewater treatment plant. Down the back.

The stormwater is the same. We had caps of up there that we can just open up and fit in the stormwater again as we go. So the power is running past there we got plinths that the houses hook into, so all the infrastructure for our future is completed. 

Text: The Tripartite Agreement

They are the guarantors. So you go to kiwibank. Okay. You submit your application or whatever, and then you've got to go to or it's a triangle between kiwibank, Kāinga Ora because at the end of the day Kiwibank don't look to you for a guarantor. They looking at Kāinga Ora, they become the guarantors.

Text: The Build

In a normal business world. Time and money is the two things that matter. You waste time, you waste money, you save time, you save money.

So I said, Oh, well, okay, what do I want to do here? I want to get this built and outta here if it falls for me. So how was I going to do that? That's when I said, okay, we're going to use a design and build. First of all, the designs are these just go through a book, got 36 Plans in there, pick out what you want. I probably had a look at three other design and builds before I decided on advance.

They had two advantages. I like the product and staff. I think it was better than anything else I saw. Their back up service and what they were telling me and from what I knew was, you know, top line. And they were local.

Text: Growing the whenua

We, right at the start allocated two hectares to housing. So it was probably about two hectares in native bush and what have you. And we think we can utilise maybe four hectares of that and we have a plan or program that's going to start building an avocado orchard through there in those four hectares and with that is just going to provide a sustainable financial future for this place and then employment as well. But the idea is that somewhere in the future, not right now, but somewhere in the future that we'll bring our old people back here and they'll be able to live here free.

We have two documents that will apply to here. One is the trust deed through the courts and the other is our governance document. And it just gives simple rules and the thought behind it is that if there's ever a disagreement or an argument or something comes up in ten years time, two people don't have to stand there and argue about it.

You just go back to these documents and the answers there somewhere and just apply that to what you're doing. Yeah, so it's an important part of living in harmony, I'll say, you know, and to the standard that the trustees want, you know. So I mean, it's a beautiful place. You need it to be looked after and we need our mokopuna in 25 years time to be able to see the same thing.

Yeah. And this is one of the things that I talk about and when we lift the standards of papakāinga.