Mike's Minute: Why are we only just now getting the Waitangi Tribunal review?

Am I right to inquire just what it is that Tama Potaka has been doing for a year and a half?

How many times have you heard me ask the Prime Minister on a Monday, when is the Waitangi Tribunal decision being made? What is Potaka doing with this activist tribunal?

Well, on Friday we got the answer.

He is going to have a review.

I thought that's what he was already doing. That’s why I thought we had been waiting so long.

The impatience I was showing in asking the Prime Minister is not "when is he announcing a review"? It's, when is the Government snipping the wings of taxpayer-funded activists that have lived well past their use by date?

The tribunal was set up 50 years ago to settle historic grievances. To a large extent, they have done that.

The fact some remain outstanding is an indictment on the people who haven't settled and various Governments who have refused to put deadlines in place.

But the majority of the intent of the tribunal is over.

Having ticked that box, they saw a future in a lot more money and work offering increasingly radical views for anyone who was bored and angry and wanted to take a case, so they could get a judgement to beat the Government of the day over the head with.

This current Government, perceived by the aggrieved as a particularly nasty lot, have kept the tribunal flat out filing complaints and receiving damning reports. None of it means anything because the tribunal has no real legal standing.

None of this is complex. Yet Potaka has been sitting there doing Lord-knows-what, to finally muster up a press release on a Friday to tell us at long, long, long, last we'll get a couple of people to wander off for a few months and come back with an opinion the Government wants, so they can do what they should have done all along - call a halt to the circus.

Once again we remind you - no small amount of the support that got this Government to power was predicated on the idea that enough was enough on the Maori overreach front.

Delivery has been painfully slow.

Potaka has been dragging the chain.

Is it possible part of the reason this Government has failed to fire more, is simply because their talk was a lot more attractive than their action?

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