The leader of a Wairarapa hapū, who wants to close a public paper road over their land, says they will consider lodging a claim with the Waitangi Tribunal if a council bylaw supporting the closure doesn’t pass.
The proposed bylaw to shut the road on the southernmost tip of the North Island has triggered backlash, with the Wairarapa District Council receiving 3500 submissions on it.
Ngati Hinewaka chairperson Haami Te Whaiti is not surprised at the response.
“I’m not surprised,” he said, “because the right of passage over our land is something they think they’re entitled to because it’s been happening for a very long time.”
Most of the damage, he said, is caused by four wheel drive vehicles causing deep ruts in the road and veering onto private land. The land owners had watched the public disrespect the land for a long time, Te Whaiti added.
“The damage has been from vehicles driving across our land, from camping and the fires that have resulted.”
On Waitangi Day in 1990, a blaze scorched the hillsides. It was thought that the fire was initially lit by illegal campers and then became out of control.
The paper road runs three kilometres from the Cape Palliser lighthouse to a DOC reserve. It runs through four blocks of Maori land. Paper roads are legal, unformed public roads.
Last week, Q+A covered fears over the closure proposal, with some users of the road also worried that the proposed bylaw would set a precedent for other wilderness areas.
There’s been dismay over the proposed closure of a road that runs through the land near Cape Palliser on the Wairarapa coast. (Source: Q and A)
People driving onto private land – hapū chairperson
Haami Te Whaiti told Q+A that he doesn’t acknowledge that the public has a right to use the road because he doesn’t think there is a road left to use. Some parts of the paper road have eroded into the sea, forcing drivers onto the private land that borders it.
“They can’t avoid going on to our land,” he said, “which they don’t have permission to do, and I think it wouldn’t be safe for the council to say they can allow vehicles to drive on.”
The land has official heritage status. There’s a pa site and remains of garden boundaries marked out in rocks, which are centuries old.
Te Whaiti said people were, in effect, driving over an archaeological site. Both the district council and the Outdoor Access Commission maintain that while a bylaw can prohibit vehicles on a paper road, walkers and cyclists should still be permitted to use it.
But the landowners don’t want walkers and cyclists on the road either — at least, not for a few years anyway. “It hasn’t been a complete no to pedestrian access,” said Te Whaiti, “ but when we’re ready, when the land is healed, we’ll consider opening it to them.”
He hoped that land owners could work together with the walkers to respect wishes to let the land heal. Some residents in the nearby coastal communities have offered to help fence off and repair the road.
Te Whaiti said it makes sense for the landowners to come to some arrangement with the local communities, but that they couldn’t continue to access the road as a right.
The Ngati Hinewaka leader insists there are other landowners along the coast and at Lake Wairarapa, who are closing off paper roads to the public, but that complaints had been focused on his hapū’s land because the public has always had access to it.
If the landowners are not happy with the decision made on the proposed bylaw, Te Whaiti said, they may go to the Waitangi Tribunal.
He said he first had a responsibility to protect the land because of its heritage value; the area was first visited by the Polynesian navigator Kupe. His ancestors, he added, would never have envisaged the damage that is happening to the land.
Hearings on the proposed bylaw will take place in the first week of September, and a final decision on the paper road will be made later in the month.
