Present government in possession of stolen goods

Waitangi Treaty settlements are not Maori greed. In the case of local Maori the Government took 20 000 hectares of land between the Waimapu and Wairoa rivers without payment, and forced Maori to leave. In reply to D.Holm (July 27), that is massive injustice.

The Government that did this passed on the asset value of the land stolen down to the present day Government and taxpayers. The present Government is in possession of stolen goods. Treaty settlements recognise this.
Local Maori will receive a settlement of about $50 million for land worth now over $500 million. This is the very opposite of greed as claimed by Ray Jones and Margaret Hills (July 27).
The descendants of those original Maori landowners are with us now. They deserve compensation for the inheritance they have lost.
To describe Maori descendants as watered down is meaningless. Nobody complains when watered down Pakeha descendants inherit a family farm.
Any descendants of an ancestor, Maori or Pakeha, are watered down, and entitled to inherit.
In reply to Margaret Hills, Wikipedia has a clear table of settlements taken from the Office of Treaty Settlements. The total in 2008 was $950 million. Settlements since then have been about $200 million. So the current total is $1.2 billion over 30 years, not $37 billion. This is a tiny fraction of Government spending.
People who claim that these official figures are understated because they do not include earnings from Treaty settlements are being ridiculous. Do they expect Maori to put their settlements under a mattress?

Peter Dey, Welcome Bay.