A battle spanning almost two centuries has reached a historic conclusion, with Parliament unanimously backing legislation returning more than 3000 hectares of whenua in Te Tauihu to the descendants of its original Māori owners.
The Te Here ā Nuku (Nelson Tenths) Bill has passed its third and final reading, bringing an end to one of Aotearoa’s longest-running Māori land and trust law disputes.
The legislation gives effect to a resolution reached between the Crown and Te Here-ā-Nuku Trust following years of litigation over land in Nelson, Tasman and Golden Bay.
At the heart of the dispute is a promise dating back to the establishment of the Nelson settlement in the 1840s.
Māori customary owners were promised that one-tenth of the settlement lands would be reserved for their benefit. Instead, only a fraction of what had been promised was ultimately set aside.
The dispute continued across generations before Rore Stafford took the case through the courts.
A landmark Supreme Court decision in 2017 found the Crown owed legal duties to descendants of the original Nelson Tenths owners. Further High Court decisions followed, including a 2024 finding that thousands of hectares of Crown-held land were being held in trust for the descendants rather than owned outright by the Crown.
The Crown and Te Here-ā-Nuku Trust eventually signed a Resolution Agreement in December 2025.
Under that agreement, around 3000 hectares of land will be returned to its rightful owners, while $420 million in compensation has been provided for land that cannot be restored.
The returned whenua includes some of the Nelson-Tasman region’s best-known places, with arrangements covering areas at Tōtaranui, Kaiteretere, Te Waikoropupū, Milnthorpe and Boulder Bank.
Part of the whenua also sits within Abel Tasman National Park.
Public access to the Abel Tasman Great Walk coastal track and the campsite at Tōtaranui will continue under a 25-year arrangement, while DOC will continue much of its existing public-facing management work on affected reserves.
The legislation also restores Kaiteretere as the correct historic name used by the original landowners, replacing the misspelled official name Kaiteriteri.
Importantly, the Nelson Tenths resolution is not a Treaty of Waitangi settlement.
It stems from private law, property ownership and trust obligations. The courts determined that the Crown had been holding the whenua in trust for its rightful owners, making the legislation the legal mechanism needed to transfer title to Te Here-ā-Nuku Trust.
That distinction makes the case significant well beyond Te Tauihu.
It demonstrates that Māori rights to whenua can arise not only through Te Tiriti settlements but through the ordinary law of property and trusts, with the Crown subject to the same legal obligations to honour those rights.
For the descendants of the original owners, the legislation represents the culmination of generations of persistence.
The struggle moved from promises made in the nineteenth century, through the Waitangi Tribunal and decades of litigation, before eventually reaching the country’s highest courts and Parliament.
Now, after more than 180 years, legal ownership of thousands of hectares is finally moving from the Crown to the people for whom it should have been held all along.
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