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Comment: The title of this draft either has been disambiguated or will need to be disambiguated for acceptance.If this draft is accepted, the disambiguation page will need to be edited. Either an entry will need to be added, or an entry will need to be revised. The disambiguation page for the primary name is Michael Smith (disambiguation). Robert McClenon (talk) 00:05, 11 February 2024 (UTC)
New Zealand Maori activist
Michael John Smith[1] (born c. 1958) is a veteran New ZealandMāori activist, iwi (tribal) leader, film maker and Greenpeace campaigner who, in February 2024, won a landmark New Zealand Supreme Court decision against seven New Zealand fossil fuel and dairy companies, including Fonterra, Genesis Energy and Z Energy. Smith is suing the businesses for public nuisance and negligence for their contributions to climate change. Smith is the climate change spokesperson for the National Iwi Chairs Forum, and a renowned campaigner for the rights of Māori. One of his most widely reported protest actions was an attempt to cut down a pine tree on the top of Maungakiekie / One Tree Hill in Auckland on 28 October 1994. The chainsaw used in the attack is now part of the collection of the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa.[2][3]
Biography and activism
Mike Smith is of Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Kahu descent, a senior tribal member of Northland tribe Ngapuhi and a Greenpeace campaigner. He has been a Māori activist since the 1980s.[4]
At first he says his activism was focused on Māori political and constitutional rights, and social and cultural programs. "However, the emerging global climate emergency caused us to re-evaluate our focus."[4]
In 1992 he attended the first global Earth Summit of world leaders in Rio de Janeiro. In 2011 he began working with Greenpeace Aotearoa.[4]
In July 1997 some 80 protestors, led by Smith and activist Annette Sykes, urged the sacking of the Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Commission chaired by Sir Tipene O'Regan.[5] Smith said that plans to return Maori commercial fisheries assets to tribal hands ignored Maori tradition and needs and would result in huge inequalities. Māori people were better placed than lawyers and judges to sort out fisheries questions, Smith argued. The absurdity of endless fisheries litigation was underlined by the Privy Council's being asked to consider the definition of the word 'tribe', he said.
Sykes, a former fishing company director, said the commission's plans would put an average 487 kilograms of quotas in the hands of each member of a South Island tribe but deliver just an average 78kg to North Island tribe members.[6]
Sykes, a politician and lawyer, is Mike Smith's former partner.[7] He has a son Hoby[3] and daughters Te Aatarangi Rangimarie Smith[8] and Bianca Ranson.[9][10] Ranson is kaiwhakahaere (organiser) of Waiheke’s Piritahi Marae and a Waiheke Local Board member.[11]
Maungakiekie / One Tree Hill attack
In 1994 Smith was convicted of trying to cut down a lone Monterey pine tree on the top of Maungakiekie / One Tree Hill. He attacked the tree on 28 October 1994, the anniversary of the 1835 Declaration of Independence. The pine was originally part of a shelter belt planted to protect native trees, not the tree which gave One Tree Hill its name. The pine survived Smith's attack, although it succumbed five years later, in September 1999, after it was ring-barked with a chainsaw by four people related to Smith, who told the Dominion newspaper he did not know why his relatives had attacked the tree. He did not assume their motivation was the same as his.[12]
Smith said that the tree was a symbol of colonisation and the mono-cultural nature of New Zealand society. [12]
"There is a saying around Auckland Māori that things will not be well in this country, vis-a-vis Maori and Pakeha, until both trees -- pine and [the original] totara -- stand side by side on One Tree Hill. That would be an indication that this country could move ahead," Smith told The Dominion newspaper. [12]
The chainsaw used in the attack is now part of the collection of the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa. [2]
One of the lawyers defending Smith on the wilful damage charge he faced after felling One Tree Hill's solitary pine tree was his former partner, Annette Sykes. [7]
"Mike took the rap for that", she told the Rotorua Daily Post. "It was Eva Rickard who planned it, she reckoned the pine was a symbol of colonial oppression, that it should have been a totara."[7]
Māori remains
Mike Smith has urged for the repatriation and return to iwi of Māori remains from museums. After a painting by the New Zealand painter Colin McCahon was stolen from a public building, he said "Human remains being treated as artwork far outweighs a painting in a DOC centre. There is an absolute hysteria when a pākehā painting goes missing but a deafening silence when Māori human remains get sold as art by foreigners."[13]
Smith says the seven companies, diary giant Fonterra (responsible for around 30% of the world’s dairy exports, Fonterra burns coal to process milk), Genesis Energy, Dairy Holdings, NZ Steel, Z Energy, Channel Infrastructure and BT Mining together are responsible for a third of New Zealand's carbon emissions.[14][16][20]
Smith says these businesses have a legal duty to him and others in communities who are being damaged by planet-heating gases.[14][21][22][23] He wants them to agree to reach peak emissions by 2025 and net zero emissions by 2050.[16][24]
"An important dimension of the case which distinguishes it from similar proceedings overseas is the relevance of a body of indigenous custom, law and practice known as 'tikanga Māori'", writes Vernon Rive, an Associate Professor at Auckland Law School, in The Conversation. "Recent Supreme Court decisions have accepted and applied tikanga as the “first law of New Zealand” including in relation to environmental protection. The Court followed that approach in this case, accepting that crucial aspects of Smith’s case rely on tikanga principles."
Smith's Supreme Court win is a “really significant and welcome development in the law,” Jessica Palairet, the executive director of Lawyers for Climate Action told The Spinoff. Her group supported Smith’s appeal in court. She called it a “significant milestone.”[25]
Lawyer Daniel Street from law firm DLA Piper told Radio New Zealand the ruling provided a new avenue for climate change litigation.
"Previously, tort law has been closed off to these sorts of claims. This particular claim has been one of much interest internationally, so there have been a number of my international colleagues and international NGOs and climate activist groups who've been following this case closely, and I suspect similar arguments being run in numerous cases offshore."[26]
Smith is also suing the New Zealand Government for failing to take effective action on climate change. “We are in a global war against those responsible for the climate emergency and we are seeing the courts play an increasingly important role in enforcing the rights of those directly affected by it,” he says.[27]
Comment: The title of this draft either has been disambiguated or will need to be disambiguated for acceptance.If this draft is accepted, the disambiguation page will need to be edited. Either an entry will need to be added, or an entry will need to be revised. The disambiguation page for the primary name is Michael Smith (disambiguation). Robert McClenon (talk) 00:05, 11 February 2024 (UTC)