“The wrongs that were done were not simply mistakes born of an early ignorance. They were breaches of a Treaty composed by the Europeans themselves. Ngati Whatua were dispossessed by people not by fate. As a sub-tribe they did not willingly sell the Orakei block but fought for over a hundred years to keep it. Nor were the wrongs all committed in the days of blankets and beads when one race barely knew the other. They began much later and worse, they continued to modern times as though one race has yet to know the other today.

At Orakei the present makes its own judgement on the past. A proud and loyal sub-tribe that supported Auckland and the Crown, was through the connivance of both made virtual refugees, a disillusioned, scattered and landless people. If we have any understanding of the Maori attachment to sub-tribe, home and place, only the most insensitive could fail to appreciate the enormity of Ngati Whatua’s loss, or the latent danger in the legacy of bitterness and anger that was theirs to inherit. For this is also a sub-tribe that has refused to die.

(Orakei Report Wai 9, pp 1-2)