Lengthy court battle dropped

A three-year court battle is finally over for an activist who was charged with trespassing on tribal land, after the Crown unexpectedly dropped its case.

Police first brought the trespass charge against Philip Taueki in 2015 after he was found in the Lake Horowhenua rowing club on the land of his iwi, Muau¯ poko.

An ardent activist for the lake’s preservation, Taueki has sparked numerous court proceedings and routinely frustrates local authorities.

Taueki was unimpressed and unapologetic when approached by Stuff, calling police ‘‘idiots’’ for pursuing the matter.

‘‘They want me out of here so they can continue abusing our lake,’’ he said.

‘‘I told the cops when they arrested me, they haven’t got a f ...... leg to stand on. It’s a blatant case of abuse and vindictive use of their powers of arrest and prosecution.’’

The trespass charge was withdrawn at Levin District Court on Friday. A court staffer confirmed the Crown offered no evidence.

The proceedings cost Taueki about $30,000, which he will apply to the court to reclaim.

‘‘The cops aren’t supposed to be wasting precious funds – that’s funding coming out of a limited budget for Crown Law – on chasing a person who’s down here basically occupying his own land, and getting treated like a criminal for it.’’

Before the police charge, Taueki had been trespassed from the rowing club by the Horowhenua Domain Board.

But Judge Jill Moss dismissed the ‘‘fatally flawed’’ prosecution and ruled the board was not the legal occupier of the building, as it was on freehold Ma¯ori land owned by Muau¯ poko iwi, in a 2016 judge-alone trial.

The Ma¯ori Land Court had found the rowing club had no legal right to occupy the building at the time, so it was effectively untenanted.

Police appealed the decision, and a December 2017 High Court judgment from Justice Rebecca Ellis found the trial judge had made errors.

Defence lawyer Michael Bott said Taueki and other Muau¯ poko descendants have particular rights to the domain under law.

‘‘The Crown realised, albeit at the eleventh hour … there was a fatal flaw in the police case.

‘‘It was all over in a matter of minutes, and this man has been on bail for close on two years until he was remanded at large last year.’’

The domain board failed to acknowledge these rights when issuing a trespass notice, he said.

‘‘When you read the Waitangi Tribunal report into the sorry state of affairs in which the Muau¯ poko people have been left by the Crown, well after a century of promises made . . . this was another dark chapter.’’

During a fiery submission to the Horizons Regional Council in May, Taueki handed trespass notices to councillors barring them from the lake.

He has ownership of the lake as a direct descendant of a Muau¯ poko chief, who signed the Treaty of Waitangi.

At the time, Horizons chairman Bruce Gordon said efforts to clean the lake had taken ‘‘a huge step back’’ due to the trespass and staff being threatened.

Lake Horowhenua was a rich food source for Muau¯ poko iwi, but is now one of the country’s most polluted waterways.

‘‘The cops aren’t supposed to be wasting precious funds . . . Philip Taueki