ABSTRACT

This chapter is intended as a contribution to the recent debate on individualization of indigenous title in Australia by looking at the outcomes of individualization of Maori customary titles to land in nineteenth-and twentieth-century New Zealand.2 Most historians would accept that the individualization project as it was carried out in nineteenth-century New Zealand had less than beneficial outcomes for the Maori people, a view shared by the Waitangi Tribunal, a judicial body set up by statute in 1975 to inquire into and report on Maori historic claims against the Crown.3 The New Zealand variant of individualized titles resulted in the creation of a tenurial system that quickly became very complex and which poses considerable administrative problems and costs for the nation today, nearly 150 years after the first of the Native Lands Acts (NZ) was enacted in 1862.