It may be the ninth year that Ngāti Kahungunu has held its AGM at Splash Planet in Hastings, but it's the first time it’s taken the AGM out of the boardroom and held it in front of its thousands of descendants, right in the middle of a theme park.
Ngahiwi Tomoana says, “Before we used to and visit all the marae and hardly anyone would turn to take part, so we decided that we would have the AGM here.”
The thousands of Ngāti Kahungunu descendants who converged at Splash Planet today included 156 sports teams competing, a drop in the bucket of 23,000 registered iwi members and 60,000 descendants both here and abroad.
Everything from treaty claims to water rights was discussed, including iwi goals of making its people tobacco-free.