No. 84.
Copy of a Despatch from his Grace the Duke of Newcastle, K.G., to Governor Sir George Grey, K.C.B.

I have had under my consideration an Act passed by the Legislature of New Zealand intituled "An Act to amend the Native Reserves Act." The effect of this Act is to transfer to the Governor and Council the species of trusteeship exercised hitherto in respect to Native reserves by a Board of Commissioners; and, as the assent of the Natives is a necessary condition for bringing. Native reserves under the operation of the Act, it enables the Governor in Council also to declare that this assent has been obtained.

I cannot but view this Act with great apprehension, though I observe your Ministry consider it of so ordinary a character as to require no comment. Even in England it is thought necessary that the administration of any important trust, affecting the management of large landed property, should be vested in some permanent body unaffected by the politics of the day, and it would be held very unsafe to vest such a trust in the Ministry for the time being. But all the peculiarities of the present case, whether arising out of the circumstances of New Zealand as a new country or out of the nature of the peculiar trust, which lies especially exposed to the varying impulses of popular feeling, and, if unjustly or even inconsistently administered, may rouse the most dangerous kind of discontent enhance the objections of principle to which the Act lies open. The circumstance that the Governor's concurrence is necessary to the acts of the Ministry may possibly furnish a guard against a hasty assumption of the Native assent, that being a matter on which a veto can be effectively used; but, in matters of practical administration, where action is indispensable, and a veto therefore ineffective, it is plain that the management of these Native lands will be exposed immediately to the alternations of popular feeling.

As, however, I have relinquished to the Colonial Government the administration of Native affairs, I am bound to assume that the Act will be so administered as to neutralize its obvious dangers; and I have to inform you that Her Majesty will not be advised to exercise her power of disallowance in respect to it.