The National Party's calling for more transparency from the government, questioning why the Department of Conservation is recommending transferring DOC land to iwi.

In a discussion document from a recent hui, DOC recommends overhauling conservation legislation to be more in line with the Treaty of Waitangi.

This would entail delegating and transferring power over doc land to local iwi.

However, National's former treaty negotiations minister Chris Finlayson says that when he took over the portfolio, he thought DoC needed to "get real" to act in accordance with the Treaty. 

He told Heather du Plessis-Allan that he moved away from the Clark Government's policy of handing over "small and discrete" pockets of land to iwi. 

"DoC to me always had an old fashioned and colonist view of its estate and what iwi could be involved in."

Finlayson says that he was always very careful with the National Park, but there was a lot of land he thought should be given to iwi. 

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