The deadline for submissions from claimants wishing to be heard by the Waitangi Tribunal at its planned inquiry concerning military veterans closed today.
Earlier this year, the Tribunal announced its new Kaupapa inquiry programme, designed to cover significant claim issues that affect Maori.
The Tribunal said it is fitting in the centenary year of the start of the First World War, in which Maori served the Crown on the battlefields of Europe, that the first Kaupapa inquiry should
focus on claims concerning Maori veterans.
The inquiry would cover all military service from Colonial times through to the Vietnam War, in time of war or peace and whether overseas or in New Zealand.
It would include 28 different claims which had raised grievances concerning veterans in areas such as the treatment of ex-servicemen and their whanau mainly in government land settlement schemes and in economic, social and medical rehabilitation.
A judicial conference would be held in early December to work out how the inquiry would proceed and what the issues were.