Petitions made up the majority of the committee's work. A lot of our people that were out there at the time were mostly concerned about things like the confiscation of Māori land, the imposition of Māori land laws, the Native Land Court. All of these played an important role in communicating Māori concerns, and by 1900, just 28 years later, it had considered around 2,500 petitions. That was the size of the problem at the time and the reason for the establishment of the committee, to the point where the committee's workload was much larger than most other committees. You see, the newspapers at the time described the chairperson's role as "arduous" and not to be desired by any member with many duties. In fact, in recognition of the workload of the chairperson of the Native Affairs Committee, from 1876 to 1880 and again after that, they were paid a little bit extra in their salary to compensate them for the extra workload that they were having to go through at the time, when few other chairpersons actually were privy to that funding.