Families of those injured or killed in disasters have won a major fight to be included more, with standards announced on Tuesday to ensure responses to disasters are more survivor-driven.
Those in the centre of some of our worst tragedies say they've been left sidelined and cast aside.
The Beehive is a long way from Pike River, and the journey from the West Coast to Wellington has taken 12 years.
Somehow, Rowdy Durbridge, who lost a son in the mine, Sonya Rockhouse, who lost a son, and Anna Osborne, who lost her husband, have made it.
“Cave Creek, Aramoana, Pike River, The CTV Building collapse, Whakaari / White Island, March 15th,” Jacinda Ardern said.
Pike wasn't our first major disaster, nor, sadly, our last, but its survivors were treated so disgracefully that the standards announced today are a response to that.
We were side-lined as grieving families, acting emotionally. Our grief was used to marginalise us, “Osborne said.
Today, the families of Pike River victims watched their story play out, and they remembered how they were pushed aside.
“I lost my son, and then I lost my power, it was a double hit,” Rockhouse said.
Among the 14 murdered in 1990 in Aramoana, just outside Dunedin, was Gary Holden and Jasmine Holden, Chiquita Holden's father and sister.
Chiquita, who was nine at the time, was shot, but survived. She received no counselling.
“So I was just a child at the time, and...the absence of any kind of professional support is something that I think really should have happened back then,” she said.
Looked back on, the same failings recur, at disaster after disaster.
With the deadly CTV building collapse in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake there was the familiar sense of half-truths, of families being pushed aside, like rubble.
Pike River Re-entry Minister Andrew Little said it was clear “any public sector agency involved in the aftermath of a big disaster, they've got to put the families, the survivors, those who were left behind, at the forefront in a way they have before”.
The emotion was still raw for the family members at the announcement.
“Because it wasn't his fault that the mine blew up, and he was too good a man for this shit to happen,” Osborne said of her late husband.
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