The Ministerial Inquiry into Land Use, more widely known as the “slash inquiry”, has released “Outrage to Optimism”, a heartfelt, damning, and sometimes angry report into the impacts of slash on Tairāwhiti and Wairoa.
Following Cyclone Hale and Cyclone Gabrielle, which hit within weeks of each other at the beginning of the year, damage to homes, farms, roads, bridges and beaches caused by the flood-carried debris of commercial pine forestry was so great in many communities north and south of Gisborne that the Government announced a ministerial inquiry to investigate it.
This afternoon, in Gisborne, the inquiry’s chair Hekia Parata made their report public. And it contains writing of a strength seldom seen in an official report in this country.
“While we make findings and recommendations for both Districts”, the report says, “ the urgency of the situation across Ngāti Porou is unassailable. An environmental disaster is unfolding in plain sight.”
The report continues: “Papatuanuku is battered and bleeding, Ranginui a fury, and Tāne Mahuta bent and breaking. Sedimentation from more than a thousand untreated gullies, trees, logs and slash off hills that should never be plantation planted or clear felled, waterways choked with debris flows, riverbeds aggraded, coastlines suffocated and dangerous, roads and bridges unfit, unpassable, and many broken.”
“Ngāti Porou tangata whenua, the people of this land, are in peril, at risk of becoming homeless and landless. We saw and listened to their grief, exhaustion, fear – of the next storm, of the next rain, and for the future. We felt called to urgent action.”
And on it goes, in language that broaches no equivocation.
A new report includes more than 50 recommendations to end the factors that have combined to devastate some East Coast communities. (Source: 1News)
“We are not a third world country. We heard from experts that the situation is perilous – the time to act is now. In their estimation we have 5 – 10 years to turn this environmental disaster around. To urgently reset the future of Ngāti Porou, and the whole of Tairawhiti.”
The inquiry was charged with responding to the issue of slash, and to larger discussions around land usage in highly erosion-prone areas like Tairāwhiti, but it was also asked to hear from the communities whose lives, livelihoods and sense-of-place have been so severely impacted by having forestry waste sweep over their whenua, repeatedly.
And it’s here that the report’s voice is most singular and passionate.
“The Panel found that lives and livelihoods were put at risk. People were isolated, and suffered trauma to their social, emotional and mental health. Woody debris and sediment caused destructive debris flows and resulted in widespread damage to properties, infrastructure and ecosystems. These symptoms of failure, weaponised by cyclonic winds and weather bombs, have created an emergency and require urgent clean-up action.”
What happens now?
Forestry Minister Peeni Henare is also in Gisborne and while he’s only just seen the report he told me he’s determined the Government’s response will be meaningful.
The inquiry’s report is adamant – a meaningful response is urgent.
None of this is new. But the official response has lacked cohesion, clarity and determination before now.
Central Government has left it to councils. Councils have been under-resourced, or confused and compromised by the position of forestry companies as large employers in the communities their slash was damaging.
WATCH: Why it floods wood on the East Coast | An investigative documentary on slash by John Campbell
After severe rain in 2018 washed significant amounts of slash onto land in Tairāwhiti, the Gisborne District Council took legal action against five forestry companies, all of whom pleaded guilty.
They were ordered to pay sums ranging from $152,000 (Juken New Zealand) to $355,000 (Ernslaw One Limited).
At the time, in a media released headlined “Forest owners vow to deal with forest harvest slash”, the Forest Owners Association said it was focused “on measures to make sure a repeat of the recent floods transporting harvest debris out of forests and into Tolaga Bay isn’t repeated 25 years from now".
But Cyclone Hale and Cyclone Gabrielle led to even greater slash within less than five years.
And people began to break under the strain.
How careless were forestry companies working along that stretch of coast?
In The Great Gatsby, there is a sublime sentence: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
I’ve thought of it often in Tairāwhiti.
How careless were forestry companies working along that stretch of coast?
It’s almost four months now since cameraman Andy Dalton and I set out to the East Coast.
January 17. Cyclone Hale had hit. Parts of State Highway 35 were closed, again. And we set off from Auckland without much of an idea of what we’d find, but a sense that it was worth looking for.
Instead of cutting through the Waioeka Gorge to Gisborne, we went east from Ōpōtiki, along the coast at the top, that ragged non-highway, winding from postcard to postcard, arriving at Te Araroa and the hospitality of Tina Ngata.
Tina and the team at Manaaki Matakaoa were working on reconnecting with whānau and communities who’d been cut off by the weather.
And it was Tina who explained to me the double whammy of logging trucks carrying out weights that State Highway 35 wasn’t built for, and the forestry debris (slash) that, after big storms, washes down rivers, over farms and roads, and bludgeons bridges until they cease to exist.
Once you’ve been alerted to slash, you can’t stop seeing it. In some places on the coast its presence is as heavy as an angry man in a pub. A bully.
We filed a story for 1News about the impact on Tokomaru Bay, where road closures had already left it so deserted that a dog was deep asleep on the main drag and chickens were safely wandering back and forth across a “highway” with no cars.
At Café 35, world famous in New Zealand, beloved for its paua pies, their turnover was down 80%. And this was before Gabrielle.
Through late January and all of February, after Hale, during Gabrielle, after Gabrielle, we went back four more times, filing for 1News, and shooting a digital documentary called Slash. The doco has been viewed over 200,000 times.
Many of the people we met, particularly in Tolaga Bay, were in a frantic despair. You also see it in the pockets of Auckland that keep flooding. They tidy up, they remove the slash or mop up the floodwater, and then the rain comes again and it all starts over. Ordinary responses must seem futile in the face of this grinding repetition. But responses are what human beings do. Otherwise all that’s left is hopelessness.
In Tolaga Bay, it occasionally felt like people were succumbing to something approaching defeat. Maybe it was just exhaustion. The slash kept coming. They kept tidying it up. The slash kept coming.
There’s a paragraph in the Sentencing Notes of Judge B P Dwyer, following the Gisborne District Council’s prosecution of forestry company PF Olsen, that says “damage caused by the 3 - 4 June 2018 rain event included an estimated 47,000 m³ of woody debris that was deposited on the beach at Tolaga Bay".
47,000 m³. On one beach. After just one rain event. And in the years since, there has been so much rain. And this year alone, there have been two cyclones.
To get to the beach the slash has to pass through the land between forest and ocean. Andy and I have spent many days on that land. We have seen the farms drowning beneath slash. We have seen the crops that have been crushed. We have seen giant logs floating down rivers. We have seen rivers turned into a tide of wood. And we have spoken to the people whose lives have been battered by the way it happens again and again and again.
We attended two public meetings in Tolaga Bay. One in January, one in March.
Reynolds Hall is the kind of venue you hope to one day see your favourite band play in. Wooden. Natural light. Shining with the history of that special place.
But the body language in both meetings was slumped. Solutions? What solutions?
It's not over
And the thing is, it’s not over.
On our most recent trip up the coast from Gisborne, Andy went up in a helicopter to film the extent of forestry inland from State Highway 35. How much of the land is now in pine?
In places, it looks like an inland sea.
The Ministry for Primary Industries releases New Zealand forest data annually, and the December 2022 update says the “net stocked area” of “planted production first” in the Gisborne District is 158,000 hectares. That’s 1580 square kilometres - or one and half times the size of Auckland.
How do we harvest it?
How much do we harvest?
How do we tidy up after each harvest?
Nathalie Whitaker is one of the founders of Toha, alongside Mike Taitoko and Professor Shaun Hendy, a climate action organisation whose “collective goal is to enable economic prosperity through the regeneration of our environment”.
In part, they’re working to support farmers and landowners who want to transition into regenerative land use.
I asked her what we need to do.
“First”, she told me, “we need to own up to some stuff".
She talked about our “Slash” documentary.
“Unlike climate change, where the problem is greenhouse gases that we can’t see, the slash on the East Coast is right in our face. It’s a very visual display of the complete neglect of our responsibilities as kaitiaki, stewards of the land. What we see on the screen is the exact opposite of what we’ve told ourselves as Kiwis about the special relationship we have to nature.”
Hers is an interesting thesis about what happens next.
“What is unusual about the Tairāwhiti situation, is that almost everyone has played a part in letting it get to this point - local government, forestry, farming, iwi, and central government. Almost everyone carries some blame for the silt and slash on their journey to this point. Everyone is connected to a few bad decisions from the past in one way or another. That means everyone has incredible potential to move past finger-pointing and straight to solutions.”
Nathalie argues that “positive change is going to happen here".
"Toha believes that the East Coast has the potential to showcase innovation and cooperation that could serve as a model to New Zealand communities across the whole country. The people on the Coast are made of stronger stuff than slash.”
Yes, they are. But the slash keeps coming.
People hold up their hurt
Hekia Parata is from this place. She was born in Ruatoria. Two of her sisters have been principals in schools here. Her father was principal at Ngata Memorial College in Ruatoria. The surname, Parata, is everywhere on the Coast.
When the inquiry was announced in February, she had a message for “the many peoples and communities of Te Tairāwhiti, Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, and Te Wairoa".
“This panel”, she wrote, “does not underestimate the impact this has had on you. As Chair, I am committed to ensuring we talk to – and listen to – as many of you as possible".
The panel did.
At the second public meeting we filmed in Tolaga Bay, people held their hurt up for the panel to see.
Bruce Jefferd, a farmer who’d introduced himself to me on the side of a slash blocked road in January, but had been too shy, or punch-drunk to go on TV at the time, stood and told the room quietly: “I have to say this certainly knocked me around. I wasn’t in too good a head space for a week, or so. Probably longer than a week.”
He paused. Everyone in the room knew it was for much longer than a week. For some of them, it has been years.
Parata listened as her sister, Nori Parata, told the inquiry that both in her in civil defence role, and as a member of the community, “our resilience and our resolve has reached its maximum".
A friend of hers told me Parata has viewed this inquiry as “legacy” work. Her chance to make a difference to the Coast, forever.
I heard from people who were at a briefing she gave for officials just prior to the report’s release that she was close to tears.
Has she made that difference?
The response to the inquiry will tell us that.
'This is incredibly disappointing'
Already, there are signs that the inquiry will be a voice to some, and a slap to others.
The Gisborne District Council, for example is subject to understanding and criticism, in equal measure.
“The Panel found that the small size and capability, slim rating base and isolation of both the Gisborne and Wairoa District Councils make it impossible for them to deliver on their full purpose. In these circumstances, trade-offs are inevitable. Wise judgement and strong, inclusive leadership are critical. Unfortunately, the GDC has made several significant poor choices that have put people and the environment at severe risk, as well as failing to meet core business requirements.”
The GDC’s reaction to that approaches fury. In a media release headlined: “Council slams inquiry report into land use”, Gisborne Mayor Rehette Stoltz says “we are extremely disappointed in the findings of the panel and we fundamentally disagree with several recommendations in the report".
“We also have serious concerns with the unsubstantiated commentary in the report as well as commentary which is outside the scope of the inquiry’s Terms of Reference. We went into this inquiry in good faith with a view to working to ensure that in implementing the recommendations, we had the best interests of our community at heart. This is incredibly disappointing.”
And therein lies the balancing act in a community in which forestry has held so much sway, and those charged with policing it have too readily been left unsupported by successive governments, and have responded, in an often ad-hoc way, under-resourced, and caught between slash and the immense harm it does, and forestry’s economic significance as an employer and a landowner.
District councils can’t get that balancing act right on their own. So far, no-one has.
But now, at long last, we can’t say we didn’t know.
Now, at long last, governments can’t look surprised, or pretend it’s a local issue, or an infrequent aberration of rogue weather events. None of that is true. We know that now.
Here, in this striking, angry, hopeful report, is an acknowledgement of the damage done, and it is an acknowledgement that the damaged truly deserve.
And then, forcefully, it demands we do better.
“The Panel found that the community is demanding a new paradigm for their regions. The storm has galvanised people into an expectation for urgent change. Their vision for the region is of flourishing biodiversity; healthy catchments, waterways, and coastlines; and resilient infrastructure and diversified economy – so that they, too, can flourish and thrive. This vision is perfectly aligned to government policy decisions at home and abroad. We are at a pivotal time in which we must take real action and live up to our commitments. Right now, the Tairāwhiti environment is on the verge of collapse, yet can become a living laboratory, providing evidence and lessons for adapting to a climate-changing world. We must act.”
Will we?
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