A history of catastrophic Govt policy blunders

Slash that collected upstream from the Waikereru Ecosanctuary on the Waimata River in Cyclone Gabrielle. The ecosanctuary on Riverside Road was established on land owned by Dame Anne Salmond and her late husband Jeremy, and is a haven for rare and endangered species of native birds, plants and animals. Picture by Tim Salmond

COMMENT   

by Anne Salmond

I agree with Manu Caddie (Gisborne Herald, May 16) that GDC has been caught between central government and the forestry industry for generations. Wholesale land clearance of the highly erodible steeplands in Tairāwhiti began in the 1880s, a process driven by central government and more or less completed by the Marginal Lands Act in 1950, which left these landscapes vulnerable and exposed.

In response to widespread erosion, central government decided to use pine plantations instead of native forests to try to heal the land. In the 1980s, central government then privatised these “conservation forests”, selling them to New Zealand companies which sold them to offshore investors. When these plantations were harvested, the land was ravaged again, most dramatically by Cyclone Bola.

Central government also imposed the National Environmental Standards (Plantation Forest) on the region, which as Manu noted in his article, are totally unsuited to local landscapes, and which GDC vigorously opposed.

The council has some leeway to impose additional rules under the NES(PF), and it should have done so. It is a mystery why it still has not taken this step — no doubt as a result of intensive lobbying and legal intimidation. GDC needs to rediscover its collective backbone, and do this right away.

Central government is also responsible for designing the Emissions Trading Scheme, which in Tairāwhiti allocates 10 times more emission units (NZUs) by Year 6 to a landowner growing pine trees than to those who are restoring native forests.

This is despite the fact that, as almost everyone agrees, highly erodible steeplands, headwaters and riparian margins in the region should be cloaked in native forest; and when according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, which calculated the emissions balance from the global forestry industry  value chain (from propagating the plants to the end life of forestry products), it emits about twice as much carbon as it sequesters.

Central government is also responsible for capitulating to intense lobbying, and allowing pine trees into the incoming “Permanent Forest” category of the ETS, against policy and scientific advice, rather than reserving this category for native forests. This is a recent blunder, for which the current government is to blame.

Pine plantations are neither “permanent”,  nor “forests”. They are relatively short-lived, shallow rooting, highly flammable monocultures — and as we saw during Cyclone Gabrielle, prone to extensive wind throw. And this in the midst of a biodiversity crisis and climate change!

For a Ministerial Inquiry into an environmental catastrophe that is “unfolding in plain sight” in Tairāwhiti to accuse Gisborne District Council of “capitulating” to central government is a bit rich, given their own repeated capitulations to the forestry industry, and their own history of catastrophic policy blunders over land use for many decades.

It is also unfair, as Manu observes, that the report ignores GDC’s concerted efforts to prosecute a string of forestry companies for breaches of their resource consents — let alone the flagrant disregard (as documented in these court judgements) by these companies for the Forestry Stewardship Council standards they’ve signed up to, and for the interests of local communities and landscapes.

This disregard, which scandalised the judges in these cases, directly led to the environmental disaster that forestry slash and sediment helped to unleash during Cyclone Gabrielle.

Of course GDC can do better, and they must. They need to use the discretion they have under the NES(PF) to speedily introduce more stringent controls on plantation forestry and carbon farming with pine trees in highly erodible hill country, introduce more sophisticated “mosaic” land use planning through the catchment planning process, take scientific advice in dealing with local landscapes, and uphold their own rules far more decisively than they have ever done in the past.

In cyclones Hale and Gabrielle, forestry sediment and slash cost almost every other industry and community activity in Tairāwhiti dearly. Schools, families and homes; restaurants and tourist enterprises; farms, orchards, crops and vineyards were all damaged, along with radical disruption to the water supply and the roading network. Incalculable harm has been inflicted on local individuals, families and businesses.

To think that Commissioners appointed by central government can sort this out is implausible, given a long history of land use blunders designed in Wellington. Local people, including GDC, should be empowered to release the brilliant potential of the Tairāwhiti region, resourced, supported and checked for outcomes by central government. It’s time our leaders stopped kowtowing to international corporations and particular interest groups, whether national or local, and concentrate on taking care of whenua, awa and people instead.

The overall vision in the Ministerial Inquiry Report for the future of Tairāwhiti, with its mosaic of diverse, thriving landscapes, rivers and coastlines, is to be applauded; even though the delivery mechanism it recommends (which seems designed to provoke a collapse of local democracy in the region) is fatally flawed.

Congratulations to Mana Taiao Tairāwhiti for instigating the Ministerial Inquiry, and for standing tall on the land. They produced an impressive submission with their crowd-sourced team of volunteer researchers. The Waimatā Catchment Group also delivered a fantastic submission, along with many others.

These are heartland leaders who live on the land, understand and love it and try to care for it and their awa against all odds. Kia kaha, kia manawanui, kia toa!