Rather than giving a little for the beach few Kiwis had ever heard of a couple of months back, the taxpayer gave a lot.
The near forty thousand who stumped up to buy beach at Awaroa Inlet were buying back land that was acquired by the Crown a year after the Treaty was signed, which was eventually flogged off to private owners.
Now it's going back into the Crown estate with a "modest" contribution from the public purse of $350,000 - pulled out at the last minute to get the bid across the line. In fact the contribution was a fairly significant part of the final settlement price.
So in reality the taxpayers have been the losers - in terms of coughing up the cash for a sand spit that belonged to them for a century or more - but the winners in that its back in their backyard. And that's where it is, in the backyard - a beach that few Kiwis visit but at least they're now safe in the knowledge that they and their descendants can visit it forever. That is, unless the Crown has another change of heart further down the track.
The fact is that there's been nothing to stop them from visiting the beach before as the current, absentee owner was relaxed about tourists kicking the sand as a reward for hiking there or taking a trip by aqua taxi. The understandable fear though was another buyer may not have been so generous, and that's where you have to take your hat off to those who organised the campaign to buy it.
