- Parts of a forest in Wānaka can be turned into prime residential real estate worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a new Environment Court decision says.
- This could help right a Te Tiriti o Waitangi grievance spanning seven generations for the forest’s future owners: 2000-odd ancestors of 50 Māori who the Crown made landless in the 1800s.
- The result comes from a unique set of circumstances involving a left-leaning minister, a right-leaning property developer, a ‘good bloke’ advocate, and the Covid pandemic. But locals worry about the future of free public access to the forest’s popular mountain bike trails.
The glistening surface of Lake Wānaka can be seen from the edges of the 50.7 hectare area known as Sticky Forest. It’s a million-dollar view: a pristine lake hemmed in by mountains from one of the highest lakeside points.
Walkers and mountain bikers enjoy daily the multitude of tracks that scythe through the shadowed pine tree interiors of the forest, eventually emerging by the lake waters that feed the Clutha River.
The Crown owns this recreational jewel and allows free public access - but the ownership is temporary and future access is unclear. The land has been allocated to about 2000 rightful tūpuna (ancestors) as part of the Crown’s 1998 Te Tiriti o Waitangi settlement with Ngāi Tahu.
The wrong to be righted is the repeated failure of the Crown to provide Ngāi Tahu with “ample portions” for their present and future needs. Instead, by the 1890s, 90% of them were left impoverished, destitute and either landless or with insufficient land.
Sticky Forest is meant to provide economic redress, but so far this hasn’t materialised. Homes bordering the forest to the south and west are typically worth millions of dollars, but the zoning of Sticky Forest’s land prevents any such development.
Nor can the trees be harvested because there’s no road in or out. And even with a road, a harvest isn’t due until 2034, and would require an emissions payment for the loss of carbon absorption.
This seems a continuation of how the Waitangi Tribunal described previous Crown efforts to remedy past wrongs: “A cruel hoax.”
But that may be about to change.
The Environment Court has ruled that just over a third of the land should be rezoned to allow development of around 150 houses - which would catapult its economic potential into hundreds of millions of dollars.
It follows one family’s concerted effort that started a decade ago, and is the latest development in an ongoing saga spanning 170 years. But it has also taken a curious confluence of circumstances to get to this point.
It may not have happened without the Covid-19 pandemic, or without Labour’s David Parker, who saw the then-Government’s fast-tracking law as a way to unlock the potential value of Sticky Forest.
Or without Winton Property Limited, which volunteered to build a road into the forest even though it had no apparent benefit to them. Or without one of the ancestors of the landless, who convinced Winton’s boss that building the road was the right thing to do.
It’s still unclear whether a new subdivision of houses will emerge. A body representing the future owners is deciding how the land will be owned - at which point the Crown will transfer ownership - and what to do with it.
Queenstown Lakes District Council (QLDC) is also considering the court decision, and a number of steps need to happen - including a zone change enabling residential development - before the court can give final approval.
But the door to meaningful economic redress is finally open, even if walking through it might create a new grievance for those who want Sticky Forest to stay as is.
‘Perpetrating a cruel hoax’
By 1864, after the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the Crown had bought about 80% of the South Island (34.5 million acres) over 10 separate agreements with Ngāi Tahu. But a promise to “reserve to the natives ample portions of land for their present and prospective wants” was neglected, with just 6359 acres (2573ha) set aside for the iwi.
The general practice at the time, in addition to adequate lands to live on, was to reserve 10% of purchased land for Māori. What ended up being reserved was just 0.002% of a tenth of the land.
Not that the amount of sold land was even agreed on. Ngāi Tahu maintained it never sold a huge portion in the centre of the South Island, an area referred to as the “hole in the middle”. Nor did the iwi’s understanding of another Crown promise eventuate: that it would retain all mahinga kai (food resource areas).
In acquiring more than half of New Zealand for £14,750 pounds and leaving Ngāi Tahu with an area amounting to less than a quarter of Lake Taupo, the Crown “acted unconscionably and in repeated breach of the Treaty”, the Waitangi Tribunal said.
By the 1890s, 90% of the iwi had either no land (44%) or insufficient land (46%), while few of the remaining 10% could make a living due to “the inferior quality of the soil or the scattered manner in which the lands were situated”.
“We became refugees in our own land,” Hana O’Regan, Ngāi Tahu general manager of oranga (welfare), previously told the Herald. “People who had been in permanent settlements, who had businesses and enterprises even, were being moved from their homes into piecemeal reserves where there was not enough to look after themselves. Within years people were dying of starvation.”
In the 1890s, Native Land Court judge Alexander Mackay was tasked with righting this wrong by ensuring all South Island Māori had enough land (considered to be at least 50 acres each). More than 4000 Māori individuals were identified as landless, and parcels of land totalling 57,600 hectares were allocated for them, a deal formalised in the 1906 South Island Landless Natives Act (SILNA).
But instead of being gateways to economic enrichment, the blocks of land were mostly inaccessible and useless, including some swampland on Stewart Island.
“To appease its conscience, the Crown wished to appear to be doing something when in fact it was perpetrating a cruel hoax,” the Waitangi Tribunal said of the SILNA promises in its 1991 report .
READ MORE: How Ngai Tahu went from being landless to a $2b powerhouse
One of the blocks was called The Neck, a section of land between Lake Wānaka and Lake Hāwea, which was meant to be given to 50 identified individuals. But this was one of four transfers that failed to happen before the SILNA was incorporated into the Native Land Act 1909.
Almost nine decades later, when Ngāi Tahu signed its $170 million settlement, the Neck was no longer available due to pastoral leases. The Crown offered Sticky Forest as a substitute; it had a similar financial value at the time, despite being a 13th the size. The iwi accepted, despite the site having no cultural significance.
The Crown took temporary ownership of the land from the council, while Ngāi Tahu and the Māori Land Court set about identifying the descendants of the original 50 landless Māori, a process that has taken more than 25 years.
The advocate
Michael Beresford was one of the recipients of a letter from the Māori Land Court telling him he was a descendant.
A Christchurch commercial real estate agent, Beresford knew the value of Sticky Forest would skyrocket - and go some ways towards providing the intended economic redress - if it could be developed for residential housing.
But this wasn’t possible due to its zoning: the northern half of the land facing the lake is designated “Outstanding Natural Landscape”, and the rest is “rural”.
Beresford thought this was wrong, given the housing suburbs that now bordered the south and west of the forest, so he applied to the QLDC for a zoning change in 2015. Without it, he argued, any economic benefit would be “illusory”.
The problem, the council said, was there’s no road to Sticky Forest.
It should have been considered when neighbouring land to the south was prepared for housing by the Crown and Ngāi Tahu, as part of its Treaty settlement. But it was neglected due to “administrative errors”, the Environment Court said.
The council was also aware of vociferous opposition - voiced during a public meeting in 2017 - to any rezoning from the local mountain biking community, which, for three decades, has built and maintained the trails throughout the forest. This is described in court documents as “informal arrangements” that were “tolerated for many years, first by QLDC as administrator of the land as a reserve and more recently by the Crown”.
Beresford was also at the meeting, and later revised his application so only a third of the land would be developed, with the rest - including all of the lake-facing half - potentially kept open for public recreation.
The council rejected Beresford’s application the following year, mainly because there was no road. The issue went to mediation on appeal, and then to the Environment Court, which has just ruled in his favour.
Environment Court Judge John Hassan said Bereford’s proposal was the “most appropriate” use of the land, and aligned with the council’s intention to “enable Ngāi Tahu to protect, develop and use Māori land in a way consistent with their culture and traditions, and economic, cultural and social aspirations”.
“In particular, it assists to address an important dimension of the tangata whenua relationship that exists with the Site, namely that enabling realisation of its economic potential is fundamental to alleviating the mamae (pain) arising from Treaty breach injustice.”
He ordered a number of steps to be taken before final approval can be given, including a rezoning of just over a third of the site to allow for residential development, with the rest remaining housing-free.
A QLDC spokesperson said: “Council is reviewing the court’s decision and will comment publicly at the appropriate time.”
But it is almost certain that some of the land will be rezoned; the council’s court submission supported almost as much land for residential zoning as Beresford’s proposal, opposing only a five-hectare elevated section called the Northern Finger (see map below).
Beresford never lived to see the fruits of his labour. He died of cancer in April 2021. His cousins Theo Bunker and Lorraine Rouse took up the fight, but in another tragic turn, Bunker passed away earlier this year, also never knowing the court’s decision.
The court ruling wasn’t unexpected because the council, late last year, dropped its opposition to rezoning. The reason: a road was now being built.
How that came to happen started with the Covid-19 pandemic.
The minister, the pandemic, and an ‘opportunity to help’
May 2020: The Labour-led Government has just announced a fast-track consenting process to “get the country moving again”. Kiwis were emerging from a strict lockdown with closed borders, and the economy at a standstill.
The new consenting law, passed in July 2020, empowered then-Environment Minister David Parker to send a proposal to an expert panel to consider. The day after it became law, a submission from Winton Property Limited to build a retirement village in Wānaka landed at the Environment Ministry.
Parker was already aware of Sticky Forest and its lack of legal access. A month earlier, as Attorney-General, he’d applied to become a party to Beresford’s court appeal in support of a zoning change.
“There is a public interest in ensuring that the value and utility of land forming part of a Treaty settlement is preserved for its future owners,” Parker said in his successful application. Rezoning could give future owners a chance “to utilise and maximise this redress land, which has become surrounded by residential development”.
Parker had also worked in legal matters involving the SILNA before entering politics, so he was no stranger to the Crown’s “cynical gesture” of giving inhospitable plots of land as “redress” to Māori in the early 1900s.
“Occasionally when you’re a minister, you get the opportunity to help people overcome some of those injustices, and when you see those opportunities, you should take them,” said Parker, crediting officials about what happened next.
READ MORE - Whenua: How land moved out of Māori control – explore our interactive map
Officials asked Winton for a map, which revealed that Sticky Forest bordered the land for the proposed retirement village. On Parker’s recommendation, the proposal was then added to the list of projects for fast-track consideration.
When Parker informed Winton of this in a letter, copying in 14 Cabinet Ministers, he added: “I will also direct the expert consenting panel to consider whether this project is a legitimate opportunity to resolve access issues to landlocked Sticky Forest.”
He then made it a legal requirement for the panel to invite Beresford to make a submission. Beresford had already passed away by the time the panel considered the proposal, but his cousins Theo Bunker and Lorraine Rouse took up the advocacy. They asked the panel to make any consent conditional on resolving the road issue.
Was Parker overstepping his ministerial remit in conflating two otherwise unrelated issues?
“I didn’t force anything on anyone, but was creating a pathway for them to be listened to,” Parker told the Herald.
“The decisions as to an appropriate remedy were taken by the courts, with the full participation of all parties. I’m pleased to have helped enable it, but I didn’t take the decision. It wasn’t up to me.”
Parker didn’t make a submission to the consenting panel, but it was aware of his support for rezoning; the Office of Māori-Crown Relations-Te Arawhiti told the panel about Parker joining Beresford’s court appeal, and why: to maximise redress potential.
Then-Treaty Negotiations Minister Andrew Little added further ministerial heft, asking the panel to “consider favourably any condition proposed which would provide the greatest level of certainty for securing legal access” to Sticky Forest. (Curiously Kelvin Davis, then-Minister for Māori-Crown Relations - Te Arawhiti, wrote to the panel with “no comment” on the Winton proposal.)
The panel was under no obligation to do so, and even questioned whether there was “sufficient logical link” between Sticky Forest and the retirement village proposal. Winton had initially reinforced this, saying in a letter to the ministry: “There is no ability for the subject site to provide access to/from Sticky Forest.”
Six months later, Winton’s revised proposal landed.
The property developer: ‘The right thing to do’
The new proposal volunteered to fuse the two issues; if the panel granted consent for the retirement village, it would only be valid if Winton sought permission from the council to build a road “to enable development” in Sticky Forest.
Winton didn’t need to be so bold. It could have offered to investigate the practicality of a road, or to consider building one if someone else paid for it.
“There’s no benefit to us, but we were happy to do it,” Winton chief executive Chris Meehan told the Herald. “I just thought they’d been badly done by for so many years. It was the right thing to do.”
Meehan and Parker now appeared to be batting for the same team, even though they’re not natural allies. Meehan and his family have donated hundreds and thousands of dollars to the Act and National parties via various companies he’s a director of.
The cost of building the road is “not a big deal in the scheme of things”, Meehan said.
“We’ve got roads heading that way anyway. It might be [an additional] 50m of road. We’ll build the access in the course of the next year or so.
“There’ll be people who probably don’t think we’ve done the right thing because they want to see it stay landlocked, but I thought that was the wrong outcome, given how they’ve been treated.”
Asked whether he might be involved in any future development there, he said “no such discussions” had taken place.
He pointed to one crucial factor. “I got to know Mike Beresford, and he’d really pushed hard to do the right thing. He slogged away for years on it, and didn’t get treated terribly well. He was a friend of a friend. He came to us and seemed like a good bloke who deserved to be helped.”
He has also been in touch with Bereford’s cousins Theo Bunker, before he died, and Lorraine Rouse.
“They’re super nice people. It was honestly more about the personalities who were trying to put something right that was wrongly done to them,” Meehan said.
“It doesn’t guarantee them a development outcome, but at least they can access their own land. We’ve also put two or three bike paths through to their boundary. That’s good for us and good for them. It gives them both pedestrian, road and bike connectivity.”
The fast-track consenting panel approved Winton’s proposal in August 2021 “by a very narrow margin, having regard to the proposal’s inconsistency with/contrariness to several important objective and policy provisions”.
The three-person panel included Hoani Langsbury, an ecologist with Ngāi Tahu affiliations and a background in environmental management; Ngāi Tahu was invited to nominate someone for the panel, according to emails between staff at the Office of Māori-Crown Relations - Te Arawhiti and the Environment Ministry.
Winton then lodged a request - supported by Bunker and Rouse - with the QLDC to build a road into Sticky Forest, and in November last year, the council agreed.
With the road seemingly just a matter of time, the council dropped its opposition to rezoning in the Environment Court, paving the way for its ruling to rezone some of the land.
‘The spiritual home of mountain biking’
The colloquial name “Sticky Forest” came from the mountain biking community, a reference to the sticks that litter the forest floor.
The sport in Wānaka isn’t confined to Sticky Forest. Bike Glendhu is a park near the south-west corner of the lake, but it’s a 20-minute drive each way, costs money to use, and its wide-open terrain is distinctly different to the tree-weaving tracks of Sticky Forest.
“Sticky is the spiritual home of mountain biking in the Upper Clutha,” said Bike Wānaka spokesman Simon Telfer, who is also chair of the Wānaka-Upper Clutha Community Board.
“It has a very special wairua (living soul). Many thousands of hours of community work have gone into creating and maintaining the network of tracks in the forest. A second generation of residents is now learning to ride in the plantation.”
Bike Wānaka wants the zoning of Sticky Forest to remain unchanged, given the “rapidly diminishing” urban green spaces around the ever-growing township. But Telfer said the biking community “absolutely” has sympathy for the future owners maximising the value of the land.
“Our advocacy has always been about trying to retain a recreational asset and for beneficial owners to attain economic sustenance from Sticky. Iwi and hapū should never have had the original land at The Neck taken from them.”
If housing is developed according to what the court decision would allow, a majority of the existing bike trails would still be housing-free because they’re on Outstanding Natural Landscape-designated land. Whether there’d be free public access to them, however, is unclear.
“The biking community is there at the invitation of the landowners and, as a club, we need to work hard and develop strong relationships in the hope that invitation remains open,” Telfer told the Herald.
“This decision is now out of our hands. We obviously have an interest in encouraging public access for walking and biking, but that decision will rest with the new owners.”
The court decision recognised the “strong recreational attributes” of the ONL-designated northern half of Sticky Forest, but these were “compromised because they were enabled by a longstanding failure by the Crown to fulfil its Treaty and Deed [of Settlement with Ngāi Tahu] obligations and associated mamae”.
The next chapter? ‘The past is just that’
The end of the saga is yet to be written.
The QLDC has 15 working days to respond to the Environment Court, and even if it doesn’t challenge the ruling, there’s uncertainty over how the 2000-odd successors will use the land.
Nor is it a speedy process, understandably, to get approval about what to do next from so many future owners, who reside across the country and around the world.
Two factors are indicative of their intentions.
The first is that the five-person group representing the future owners includes those who fought for the rezoning. Lorraine Rouse was elected chair of the group, which includes Mike Beresford’s son Jackson, who told the Herald he was “happy” with the court decision. Theo Bunker was also elected, but replaced after his untimely passing.
The second is the group’s motive. “Economic benefit for all successors is the key driver,” Rouse told the Herald in an email prior to the court decision (she declined to comment further when contacted this week), which was the purpose of the SILNA in the first place.
“We are in the early stages as a representative group and our role is to investigate all options for the land and get the best possible outcome for the successors. As you will appreciate, there are a number of steps before any decisions can be made by the 2000+ owners/successors.”
She and Bunker were “very grateful” to Winton for successfully applying to build a road into Sticky Forest.
If housing went ahead, what happened to the rest of Sticky Forest was “still an unknown”.
“The key point in regards [to] this land is it will be individual ownership, not iwi-based. This means the owners/successors will benefit but also be liable for any costs incurred once the land is transferred,” Rouse said.
“How Bike Wanaka will fit into the picture is still to be determined.”
She was looking ahead, rather than behind.
“The past is just that. My personal view is to move on and make the best of future opportunities. The last 12 months have seen progress, and dwelling on past injustices will not progress the transfer of this land any faster.”
A Sticky Timeline
1840-1864: The Crown buys land from Ngāi Tahu but fails to keep its promise of leaving the iwi “ample” reserves for their present and future needs. By the 1890s, 90% are either landless or have insufficient land.
1906: The South Island Landless Natives Act (SILNA) identifies plots of land to be returned to landless Māori. One parcel, called The Neck and situated between Lakes Wānaka and Hāwea, is to be given to 50 individuals, but the Crown fails to do this before the SILNA is incorporated in the Native Land Act 1909.
1998: In the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement Act, the iwi agrees to substitute Sticky Forest in Wānaka for The Neck, which is no longer available due to pastoral leases. Ownership passes from the local council to the Crown while the ancestors of the original 50 landless Māori are identified.
2015: One of the descendants, Mike Beresford, applies for a zoning change that would enable some residential housing in Sticky Forest, without which the intended economic redress would be “illusory”.
2018: The QLDC rejects Beresford’s application mainly because there is no road access to the land. Following mediation, Beresford appeals to the Environment Court.
2020: During the Covid pandemic, then-Environment Minister David Parker refers a retirement village proposal - from Winton Property Limited - to an expert panel for fast-track consenting. The land for the village neighbours Sticky Forest, and Parker requires the panel to hear a submission from Beresford.
2021: Beresford dies of cancer before the panel considers the proposal. His cousins Theo Bunker and Lorraine Rouse, with the support of a Cabinet minister and the Attorney-General, ask the panel to resolve the access issue for Sticky Forest. Winton volunteers to make the panel’s consent conditional on Winton seeking council permission to build a road into Sticky Forest. The panel grants consent for Winston’s proposal.
2023: The QLDC approves Winton’s request to build a road into Sticky Forest. The council subsequently drops its opposition to housing on some of the land. A vote is held to elect a group to represent the interests of the 2000-odd identified successors who will be the future owners of Sticky Forest.
2024: Bunker passes away. The Environment Court rules in favour of Beresford/Bunker/Rouse, and orders the QLDC to change the zoning of some of Sticky Forest to enable housing potential. The council has 15 working days to respond and is considering the ruling. The group representing the future owners will decide how the land will be owned and what to do with it, including whether some public access will be maintained. The group includes Beresford’s son Jackson, and Rouse as chair.
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery team and is a former deputy political editor.
Disclaimer: He lives near Sticky Forest and is a frequent user of its trails.
