These columns use geography as a way of trying to understand the world. In this column a short stretch of Papaiti Rd is examined to comment on the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA).
We live beside the longest straight section of the Whanganui River. Each end is constrained by bluffs. The upstream bluff opposite Kaiwhaiki Pā has a long history of falling down, blocking the river flow, reappearing on the bar at the river mouth, before the sediment heads out to sea.
Kaiwhaiki bluffs. Photo / Fred Frederikse
These bluffs are about half a million years old and mark the transition between the Maxwell and the Nukumaru deposits of the Whanganui series (the best record of the last one million years of the land formation of Aotearoa). This unstable material had its origin in an eruption at Whakamaru, northwest of Taupō. Exacerbated by the vibrations of logging trucks, large chunks are coming down so regularly now that Downers trucks and diggers are almost permanently parked outside our gate.
In the days before regional councils the slips were pushed over the bank into the river, where they had gone since before humans arrived early in the last millennium. The Polynesian explorer Kupe reputedly navigated his way up this section of the river when tall trees grew down to the river's edge and birds flocked high above in a slit of light.
Years of people driving out from town and dumping rubbish over the bank mean that the vegetation today consists of every bad garden weed known. Willows and poplars, ivy, bamboo, horsetail rush, old man's beard, buddleia, montbretia and wandering Jew have replaced the canyon of tall trees that Kupe and his crew first clapped eyes on.
Horizons Regional Council has determined that the slips from the bluffs can no longer be simply pushed over the bank and now they are trucked downriver a couple of kilometres - at a cost to the district council ratepayer - and deposited between the unmanaged willows and poplars where the floodwaters once spilled out on. This means the next big floods will be accelerated through this section and probably take out the road at the downstream bluffs.
Those who fully appreciate Horizons' incompetent handling of the Balgownie floodbanks in the lower reaches will not be surprised.
Rivers tend to want to meander. It is a complex process and not fully understood but a meander is the river's way of doing the least amount of work in turning and accelerating the flow is one sure way of creating a meander.
In an attempt to slow down as it rounds the corner at Mosquito Point the river is creating a meander there, cutting into the bank above and below this popular swimming place to the point where it was undermining the old road. The district council was left with no option but to shift the road back. No sooner had the new road been built than the turnoff to Mosquito Point became a favoured burnout/doughnut venue. There were even two spots where they had bored down 100mm by repeatedly doing wheelspins in the same place. After two years the whole section had to be resealed but the tar had barely cooled when the following night they were at it again. It seems the human race is destined to go straight to hell in a boy racer's car.
Boy racers have left a plantation of rubber at Mosquito Point turnoff. Photo / Fred Frederikse
At the last elections all the political parties agreed that the RMA was not working and needed to be reviewed. In 1991 Sir Geoffrey Palmer had created the regional councils - a pernicious halfway house between the state and the locality - whose role was to administer the RMA. In effect he created two separate layers of planning bureaucracy and therein lays the problem.
The solution is simple. Implode all the district councils into the regional councils and adopt a constitution similar to that of Switzerland (the cantons/regions there do not cede their authority to the state). Each canton is free to come up with its own environmental management systems - and hence in Switzerland you have a European environmental planning exemplar.
Different regions have different geographies and different economies and require different planning solutions - and having one planning layer would certainly speed up the process - and reduce the cost.
