‘Everyone knew about this and did nothing’
When forestry waste caused widespread devastation in the twin summer cyclones, the government commissioned an inquiry. But records show experts have been raising the alarm of pending disaster for decades. Why was no one listening? Kirsty Johnston reports.
Ten minutes into the grey wasteland of the Mangatokerau valley, just north of the East Coast’s Tolaga Bay, Bridget Parker slams on the brakes of her truck and mutters quietly, ‘‘oh god, look at that’’.
She is pointing at a collapsed slab of riverbed, its silty sides littered with the dead trees. The water below is a chalky green. As she watches, a pile of gravel from the road slips further into the stream.
Parker, a farmer who has lived at Tolaga Bay since she was a child, jumps out of the truck, wading through the mud in her sandals, for a closer look. ‘‘That used to be our swimming spot,’’ she says, her hands covering her face in shock. ‘‘It was a meadow, the grass sloping down to the edge. We used to bring the kids here for picnics. And now look at it. It’s totally lost.’’
The Mangatokerau river – and its neighbours the Mangaheia and the Hikuwai – were wrecked by Cyclone Hale on January 10, then wrecked again by Cyclone Gabrielle a month later. Rafts of full-grown logs and wood slash from the commercial pine forests above careered down the valleys, gouging out the riverbed, smashing bridges and choking rivers, smothering fish, flooding houses, clogging Tolaga Bay’s famous beach.
And alongside the wood: silt, slipping from the steep, unstable harvest sites in great chunks, and washing on to the land below.
Where the rivers merge with the U¯ awa river at the fertile, lowland plains there is grainy mud everywhere: it swarms sweetcorn paddocks and swamps fences, seeps across roads, into homes, into cars. It inundated the Parkers’ fledgling kiwifruit orchard, due for its first harvest this March. The silt pile was so deep it took 60 workers digging for a week to get it out. The Parkers sold their stock, unable to feed them on silt-covered grass.
Since 2017, the region has been regularly plagued by floods of wood and silt every time there is a heavy rain event. During the worst example, severe storms at Queen’s Birthday weekend in 2018 saw 400,000 cubic metres of woody debris spread across the U¯ awa catchment. In total, the clean-up across U¯ awa cost $10 million.
In response, the council took a series of five prosecutions against companies who managed the forests near Gisborne, accusing them of breaching the Resource Management Act by illegally discharging sediment and woody debris into the environment. On December 9, 2022, Ernslaw One Ltd, which refused to plead guilty for more than four years, was the last of those companies to be sentenced in court.
Judge Brian Dwyer fined the company $355,000, punishing it both for the pollution and for its ‘‘obdurate’’ position, which repeatedly delayed the council’s investigation and the court case.
A month later, logs and silt from Ernslaw’s U¯ awa forest site crashed through the Parkers’ property again. ‘‘We feel as though we are being chased out of our home,’’ Mike Parker says. His family have farmed in Tolaga Bay since 1958. ‘‘We keep saying, ‘don’t we have a right to live here safely?’’’
After Cyclone Gabrielle tore through in February, the government announced an inquiry into forestry slash and land use, prompted both by the widespread devastation and the death of a child at Gisborne’s Waikanae Beach on January 25. Witnesses said the 11-year-old boy was hit by a log while playing in the water. The inquiry, led by former National MP Hekia Parata, will run for just two months, concluding at the end of
April.
Tolaga Bay residents are among those scrambling for information to present to the inquiry panel. They don’t understand why it has taken so long to come to this point. Because, for years, multiple reports, investigations, and prosecutions have carried warnings about the risk of allowing poorly regulated forestry on the steep land surrounding their homes and farms.
‘‘Everyone knew about this and did nothing,’’ Mike Parker says.
Pine trees were first introduced to Taira¯ whiti as the solution to a problem: erosion. Pa¯ keha¯ settlers had burned and cleared the forest and populated the country with sheep and cattle.
But without the tree cover to protect the soil, the steep hillsides began to erode – their soft soils slumping into gullies and, eventually, out to sea. By as early as the 1950s, it was conceded that the most vulnerable land needed trees back. But instead of reverting to native bush, the New Zealand Forest Service chose to plant the exotic Pinus radiata, a species noted for its rapid growth and ability to withstand harsh conditions, and already in use around Aotearoa as a replacement for native wood. The Crown began to buy pockets of land – both in Gisborne and in the erosion-prone Tasman region – to turn into ‘‘protective’’ forest.
Then, in 1988, Cyclone Bola hit. The storm completely devastated the pastoral hill country, with landslides scarring almost every slope.
In response, the Government subsidised a mass planting scheme in Taira¯ whiti called the East Coast Forestry Project. Private investors rushed to take advantage, in hope of huge returns. At the same time, the Crown sold the cutting-rights to its own forests, including those first planted as erosion protection. By 1997, 27,0000ha of paddocks had been replanted in exotic forest. By 2020, there was more than 150,000ha in radiata on the East Coast.
Pines take 28 years to mature. For years, as harvest grew near, forestry companies nationwide were required to apply for consent and meet the individual consent conditions of each council, which varied by district. But as the mass of post-Bola plantings in Taira¯ whiti grew ready for felling, the companies began to push back against the regionalised regulations. They wanted national guidelines, to save time and money.
In 2009, the Minister for the Environment, Nick Smith, asked the Ministry for the Environment to look into the creation of a national environmental standard for forestry (NES-PF). Straight away, Gisborne District Council mayor Meng Foon pushed back, asking the ministry not to proceed with the idea.
‘‘The key reasons for the request are the likely adverse environmental effects in the Gisborne District,’’ Foon wrote. The region’s shallow, erosionprone hills needed site-specific controls, he said, not a one-size-fits-all rule.
By 2015, the proposal was raised again by the Ministry for Primary Industries.
The councils opposed it. One called it fundamentally flawed. Another labelled it ‘‘ an industry-led proposal driven by industry for the benefit of industry’’.
Gisborne council was critical that it relaxed rules on all but the sharpest slopes, meaning forest owners could harvest on huge swathes of erosion-prone land without a consent covering specific details of how they would mitigate against landslides.
‘‘Even with native regeneration there will still be uncontrollable erosions, but we can save a lot of land that is otherwise turning into a moonscape.’’ Manu Caddie Gisborne District councillor
Cyclone Cook struck Gisborne at Easter 2017, after harvest of the Bola-era plantations had begun. Floodwaters dragged waste downstream, with slash and logs clogging the U¯ awa catchment.
Afterwards, Gisborne District Council principal scientist Murray Cave wrote a report warning forestry debris was likely to cause huge damage in another big storm and finding foresters were not following best practice. Slash piles known as ‘‘birds’ nests’’ were routinely stored on flood plains and future downpours would cause risk for buildings and infrastructure. Slash traps meant to catch the debris were overwhelmed or had failed. Earthworks next to streams did not have the safeguards required to stop sediment reaching streams.
Cave recommended the council ‘‘where practicable’’ review harvest consents to ensure they were fit for purpose, and ramp up its compliance and monitoring arm. He also said the council should find new environmental tools to address the issues, as they were not ‘‘fully addressed’’ by the guidelines in the new national standard.
One day shortly after Cyclone Hale hit in January, Bridget Parker came across two managers from forestry company Ernslaw in her orchard. ‘‘What are you doing here?’’ she asked. The pair were inspecting the damage. Parker asked them to help clean up the mess. Ernslaw agreed to pay for removing the logs from the orchard, but not the silt.
Up and down Tolaga Bay, the stories are the same. After 2018, forthcoming help from some of the companies was extremely slow. They quibbled endlessly over what proportion of the wood on the beaches was from forests, and what was natives or other species like willows. The council later found 85% came from pine forests.
When pushed, some of the companies paid landowners partial clean up costs. Permanent Forests, for example, paid Paroa Station owners $388,000 for the damage and clean-up work. But the station owners estimated it would cost up to a further $175,000 to remove the debris. All of the companies faced further fines in court.
At Linda Gough’s house in the Mangatokerau valley, mud has taken over the entire property. It stinks from the puggy silt and the toilet no longer works. Gough has lost her garden, her fruit trees. All her fences are down.
Civil Defence convinced Gough and her family to move out after she started getting chest pains from stress. Gough had been arguing with Aratu, the company that owns the forest upstream, to come and dig their property out.
In 2018, it was even worse, Gough says. The forest owners’ lawyer turned up on her doorstep to negotiate a payment, Gough says. When she told them the offer was too low and she would take them to court, she was told they would just drag it out because ‘‘we know you can’t afford to fight us’’. Forestry have all the money and all the power, the Tolaga Bay locals say. During the national standards’ formation, they constantly pushed for weaker rules, according to former Gisborne District Council environmental services manager Trevor Freeman, who was on the working group.
In the prosecutions taken after 2018, the court highlighted the companies’ attitude to the laws they helped create. The forest owners had not taken necessary precautions to prevent the damage caused by their practices, the court found, even though they could have. The judge suggested this was because of the cost.
In one instance, he said, Ernslaw had even written a letter to the council outlining the costs of preventive work. ‘‘Ernslaw obviously reached the view that the economics of these measures were such that it was not practical to take them,’’ Judge Dwyer found. The court noted
Malaysian-owned Ernslaw was one of the largest forest owners and the second-largest private landowner in the country, and had earned $53.8m between 2014 and 2018.
The forestry owners’ deep pockets afford them a long reach: they can hire expensive public relations firms, hold flashy events, write economic impact reports about the importance of forestry for earnings and employment. In 2013, industry lobby group Eastland Wood Council produced research arguing it employed 10% of the regional workforce.
Forestry’s contribution to the economy also affords them access to politicians. In 2022, the industry’s national body, the Forest Owners Association, had regular catch-ups with Minister of Forestry, Stuart Nash. Diary entries show he even attended their board meetings.
On the flip side, when he was in Gisborne after Cyclone Hale, Nash held a meeting with forestry stakeholders and the council, to which local landowners were not invited to attend.
This upset Mana Taiao Taira¯ whiti – representing landowners, iwi, and environmentalists – who had just presented council with an 8000-signature petition asking for a forestry inquiry.
Nash had earlier rubbished the inquiry idea, saying the forestry industry was best placed to selfregulate in conjunction with councils. This response – and the fact Nash had previously taken large electoral campaign donations from forestry-related companies – gave rise to allegations he was a forestry apologist, which he strenuously denied.
But Mana Taiao wasn’t convinced. A week after Prime Minister Chris Hipkins overruled Nash and the inquiry was announced on February 23, Nash was still pushing forestry industry talking points. On February 26 he told Q+A: ‘‘Keep in mind, about one in four families up and down the East Coast rely on the forestry and wood processing industry.’’
Mana Taiao members like former Gisborne District councillor Manu Caddie say native bush must be encouraged back on the steepest slopes – not for harvest, but to hold the hillside together.
‘‘Diverse native forest is the best, perhaps only land-use option for remote, erosion-prone landscapes. Even with native regeneration there will still be uncontrollable erosions, but we can save a lot of land that is otherwise turning into a moonscape.’’
Forest Owners’ Association spokesperson Don Carson anticipates some steep land would need to be retired. That would be expensive, he said, and difficult, as natives were much harder to grow than pine. Then there’s the question of who pays.
‘‘If the Government requires managed retreat from that land I think the companies would expect compensation for doing so,’’ Carson said.
Part of the opposition to phasing out clearfell pine is the consequence for employment. Work has always been part of the industry’s sales pitch, and still is. Whether its promises have come true, however, is a matter of opinion.
Forestry is largely contract work. When there’s thinning or harvesting to be done, the money isn’t bad. But if the crews are stood down – when the log price drops or after a storm – there’s no pay.
For example, in the weeks after Cyclone Hale, Gisborne’s Ministry of Social Development office was faced with workers that had been laid off, wanting help finding new jobs, or applying for welfare.
‘‘People thought it would create jobs for the young men,’’ says Sarah Gibson, 91, who has lived in the village for 70 years. And at first, there were jobs, she says. But after the initial planting was done, the work dried up and all those young men started to leave.
Back then, Gibson says, Tolaga was a thriving township. All the shops were open. On Friday nights the farmers and their wives would all come into town, it was humming . Now, the streets are empty, the shops boarded up.
‘‘Our town is dead,’’ Gibson says. ‘‘Out here, it’s hard to see where the cash from the $6b forestry industry is ending up. ’’