Dad would have been buoyed by how I got things done for NZ
My dear father was very proud of his children. Both received an education denied him. He arrived in New Zealand from Denmark as a 14-year-old, believing he’d finish his schooling here. It was not to be. He was instead billeted out to work on a farm while his father went looking for somewhere to permanently settle the family and find work.
Dad never did finish school. He spent most of his working life as a bricklayer until his back and elbow gave out, then finished it working in a dairy factory. He got caught when the Bolger Government raised the Super age. It was tough working two years longer than he or his body wanted.
Dad felt he had not achieved much in his working life. I begged to differ, telling him he could literally see the tangible fruits of his labour every day, in bricks and mortar, while building homes for families.
When a political scientist, achievement felt more intangible, and I eventually struggled to see the point of it. Once in that space, you really shouldn’t be standing in front of the young. Luckily, deputy prime minister Winston Peters offered me a chance to serve in 2017, and I took it, at exactly the right time for me.
My dad was proud of my new job but, sadly, died three weeks into my starting it, so we never got to talk about the experience. If we had, I’d have told him a story about DART buoys and politics, about helping to achieve something practically useful.
What is a DART buoy? It stands for Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami buoy. They provide early warnings of tsunami. A Budget bid by the minister of civil defence to replace America’s ageing, not-to-be-replaced DART buoys in the Pacific was rejected in Budget ’18.
Winston, when acting prime minister that year, found this situation unacceptable. The first responsibility of government was to keep its citizenry safe, he would say, yet ours were not because a lone American DART buoy in the last year of its life was our only warning against certain tsunami risks to the country’s north.
The science said undersea earthquakes capable of generating tsunamis along the Kermadec Trench, up to Magnitude 8 to 9, would not be felt in the North Island.
If an earthquake of this type occurred, without DART buoys in place, it would be unlikely GeoNet would be able to confirm the generation of a tsunami, and issue warnings and undertake evacuations before a tsunami hit coastal communities.
We were told that historically, there had been three previous tsunami events, in 2016, 2009 and 1947, when having DART buoys would have changed outcomes for New Zealand and Pacific Realm communities.
The most serious happened in 2009. A tsunami caused substantial loss of life in Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga. If DART buoys had of been in their proposed locations, warnings and evacuations could have happened and lives been saved.
So, at the then acting prime minister’s direction, we got down to work.
We spoke to the United States Government about maintaining its last Pacific-based DART buoy until we had ours in place. We asked the Australian Government about supporting the new network for our Western Pacific neighbours. Both agreed.
It would be a nervous 12-plus months until 12 DART buoys were built and finally deployed.
There was some politics over who should pay, and when, but Peters allowed Vote Foreign Affairs to absorb much of the cost because he was not confused about what mattered most – getting orders in and a network up – even if others were.
Bottom line, a small group of us in Peters’ office and officials from across agencies and Niwa, got the job the acting prime minister wanted done.
In early March 2021, a series of earthquakes struck in the Kermadecs. This led to coastal evacuations along the eastern shoreline of New Zealand. Why? Because the DART buoys recorded the elevated wave height, so a timely warning was issued.
The recent massive underground volcanic explosion near Tonga also triggered the buoys. The first signal from the buoy closest to the volcano confirmed that a volcanic source tsunami had been generated. A second DART buoy was then triggered so GNS’s National Geohazard’s Monitoring Centre was able to quickly build a picture of what threat existed for New Zealand and its Pacific neighbours and warn appropriately.
DART buoys can’t stop mother nature, but they can give people a timely and accurate warning about its destructive potential, and that can make all the difference.
That story is reason enough for anyone who might think about serving in government one day to do it, I’d have told my dad. The chance to get things done. I can imagine him asking lots of questions, which was his way, and getting in the last word: ‘‘I knew you’d grow up, son. Took a while.’’
DART buoys can’t stop mother nature, but they can give people a timely and accurate warning about its destructive potential, and that can make all the difference.