Death, devastation and extreme weather test media

Source: Radio New Zealand

“I can look at our protectors – our maunga – around us and there’s huge slips gashing them,” Civil Defence incident management leader Trudy Nawhare told RNZ’s Checkpoint last Monday.

“One of our whanau described it as just like a movie – or something you might see on the TV.”

She was describing the damage in Te Araroa on the East Cape. At the height of the danger, Newstalk ZB reported Civil Defence officials there telling whanau to tie their tamariki to themselves and wait for rescue from floodwaters.

The disaster-movie scenes Nawhare described also played out on TV news – from Northland, Coromandel, elsewhere in Tairawhiti and the Bay of Plenty – but in Mount Maunganui, it wasn’t just the scars of storm damage on the hillsides.

The catastrophic slip from Mauao onto Beachside Holiday Park killed six campers and became the focus of the media coverage for days.

Eyewitness Alistair McHardy gave TVNZ News chilling phone footage of a slip he filmed in the early hours of the morning. He also gave a chilling account of his own helplessness when disaster struck after 9am.

The Herald vividly described how Morrinsville teacher Lisa Maclennan also raised the alarm and saved lives – but didn’t live to tell the media about it herself.

Images of the giant slip from overhead were heavily used by the media, but perhaps the starkest image this past week was the Bay of Plenty Times front page on Monday.

It bore the names of Maclennan and five other victims on a stark black background, and a statement from Ngati Ranginui: “Those who have passed now become part of the sacred fabric of our Maunga. Their wairua will rest forever, beneath the mantle of Mauao, protected and embraced for all time.”

Pointing the finger

Along with neighbouring Ngāti Rangi and Ngāti Pūkenga, Ngāti Ranginui administers the maunga through the Mauao Trust. The prime minister thanked them all for their support of people who were displaced and traumatised – and for their help with the recovery, but on social media, the iwi were accused of contributing to the catastrophe.

Online posts that claimed the removal of non-native trees for protection of culturally significant sites contributed to the landslide were widely shared.

“It was a day of disappointment, as the prime minister had to shut down what he called racist misinformation over the role of iwi in the landslide,” said ThreeNews on Monday.

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“I’m aware there’s a lot of misinformation and stuff going on out there,” Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told reporters. “The people on the margins with their rhetoric – they just need to frankly keep it to themselves.”

He didn’t name names, but Cameron ‘Whale Oil’ Slater said on X that the landslides “may have been the result of co-governance of the Mount”. He alleged Māori had demanded removal of large non-native trees recently at the main slip site.

Alternative news sites online also aired claims that the deadly landslide was avoidable, and may have been sparked by the removal of stabilising trees and at the iwi’s request.

Several cited the analysis of retired civil engineer Rod Kane, who claimed to have 20 years of experience in slope stability and remediation.

“It’s now fairly evident that the Tauranga council, at the insistence of iwi in using ratepayers money, removed big trees in the area of the slip simply because they were colonial,” Kane said in his own online post. “This is where superstition, stupidity and cultural arrogance hits the brick wall.”

He went on to warn of what he called “fake tribalists” and “12th century spiritual nonsense”, encouraged by what he called “stupid governments and councils and the media”.

Clearly, it wasn’t just geotechnical evidence informing Kane’s conclusion. In a rambling interview with Counterspin Media, Kane and the host claimed the removal of “naughty racist trees” contributed to the slip – and aired concerns about inept politicians, the RMA, “uncontrolled immigration” and Te Pāti Māori “pushing for civil war”.

Broadcaster Duncan Garner was persuaded by Kane’s account, reading it aloud on his MediaWorks podcast ‘Editor In Chief’.

“Colonial trees were removed at the insistence of the owners, the local iwi, not because of science, but because they were colonial trees – despite basic geotech reality, because symbolism mattered more than stability.”

“Six people… died because human decisions altered the land in 2017,” Garner told his listeners.

News media clear up the picture

Under the headline ‘Did tree removal really trigger the Mount Maunganui landslide?’ Dr Andrew Stolter from the University of Auckland’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering told Stuff: “Not really.”

Removing trees could contribute to instability, he said, but also tree roots may not be deep enough to control a deep, fast-moving slip like that one. Extreme weather and soil conditions were the big factors, he said.

So did Professor Ewan Mason from the University of Canterbury, who told Stuff the removal of trees in 2022 and 2023 would not be the sole reason for the tragedy.

“The surface of it is riddled by past landslides, which have occurred some recently in the last couple of decades, but also some long before European settlement,” University of Auckland professor of Applied Geology Martin Brook also told the Herald Now show.

Martin Brook followed that up with an article widely republished in our media this week, in which he said that the campsite itself was built on deposits from previous slips long ago.

Mauao may have been a disaster waiting to be triggered by extreme weather, but not solely for the reasons that some non-experts claimed online.

News you can trust

Once the emergency subsides, politicians might ponder the benefit of people getting information from accountable news outlets – rather than scattergun blurts on social media, where there’s no real recourse at all for falsehoods and bad-faith opinions.

Co-incidentally, last Wednesday, ACT MP Laura McClure lodged a Member’s Bill to scrap the state-backed agency upholding standards in broadcasting, the Broadcasting Standards Authority.

“In a free country, the ultimate broadcasting standard is the judgment of the audience,” the ACT party said in its announcement of McClure’s move, which would mean broadcasters couldn’t be held to account at all.

“How do you make sure that people have some kind of news that they can loosely trust?” Newstalk ZB’s Ryan Bridge asked her.

“When something big happens, you go to a trusted source. Do you not need some regulation for that?”

“Given the fact that people are consuming media in all kinds of different places, it really is unfair for mainstream media to have to adhere to paying levies,” McClure replied. Broadcasters pay a modest $500 for each $1m in revenue annually for BSA levies.

“I do think it is important for people to have oversight and trust and accountability, and I think that we’ve got enough there.”

She didn’t mention that broadcasters themselves drew up the broadcasting standards, alongside the BSA itself, and those standards mirror their own editorial principles and guidelines. Scraping the BSA complaints system would probably mean more complaints ending up in court – a much bigger liability for broadcasters.

If McClure’s Bill is drawn from the ballot, MPs would have to decide if extending the free-for-all of the internet to broadcasting is really in the interests of New Zealanders, who mostly say they do want news they can trust, when asked in opinion surveys.

What happened – and what happens next

After last week’s tragedy, probing journalism revealed that warnings were missed at Mount Maunganui, emergency calls may have been mishandled and opportunities to save lives possibly squandered.

Under the headline [‘Should warnings have been seen?’ https://www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/360936602/mt-maunganui-landslide-should-warnings-have-been-seen] the Weekend Post had six senior journalists on the case.

The Post‘ national affairs editor Andrea Vance concluded there was no system to escalate the response in place and critical information stayed in silos.

Last Tuesday, RNZ’s Phil Pennington revealed that, after a big storm in 2005, geotechnical engineers told Tauranga City Council buildings should not be in “run-out zones” that might be inundated in a slip, unless they had been specially protected.

The prime minister was not alone in his surprise to be told this week that landslides have killed more Kiwis in our history than any other natural hazard.

“I had no idea until this week,” Newstalk ZB host Jack Tame said on air last Monday.

“Just as Pike River was a catalyst for huge health and safety law reforms, the Mount Maunganui disaster is fast shaping up as a watershed moment for property owners and councils, when it comes to liability around the country,” Tame said.

The media will have a role in whether it is a watershed or not.

Learning the lessons and making a plan

Some of Tame’s media peers were not so hopeful.

“I’ve seen this too many times with reports into disasters,” RNZ’s Morning Report host Corin Dann said on the political panel show ‘The Whip’ last Wednesday. “They don’t get acted on properly – or they don’t get implemented or it’s taken too long… and then it drags and it gets lost in bureaucracy.”

ZB host Andrew Dickens earlier echoed that fear.

“We’ve had this before,” he said. “Whether it’s Pike River or Cave Creek or the Wahine, after time has passed, we have a review, but by that stage, the heat has gone out of the argument.

“Maybe you should not just blindly trust your fellow citizens who say, ‘Yeah, sweet, it’s never happened before, so don’t worry about it’.”

Talkback hosts change their tune

Coincidentally, Dickens was saying that on ZB last Monday, on the third anniversary of the Auckland Anniversary Day floods. When Cyclone Gabrielle was bearing down on Hawke’s Bay and Coromandel days later, Dickens pushed back hard at talkback callers claiming the warnings were overblown and unnecessary.

The biggest names on the same radio network were also saying that. Mike Hosking, Kate Hawkesby and Kerre Woodham all condemned school closures and evacuation warnings as fear-driven overreactions.

Three years on, after the catastrophes at Mount Maunganui and Welcome Bay, Hosking was this week earnestly pondering whether this would end up changing where we build and live.

He told listeners it was a bit too soon after the tragedy for that discussion, but Woodham did have that discussion on her ZB talkback show last Tuesday, after telling her listeners the deadly landslide was “horrifying, but not unexpected”.

“In some instances, though, do we just need to acknowledge that we are no match for the power of nature, concede defeat and step away?” she asked.

Several ZB listeners got in touch to say it was too soon to ponder that sort of thing and more said the same of claims that the tragedy had been caused by climate change.

Those making that case included the prime minister.

“I’ve talked about that for years,” he told RNZ’s Morning Report on Tuesday from Mount Maunganui.

“I just think, if you’re a doubter of climate change having an impact on extreme weather events, I’d give that up, because there’s no doubt there’s that connection.”

Last weekend’s Otago Daily Times editorial was even more blunt under the headline ‘It’s climate change, stupid’. That was directed at the doubters and deniers, and not the prime minister, but this bit of the editorial was:

“Economy was mentioned 18 times in Christopher Luxon’s State of the Nation speech this week, but climate change? Not once.

“It was a speech about wanting to ensure the best possible future for Kiwis, which completely ignored the most pressing issue the same day.”

The Post editorial the same day was also unequivocal.

“If you ask why this summer’s been wetter than the golden Kiwi summers you remember, the answer is climate change. There’ll be some who say it’s too soon to talk about climate change while the search for bodies is ongoing.

“They’ll say the commentary is politicising the tragedy, but the reality is that rather than too soon – it may be too late.”

Tauranga City Council, which owns Beachside Holiday Park, has commissioned its own review of last week’s disaster and, having seen the damage up close for himself, the prime minister was persuaded to propose a wider one as well.

While arguments fade about ‘the right time’ to talk about those things, the inquiries will be done in the knowledge that what happened at Mount Maunganui and Welcome Bay could happen almost anywhere in the country at almost any time.

Journalists have already identified the issues that need to be tackled.

This week, RNZ’s Kirsty Johnston detailed a “growing gap between disaster recovery and climate preparation.”

It showed a pattern of spending heavily after disasters strike, but investing comparatively little upfront to reduce future risk, even though Treasury has highlighted this growing future fiscal liability for the Crown.

“While we still can and perhaps just still be able to afford it, we must act in unity,” The Weekend Herald editorial said.

AA Insurance’s move this week to halt new home insurance policies in Westport because of flood risk was timely.

“If we continue down the same road of reaction, then some communities will face the prospect of being abandoned, if not by its people, then by those holding the purse strings – the insurance companies and government,” the Weekend Herald said.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand