The Cost of Looking Away
How Policy is Unraveling the Heart of Aotearoa
I’d like to thank Anne Salmond for her Newsroom article which I used as partial source material for this piece. https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/08/23/anne-salmond-who-is-this-government-working-for/
In February 2023, Claude Ruru was rescued from rising floodwaters in Te Karaka by climbing into the bucket of a neighbour’s front-end loader. When he returned five months later, his house was gone, replaced by a silt-covered landscape and a temporary dwelling provided by his iwi. A few kilometres away, orchardist Blake Briant was digging out the land with heavy machinery, having already removed 500 truckloads of silt. Yet he said, "we're still standing on it."
These are not stories from a distant warzone or a failed state. They’re from Aotearoa New Zealand, unfolding in real time.
The question Dame Anne Salmond posed - "Who is this government working for?" - is no longer rhetorical. It’s urgent and it’s one the entire country must confront.
Over the past decade, the people of Tairāwhiti, Nelson, Tasman and Hawke’s Bay have endured increasingly severe storms. Each disaster has left homes in ruins, schools closed, families displaced and marae silenced by mud and debris. The pattern is painfully predictable and yet government policy continues to move in the wrong direction - deregulating land use, weakening environmental oversight and disempowering the very councils and communities closest to the harm.
For all the glossy talk of economic growth, the human and environmental toll is immense. Forestry slash has choked rivers and slammed into bridges. Entire towns like Wairoa and Tolaga Bay have become synonymous with flooding and still, new legislation moves forward - shrinking the regulatory power of local authorities, pushing pine plantations into erosion-prone hills and gutting the requirement for foreign investment to demonstrate a tangible benefit to New Zealand.
Let’s be clear. This is not a partisan argument. Responsibility spans administrations. Labour, while in government, made early moves to strengthen the Emissions Trading Scheme and support native forest regeneration. But enforcement was often light, and decisions such as allowing exotic forestry to continue on vulnerable land persisted. The current coalition government, led by National, ACT and New Zealand First, has taken a markedly more aggressive stance. Together, they have pushed to remove critical investor vetting from the Overseas Investment Act, weakened the National Environmental Standards for Commercial Forestry and sidelined the recommendations of their own ministerial inquiries.
ACT continues to champion minimal government interference and has called environmental protections “anti-growth.” National focuses on economic development and housing while downplaying environmental constraints and New Zealand First - whose rhetoric includes strong regional advocacy, has nonetheless supported measures that further centralize control and dilute environmental safeguards.
The Greens and Te Pāti Māori, both in opposition, have consistently raised the alarm. The Greens advocate for climate-aligned land use and biodiversity protection, while Te Pāti Māori emphasises rangatiratanga, Indigenous guardianship of whenua and wai. Yet their warnings, however eloquent, remain largely unheeded by the ruling majority.
This isn’t just policy failure. It’s a moral reckoning.
The science is unequivocal. Climate change is making rainfall more intense and frequent. Warmer air holds more moisture and when storms come, they come hard. The land, stripped of native forest and replaced by monoculture pine, cannot hold and when it breaks, it sends rivers of mud and logs into homes, paddocks and dreams.
We cannot say we weren’t warned. The Ministerial Inquiry into land use in Tairāwhiti, chaired by Hekia Parata, laid it out plainly. So did the Forestry Stewardship Council when it suspended certifications over slash management. So too have residents who’ve spoken up at council meetings, marae and to reporters with mud still on their boots.
In Wakefield, a woman named Charla Stratford stood outside her waterlogged house and said, “We are splashing inside. I believe if a nearby culvert was widened, my house wouldn't be flooded out.” Her frustration was echoed by Julian Edmonds, who watched a whirlpool tear through his backyard - “There was a huge whirlpool here - water was wooo, straight in there and bursting out the other side.”
And Linda Gough, who saw her Tolaga Bay property submerged under slash and floodwater, was clear about the cause - “It wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the logs.”
These are not statistics. They are warnings etched in grief and resilience.
So how did we get here? Partly, this is a story of ideology - the belief that deregulation breeds prosperity, that foreign capital brings solutions and that local governance is an obstacle rather than an asset. But it’s also a story of forgetting. Forgetting our obligations to whenua and tangata, to the rivers that carry our reflections and the soil that holds our past.
And this story is not uniquely New Zealand’s. Around the world, we see governments loosening environmental protections, ceding land use decisions to corporate interests and reacting to ecological disasters with little more than band-aids. In Brazil, illegal logging surges despite global climate pledges. In the United States, rollbacks on water protections have left communities exposed to chemical and sediment pollution. In Australia, the clearing of native bush for coal and agriculture continues despite decades of drought and fire.
These are the symptoms of a shared affliction - the global failure to reconcile economic models with ecological boundaries.
New Zealand is at risk of becoming a microcosm of that global failure, once celebrated for its clean, green identity, it now stares down the barrel of increased disaster frequency, irreversible biodiversity loss and a cultural reckoning about who gets to define the future of this land.
If we do not shift our thinking, radically and soon, we can expect more than just floods. We can expect -
Entire towns becoming uninhabitable due to repeated infrastructure collapse.
Spiralling insurance costs that leave vulnerable families unprotected.
The erosion of public trust in governance, as decisions appear driven by remote interests rather than lived experience.
Cultural dislocation, as ancestral land becomes unliveable and sacred sites are repeatedly desecrated by runoff and debris.
Globally, the failure to act will deepen. Climate refugees will increase. Food systems will be disrupted by droughts, floods and failing soils. Economic instability will surge as countries scramble to pay for damage control instead of prevention.
Yet there is still hope. Across Aotearoa, iwi-led initiatives show what restoration can look like. Native forests planted today will not stop the next storm, but they will soften its blow for the generation that follows. Councils empowered to regulate for their people, not against them, can rebuild trust. Science, when paired with local knowledge, can chart a new course.
We have reached a crossroads. We can choose a future where rivers run clear, where communities are equipped to protect themselves and where our policy reflects both scientific reality and lived experience. Or we can continue down this path of extraction, erosion and eventual collapse.
It is no longer enough to ask who the government is working for. We must demand they work for us - for the people in flooded homes and gutted schools, for the rivers that fed our grandparents and the forests that might still shelter our grandchildren.
Policy is never just paper. It is the difference between safety and disaster, between sustainability and ruin.
The time to look away has passed. The time to act - with courage, humility, and foresight - is now.
Finally, even if your don’t believe a word of climate science; even if you have had a gutsful of bloody Maoris and Greenies; even if you think anyone who wrings their hands over the health of the planet are wokesters and Marxists, I’d just ask you this. If you were on the beach at Banda Aceh when the Indian Ocean tsunami was still over the horizon, would you have stayed on the beach because no one could prove to you that the danger was imminent and overwhelming, or would you have run like hell for safer ground?
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