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• Published date: 21 January 2023
• Publication title: Weekend Herald

Gisborne Mayor Rehette Stoltz says she and the district council support a call from the Environmental Defence Society for a commission of inquiry into forestry practices in the region, while in other reaction, by mid-week more than 800 people had signed a residents’ petition calling on local government and the Beehive to act on what is being called an “ecological disaster”

“We are sick of seeing the carnage created by forestry slash (waste debris) in our awa and along the coast ... after years of expensive litigation, it seems Gisborne District Council is still unable to set rules that protect the environment and it is impacting on our ability to live in our own lands,” said a spokesperson for petition organising group Mana Taiao Tairāwhiti.

The group, which includes farmers, horticulturalists, Māori landowners and conservation workers, aims to get more than 1000 signatures to present to the district council at its Sustainable Tairāwhiti meeting on January 26.

The latest deluge of forestry slash and silt came with flooding during ex-tropical Cyclone Hale on January 10, which plunged the region into a state of emergency.

Stoltz said since a severe storm in 2018, which resulted in damage running into millions of dollars and 10 council prosecutions of forestry companies for breaches of their resource consents, the region has been hit by two Civil Defence weather emergencies in 2021 and three last year.

Among East Coast farmers there’s “a growing and real sense of anger that this keeps happening”, says farmer Toby Williams, chair of Federated Farmers’ meat and wool council, whose farm at Whangara, halfway between Gisborne and Tolaga Bay was affected, but not as badly, he says, as those on river flats to the north.

Williams believes around 200 farms were affected by the latest storm. A Federated Farmers-funded study of the impact of the previous recent weather events assessed the cost to farms at $11m.

Stoltz says she supports calls for an independent inquiry “because what we are currently doing is not sustainable”.

“It [forestry] is a huge industry in the Tairāwhiti but we will have to have discussions going forward about how we are going to operate in a sustainable way because what we are doing as a region isn’t working.”

She promised more prosecutions if forestry companies were found to have breached resource consent conditions.

But while fed-up Te Tairāwhiti people push for an independent inquiry into, and review of, land use planning, regulations and rules for...