Jonathan Milne

He quit under some degree of duress, one suspects from the new mayor, Greg Haller, and the Serious Fraud Office is considering whether it too will investigate formally.

It's difficult to understand quite how he thought this was responsible behaviour.

I would say that, you know, there's no allegation of fraud or that he was loaning his own pockets, but it certainly looked pretty reckless.

And this from a community that was really straight in for cash.

Yeah, and I guess the wider context is that this community is already, and was when I visited there last year, in talks with government over what structures and what funding were needed for it to continue.

I mean, this is an existential question.

Whether the Chatham Islands, 800 kilometres offshore from New Zealand, can actually remain as a community with people living and working and going to school there.

The...

The requirements of a remote community now are far more than they were 100 or 200 years ago.

We could look back nostalgically and say, oh, 100 years ago, they probably lived pretty much a self-sustaining life of agriculture and fishing.

But these days, there are basics that you need.

You need to be able to export your goods to the world.

You need electricity.

You need data, internet.

All this stuff is expensive to provide.

They've built, with a big grant from central government, a large, well, significant wind farm on a peak at the top of the island that's designed to bring down their power bills because they're paying phenomenal amounts for just basic electricity, you know, just to run a fridge or a freezer and keep the lights on in your home is a

enormously expensive in the Chathams.

So this is the kind of infrastructure that is basic now.

You need it in the 21st century, but it doesn't come cheap.

The government's invested in the wharf, the government's invested in the airport, the government's invested in the wind farm.