Jonathan Milne

It owns forestry and it owns a lot of seafood quota, a lot of fishing quota.

That's a trust and the beneficiaries are the people of the island and it reinvests in assets and infrastructure on the island like that wind farm that I talked about earlier.

It's doing okay.

The council is the other big governance organisation that's pretty much bust, you know, pretty much bankrupt.

And so what Shane Jones is saying, why don't we merge these two and the earning capacity, the revenue-making capacity of the trust can be fed into the jobs that the Chatham Islands Council can't afford to do, keeping the roads maintained, fixing the potholes, getting rid of the rubbish.

He's been pushing for that for the last year or so.

The new mayor had pushed back pretty hard against that, despite the former CEO, Paul Eagle, acting as a very friendly go-between, bearing in mind that Paul Eagle was mates with Shane Jones.

The new mayor had been pretty anti-doing any kind of merger deal as the minister had wanted, but Shane Jones dragged him through the public mill, really, attacking him quite strongly and saying,

the media and interviews.

So as far as the mayor was concerned, a lot of people on the island were concerned.

This is an independent Dow Trust.

It's nothing to do with the government.

For the government to force it to be merged with the council and to pay the bills for public infrastructure like roads, they saw as wrong.

I think they saw it as essentially taking their birthright, as Ireland is, their fisheries, their forestry, and the...

government using it for its own purposes, even if those purposes would have benefited the communities on the island.

They felt that the Crown, the government, should be chipping in itself a little bit more.

The difficulty is that obviously this endowed trust is not.

You can't just go and raid private trusts even if there is a clear public good.

So there's been quite a tense standoff.

The trust and the council, the new mayor, have been working side by side and going back and forth with ministers, with Shane Jones and with Mark Patterson, trying to find a solution.