Mark Mitchell

It could have been both.

Oh, Kiwifruit was too.

So Bay of Plenty, the unscathed bite, which is encouraging.

Do you want a bit of back and forward, Mark?

I'm a bit sick of the build-up.

Let's try and differentiate the state of emergency from the media build-up and the hysteria.

I don't know if you saw it from Bali, but the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of last week was just BS.

It was just, you know, duck now, tie stuff down, run for your life.

I mean, come on.

Surely something needs to be done about that.

I hear what you're saying, and I did watch for three days the initial build-up and watching the emergency management system activate, which quite simply was outstanding, and we have come a long way.

When I became Minister, I had several reports sitting on my desk, including the one from Sir Gerry Mataparae, saying that we lose property, we lose lives, and it costs us billions of dollars because we're not that good at responding.

And there's complacency sitting inside the system.

I've worked really hard to change that, and I understand what you're saying, but at the end of the day, we don't have the luxury to be complacent about these things.

There is a bit of a she'll be right attitude, and just to give you an example on this one, it didn't hit us as hard as what we anticipated or what was forecast.

That was a good thing.

The system moved out to the East Wall, so we got the fringes of it, but we still had 3,000 people evacuated, 14,000 households without power, dozens of roads closed, hundreds of incidents and rescues performed by... Yeah, but Mark, that's the actual event.

I get the actual event, but what you're doing, it's not you, it's what the media's doing and the Met Service are doing in the ensuing period is scaring people for something that may or may not happen.

They didn't even have a forecast lockdown.

So, Pete, I just think that, number one, the Met Service do an outstanding job, but it's not a perfect science.