Chapter 1: What makes the Chatham Islands unique and special?
Island time. It's a real thing. The clocks don't matter as much, and moments stretch out.
It's wild, it's windswept, it's unique.
The Chatham Islands give you space to reset, to fill your spirit, and to unplug from the noise.
It's also home to about a third of New Zealand's threatened species, unique plant life, and a rich cultural history that's undergoing a revival. But the Chatham Islands has problems. It's expensive, relies on diesel, its infrastructure is failing, there are no jobs to keep young people on the island and a key government presence there.
The Department of Conservation is once again being restructured. I'm Alexia Russell and today on The Detail, it's been a year since Regional Development Minister Shane Jones landed with a Hercules full of business leaders, media and officials promising to help fix things.
My newsroom colleague Jonathan Milne was on that flight, so we're checking in with him again, and later I'll also be talking to newsroom's environment editor David Williams about what's up with DOC. Since last year, there's a new mayor and a new council chief executive after the last one went overboard with his ratepayer-funded home renovations. Jonathan has been following the saga.
For a couple of years now, the Auditor General's office has been sounding a note of concern about the financial statements from the council every year and questioning whether it could actually remain as a going concern, which is a pretty serious concern. And the council had acknowledged that and said, well, basically, we are really struggling. They were...
constantly living at the very limits of their $500,000 overdraft. The former mayor, Monique Croon, told me there were rusty, derelict cars piling up all over the island that they couldn't afford to move, they couldn't afford to fix the potholes on the road, despite some funding from NZ Transport Authority. So they were really struggling just to do the basics. Their rates can't even come close.
They don't even pay a fraction of what it costs to maintain the infrastructure on the island, like the roads, like the airport, like the port. So what they get is a grant from internal affairs from the government every year, several million dollars, that basically keeps the wheels turning. But they say even that wasn't enough and that they were struggling to deliver.
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Chapter 2: What are the major challenges facing the Chatham Islands?
Poor legal us for high-end, merely kitchen appliances. So it became quite shambolic. He ended up taking over as chief executive, running the project himself. And it wasn't just this. There were all kinds of big contracts being let to do strategic work, one of which they approved his wife subcontracting on this. So it was all starting to turn into a really bad look.
And one of the locals, we think, wrote to the auditor general and said, And the Auditor-General said we can have a look into this. Bear in mind the Auditor-General was already concerned about the finances of the Council and whether it could remain a going concern.
And now they've got this added concern of a Chief Executive who seems to be spending with some kind of reckless disregard and getting his expenses signed off sometimes by the Mayor, sometimes by the Council, sometimes probably not really at all.
This is Andrew Goddard, a Senior Inquiry Specialist at the Office of the Auditor-General after that report was released.
In a nutshell, our inquiry found that the Council didn't have adequate systems to manage procurement and sensitive expenditure appropriately. It had relevant policies, but it didn't routinely follow them, and that its processes to monitor and control spending were not working well.
We also saw examples where the Chief Executive had provided misleading information to our office, and we have drawn this to the attention of the Council, Parliament and the public.
You know, he got six months rent free because the house wasn't ready to his standards when the family got there. So they put him up in an accommodation on the island rent free. And nonetheless, he still also felt the need to charge. I think I added up about $14,000 of expenses pretty much on food. And then thousands more on the credit card also, presumably on food and stuff.
The money was just twittering through his fingers. And this on an island that was really worried about its own financial sustainability. So you can imagine that locals were getting pretty concerned about this.
And he's been caught out. He's gone.
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Chapter 3: How has the local government responded to financial concerns?
It is so fantastic to be here in the Chatham Islands. I'm down at the port. Significant announcement around procuring finally the new vessel here for shipping services to the Chatham Islands. There's an agreement now signed off by Cabinet to start negotiations with McCullen Brothers and Nova Marine on a new 78 metre vessel. Now that's going to be vital for the resiliency of the island.
Everything that comes in and off this island, barring a bit of air freight, is done by these vessels. And we're talking livestock, we're talking groceries, products, resources, gear for the Fulton Hogan crew doing the roading out here.
That's Associate Transport Minister James Meagher last September announcing a $24 million replacement for the 40-year-old Southern Te Ari. That lifeline of a ship keeps breaking down and is unreliable to the extent that a couple of years ago cattle couldn't get to the abattoir on the mainland to be slaughtered
Chapter 4: What issues arose with the previous mayor and council leadership?
and nearly 6,000 had to be culled. The new boat should be in operation by the end of next year. The council also gets $4.2 million a year from Internal Affairs in recognition that its ratepayer base can't possibly cover all the expenses. In fact, Jonathan says the island is just about entirely bankrolled by the New Zealand taxpayer.
The government's invested in the wharf, the government's invested in the airport, the government's invested in the wind farm. I talked to Shane Jones, the Minister for Regional Development, about this a few months ago.
He says, actually, I'm getting together all the chiefs of all the public sector agencies that deal with the Chatham Islands just to add up how much the taxpayer is investing in the Chatham Islands because we don't even know the total number yet. It's so much. NZTA is probably one of the biggest funding agencies because it puts money into the roads there.
which is still in pretty terrible shape, I have to say. I'm sorry I answered to you.
But can you look at a community like the Chathams and say, you're just not economically viable, everybody pack your bags?
I asked the Minister that question on the ground in Chatham Islands, at Waitangi in the Chatham Islands a year ago this month. I said, how much can the taxpayer invest to maintain this community when clearly the young people of this community are voting with their feet, they're leaving, and they're not coming back because there are no jobs, there are no houses to come back to.
They've got their own housing crisis there on the Chathams. I asked the minister, and he was very adamant then, you know, we will not turn our back on a community like this. We will continue to support them. I asked him the same question again earlier this year, and he was a whole lot more equivocal. And I think he's looking at them, and possibly, you know, he's heavying them a little bit.
to, as he sees it, get their house in order. And he's kind of leaving open the question as to how long and how much the government can continue to support them. And that's why we're now at a position where he's been having some very robust conversations with leadership of the islands, with the new mayor who was...
more or less elected on an anti-Shane Jones platform, and anti having to do compromise deals with the government, at least, platform. Shane Jones wanted two key bodies on the island to merge, to amalgamate. One of them is an independent endowed trust, the Chatham Islands Enterprise Trust. It's actually relatively well off.
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Chapter 5: How is the financial sustainability of the Chatham Islands being assessed?
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.
What was the mayor's reasoning? What are the cons of it?
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. I understand that they have quite recently delivered a new proposal to the ministers.
So initially they'd sort of agreed to some solutions around their assets, around their airport and other assets. But ministers came back and said, no, not good enough. We want a merger. We want the council and the trust fully merged so that all of those assets that the trust has are available to support and maintain public assets, public infrastructure on the islands.
The council, I understand, has now gone back to ministers with a proposal that will... give the government a lot of what it wants.
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