Mt Maunganui Tragedy Another Deregulated Kiwi Nightmare

So it now seems like everyone knew there was a landslide coming at Mt Maunganui and no one did anything.

I think one of our problems in NZ is that we see ourselves as a country when the truth is that we are 3 huge sparsely populated Islands.

A Country has functioning checks and balances, an Island is all on its own.

We think that we are a country with all the fabrics of society and state that combined ensure these sorts of events don’t occur, the truth is that we are a flint bare nation with none of the oversight or beurcarcy needed to keep us safe.

Bryce Edwards has been outstanding in his coverage:

SHOCK TURNS TO ANGER AT MOUNT MAUNGANUI

The Post newspaper’s detailed reconstruction by Mike White and colleagues today lays this out starkly: “the signs were there of a looming catastrophe”. A July 2025 landslide study, commissioned by Tauranga City Council and prepared by WSP, used detailed terrain mapping to identify high‑risk slopes on Mauao. The mountain was the case study for the wider project, and the report “clearly flagged the danger across Mount Maunganui”.

Yet for some reason the mapped hazard boundary stopped at Adams Ave, just short of the holiday park. As The Post reports, experts suggest this was “likely because there are no permanent properties there requiring LIM notices”. In other words, because there were tourists rather than ratepayers, the risk effectively fell off the map.

The history of instability on that slope was not unknown. A 2014 scientific paper mapped landslides on Mauao back to 1943, including a major slip in 1977 in almost the same area behind the campground and hot pools. Andrea Vance notes that this long record of instability was precisely why the council started its city‑wide landslide mapping in 2023.

So this was not an invisible risk suddenly materialising out of nowhere. It was a known hazard, at a known site, in a week when MetService warnings and climate scientists alike were shouting about the severity of the incoming storm.

…he’s right, we knew this was a problem but no one wanted to be responsible…

Faced with this timeline, politicians have reached for a familiar script. Luxon, asked on site why campers were not evacuated after the first slips, replied that these questions would be answered after a “proper process”. The mayor likewise announced an “independent review” to establish “the facts and events leading up to the landslide” and to “ensure that in the lead‑up to this tragedy, everything was done that was appropriate”.

Reid Basher, an expert on disaster risk governance, has warned us about exactly this pattern. After every disaster, he notes, inquiries tend to “take a close‑focus approach and be preoccupied with finding out where laws were broken and who may have failed in their accountability. Too often the finger points at hapless, mid‑level functionaries who were tasked with too many responsibilities and provided with too little funding.”

He invites us to imagine an inquiry that instead “unveils the trail of accountability that reaches the very top”, exposing the “longstanding inadequacies in political commitment, laws, policies and public investment on disaster risk and its management”.

Tom Peters is more blunt about the likely purpose of the announced review: “Like countless other official inquiries following such tragedies, its purpose will be to make a show of ‘learning the lessons’ while deflecting calls for accountability.”

…no one will be held to account because the deal in NZ is that Government underfund social infrastructure and when it falls over the Government let the bureaucrats who implemented the underfunding a get out of jail free pass….

Basher talks about “the deadly combination of climate change and ongoing exploitative or thoughtless land‑use”. That phrase captures the wider pattern that ties Mount Maunganui to the rest of this summer’s disasters in Northland, the Coromandel, Tairāwhiti and beyond.

We keep building and rebuilding in floodplains and at the base of unstable slopes. Councils, under pressure to grow their rating base and keep rates down, open up marginal land. Central government refuses to fix the chronic underfunding of local infrastructure or to set a serious, nationally coordinated framework for climate adaptation. Renwick has been calling for such a framework, instead of the current piecemeal council‑by‑council approach.

When storms come, ministers reassure us that “we have been aware that it’s coming” and that the country is “well prepared”, as Mark Mitchell told RNZ listeners the night before the Mount Maunganui slip. Local states of emergency supposedly give officials “the power to move people to safety”. And yet, as Peters points out, no one moved the hundreds of people camping directly below a sodden, historically unstable hillside.

Afterwards, we call it a “natural” disaster, even though both halves of the equation – the intensity of the weather and the exposure of people and assets to harm – are strongly shaped by human choices.

…no one will be held accountable just as catastrophic climate change forces its way into reality.

This Government has destroyed environmental protections while cutting $25million from Civil Defence and yet the Right Wing Hate Trolls blame Māori!