Lillian
Hanly, Political reporter
Te
Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi says the government’s
$1 million to reimburse marae that provided welfare in
response to severe weather events is “not enough”.
He
said, “We don’t need money for a response, we need money for
resilience, and our communities need it right
now.”
The first day back at Parliament saw parties
responding to the government’s
announcement on Tuesday it would top up the Mayoral
Relief Funds with $1.2m for immediate support to those
communities affected, alongside $1m for
marae.
Christopher Luxon praised support from marae as
“exceptional”.
“They have provided shelter, food and
care to people in need, and I cannot speak more highly of
them.”
Finance Minister Nicola Willis said Te Puni
Kokiri would coordinate with NEMA on distributing funds to
marae, “often Te Puni Kokiri are the ones with the
relationships on the ground”.
“But of course, in all
of these responses, it’s a matter for council, marae and
emergency response to work together.”
Emergency
Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell also praised
marae, saying they had stood up and provided support at
“just about every event that I’ve been to”.
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He said
his emergency management bill that was in the house at the
moment “actually formally codifies them having a seat at the
table, because they are very good at emergency
management”.
Luxon went on to say he and Mitchell had
the privilege of visiting some of the marae in Northland
over the weekend.
“I came away feeling incredibly
proud and humbled by the manaakitanga shown by everyone
there,” said Luxon.
But
Waititi said it was “nice to be proud and humbled by it when
you just visit for five minutes”, but those communities had
“quite often” had to face severe weather and climate issues
without plans to “build resilience”.
“It’s our little
communities that are hit first.
“We’re the first to
respond, but we’re the last to be given any type of
resources,” Waititi said. He wanted the Prime Minister to
reconsider “giving the right resourcing to the right
communities”.
The recovery period would take “months
and months and months” he said, “but we’re sick of
response”.
“This has happened before. This is not an
unprecedented issue anymore. It’s not one in 100 years. This
is not once in a lifetime. These events are happening every
year. We’re having these conversations every year.”
He
pointed to Te Tai Rawhiti who were having to rebuild roads
“all the time”, and marae there who had to respond all the
time.
“But they’re responding on the smell of an oily
rag.”
He acknowledged those who had lost their lives,
“but how many more lives must we lose before we start
looking at plans of resilience and not response?”
NZ
First leader Winston Peters said Waititi had got up and
“made a fool of himself”.
He said NZ First had given
the most money to marae upgrades “because we know they’re
sustainable institutions” and they demonstrated that during
Covid-19 and the current crisis.
His
deputy leader Shane Jones brushed off questions about
whether climate change was linked to last week’s
storms.
Jones said he was not interested in a debate
on climate politics but he was all about
adaptation.
He had this response when asked if climate
change played a part, “no – the volatility of the weather is
something we must not take for granted, but taxing cows as
they belch and emit from the rear end is something I’m
totally disinterested in.”
Jones said he was the
minister that found $200m for stopbanks from the Regional
Infrastructure fund.
Labour’s Chris Hipkins also said
marae should be valued “day in, day out, year round” not
only in “times of tragedy”.
“Marae do amazing work
when New Zealand’s faced with tragedy, when we’re faced with
adverse situations.
“They throw their doors open. They
welcome everybody.”
Hipkins
was broadly supportive of the government’s initial funding
support, saying it was “clearly a start”.
“I recall
when cyclone Gabrielle hit initial sums of money looked
quite modest, and then we had to build from there.”
He
didn’t want to rush and criticise the amount, “because it
will take some time to identify exactly what support for
rebuild and clean up is required”.
Luxon had outlined
this during the post-cabinet media conference on Tuesday
when announcing the package.
“The top up of Mayoral
funds, which is a very tactical, practical, immediate piece
of funding, that is not the ‘be all and end all’
here.”
Finance Minister Nicola Willis echoed this,
saying the Mayoral Relief Fund was a “drop in the
ocean”.
“Tthat’s just putting cash in local bank
accounts to ensure that voluntary efforts aren’t stopped for
lack of resource.”
Luxon
indicated it was too early to say how much the total cost of
recovery would be, but Gisborne District Mayor Rehette
Stoltz told Checkpoint on Tuesday she estimated the damage
caused to her region alone during last week’s storms will
cost some $21.5 million to fix.
Willis said there was
“hundreds of millions of dollars available across government
for responding to this event”.
She gave the government
policy statement on transport as an example, which
specifically allocated funds for the rebuild of roads
following natural disasters. There was $400m available for
the rebuild of state highways and more then $300m for local
roads.
The Greens also criticised the government’s
$1.2m, questioning why the government had not implemented
Civil Defense Payments, which was immediate relief and
available under current legislation.
The Greens
co-leader Chloe Swarbrick said the government was not doing
enough – especially when it came to long term
challenges.
She said the government had “knowingly and
intentionally made decisions to make climate change
worse”.
“Climate
change is not only devastating in terms of the loss of life
that we see, but also in terms of exacerbating the cost of
living crisis – so no, the government is not doing
enough.”
The ACT leader said he was more in favour of
climate funding going toward adaptation rather than
mitigation.
David Seymour noted the government had
spent “around a billion dollars on climate change
adaptation”. He said the government had done deregulation
work making it easier to “raise roads, to build drainage, to
ensure that these things are less likely to
happen”.
“So
are we there yet? Clearly not remotely close,” he
said.
“But the government has done a major pivot away
from really quite futile efforts to reduce global emissions
towards practical improvements to what is on the ground in
New Zealand.”
He said he didn’t want to “further
politicise it” by pointing out who he thought was
politicising it.
Hipkins said in response to whether
mitigation or adaptation should be the focus, “we need to be
able to do both”.
“The reality here is that without
mitigation, the amount of money that we’d need to spend on
adaptation would be
unaffordable.”
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