Latest news with #CycloneGabrielle
NZ Herald
11 minutes ago
- Politics
- NZ Herald
RSA relaunch aims to modernise support for veterans, end internal disputes
It also underscored its developing focus with an extended screening of the documentary Back To Timor. In an interview with the Herald, the RSA rebellion was dismissed by Jones as driven by a small group of clubs disgruntled at being told what to do, which was to focus on supporting veterans rather than maintaining institutions that are struggling to survive. The memorial wall outside RSA Tauranga. A relaunch of the national RSA office last night signalled a move towards the generation of contemporary veterans. Photo / Tom Eley Jones, a former Chief of Defence, said a 'generational shift' was happening as the older generation of veterans, who deployed and returned in large contingents from recognised landmark wars, gave way to contemporary veterans whose service was often in smaller groups to lesser-known conflicts. He said that needed to be recognised by modernising the RSA's administration and structure so it 'refocuses back support to veterans, not about the clubs or associations' that were developed to support earlier generations of war fighters. Doing so, he said, would better reflect the needs of 'contemporary veterans rather than the needs of 100 years ago veterans'. RSAs developed organically over years, initially during World War I, and mostly around large military units formed geographically. That meant those who returned home from service would return to the same areas, leading to clubs forming where significant numbers of veterans clustered. Retired Lieutenant General Rhys Jones, pictured during his service, says it's time to modernise the RSA's administration and structure. Photo / Supplied These days, and for decades, military units have reflected specific trades and specialities rather than where service people came from. Contemporary veterans have also told the Herald the RSA's hospitality-focused offering doesn't appeal to a younger, active contingent in a generation less inclined to drinking. Jones said the dwindling numbers of older veterans had led to some clubs closing and others struggling to meet operating costs, draining away 'assets they've gained over the last 100-plus years that have been donated by the public'. Jones said there had been cases of clubs amalgamating and 'they've almost ignored that support to veterans [as] RSA assets have disappeared and gone into other parts of the community', with clubs broadening their appeal and membership. He said a 'veteran support hub', as developed in some parts of the country, could be a better way of directly providing support to veterans who needed it. The RSA modernisation also provided support for RSAs that faced financial or membership stress and needed to move away from hospitality, he said. 'The hospitality-based organisations still have a purpose. The whole aim of what we're trying to achieve is that there's a point of contact for veterans. NZDF personnel supporting local communities after Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023. Jones says some younger veterans might not need help now but it was important to make sure it was available when they did. Photo/NZDF 'Some get that contact by joining clubs and have a place to go – others don't want to do that. And we need to have other ways for the contemporary veterans to maintain contact.' Jones said some younger veterans might not need help now but it was important to make sure there was a structure in place that could support them when they did. 'It's making sure that the contemporary veterans know where to go for support so we can be there for members or non-members so long as they're veterans.' Jones said while those who served often needed support for the physical toll of service, there was also the need to support the mental health of veterans. He said it was still a struggle to make people understand that psychological support was just as important. Those involved in peacekeeping missions and disaster relief, along with war zones, were exposed to potentially damaging environments that most people would not experience and had lasting impacts. Jones said the existing system to support veterans – Veterans Affairs for those who qualified for support and ACC for those who did not – had 'many holes and gaps' on which the RNZRSA advocated, including changes to the current legislation. 'I think we're still set up to recognise physical injury and the whole kind of process is more geared towards that rather than that holistic support we need going into the future.' The RSA's collective focus has been marred by a turf war over the past two years that has resulted in a number of clubs preparing to break away. The service of contemporary veterans is often in smaller groups than their predecessors. Photo / Supplied Jones said those rebels were a 'quite small' but 'vocal minority'. He said the change to the constitution, often cited as the reason for the discontent, 'was not the reason for this rebellion'. 'It was more it was a bone to be chewed, that they could actually get some leverage on that. 'They're not wanting someone to actually look at what they're doing and say, 'actually you shouldn't be doing that, this is what you should be doing', and that's been going on for quite some time. 'It's about clubs and organisations having been run a particular way for so long and they are not really recognising the generational shift that's needed to go from veterans of the past to the veterans of the future.' Jones said many clubs had brought in people who had not served, which had the benefit of expanding the skillset on which they could call. He said those members 'really do add value' but there was a danger it 'dissipates that focus on veterans' and could potentially draw RSAs away from their core purpose. Opposing clubs have taken heart from a legal opinion critical of the constitution process, which they say supports their view the national office changed the voting rules to get their changes through. In contrast, the national office says the process followed was appropriate and needed to meet law changes to how incorporated societies operate. Jones said he could not comment on the legal case brought by a group of rebel clubs challenging the constitution and the process by which it was changed. Minister for Veterans Chris Penk said the RNZRSA was a 'valued partner in shaping Government policy for our veteran community' and he often sought the views of its national board. While the RNZRSA operated independently, and advocated as such, Penk said he was working with it to 'improve recognition for veterans', including expanding the definition of a veteran through a new law. Penk said the screening of the Back To Timor documentary was a great opportunity for those present to share memories and remember those who served, and where they served. David Fisher is based in Northland and has worked as a journalist for more than 30 years, winning multiple journalism awards including being twice named Reporter of the Year and being selected as one of a small number of Wolfson Press Fellows to Wolfson College, Cambridge. He joined the Herald in 2004. Sign up to The Daily H, a free newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
NZ Herald
2 days ago
- Climate
- NZ Herald
Hakanui flood resilience project set to start on SH2 near Te Karaka, north of Gisborne
Bayley said in the past this stretch of road had to close during heavy weather events because the area was prone to flooding. 'These closures create disruption for communities and the flow of freight, as well as causing safety risks for emergency services. 'To reduce the risk of future flooding, we're raising the highway and upgrading drainage, making it stronger, safer and more reliable for everyday travel and emergency response. 'The Hakanui Straight project spans a vital link for freight between Bay of Plenty and the East Coast, and ensuring its resilience is essential for businesses, residents, and regional connectivity.' The improvements being made are particularly significant for Te Karaka residents, who suffered severe flooding during Cyclone Gabrielle when water breached the stopbanks of the Waipaoa River. In the early hours of February 14, 2023, around 500 residents evacuated to surrounding hills, watching as the floodwaters overtook their homes, workplaces and marae. Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki kaitiaki Pimia Wehi said working with Trec throughout the design process had been crucial in ensuring the upgrade met the community's needs. 'This is a huge step forward for Te Karaka, Puha and Whatatutu. 'The devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle is still fresh in our minds as families lost their homes, businesses were destroyed and many of us were stranded without communication for more than a day,' Pimia Wehi said. 'Seeing this work begin is a relief. It means our people will have better access to emergency routes and won't have to face being completely cut off again.' Bayley said early enabling work, such as the site office establishment, fencing and services relocation, was expected to begin this week, weather permitting. 'Road users aren't likely to notice too much activity until the physical work begins, which is expected next month. 'At that stage, short traffic delays are expected while crews carry out the upgrades. 'Traffic will be managed by closing the road shoulder during early works, followed by one-lane closures with stop/go to maintain two-way traffic during major works with reduced speed limits along the work site. 'Please drive to the conditions and be aware of the increased truck movements and trucks crossing the road.' About the name Hakanui Straight The project name is Hakanui Straight but was formerly Nesbitt's Dip. The change has been requested by hapū and iwi representatives as the name reflects the area's cultural and historical significance. The Hakanui Stream was important for local food gathering, mahinga kai and as a travel route for waka. With the road being elevated to ensure safer and quicker evacuations during floods, Straight (rather than Dip), embodies strength, directness and a clear path forward. For more updates, go to
NZ Herald
2 days ago
- Business
- NZ Herald
Government can't be the de facto insurer of property after weather events
For example, the communities of Port Waikato and Bluecliffs have seen properties irreparably impacted by coastal erosion and sea level rise but have been treated differently to the properties impacted by single destructive events such as Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland Anniversary flooding in 2023. Not having a clear policy on the Government's response after an event has created this unfairness in outcomes. Buyouts of properties most affected by Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland Anniversary flooding cost central and local government billions of dollars. The future liability of the reactive approach from these weather events is large and growing, as development continues to happen in places that will be affected by the physical impacts of climate change. It is not sustainable for the Government and local government to be the de facto subsidised insurer of property values after significant weather events. This approach is effectively a subsidy encouraging people to stay in harm's way. We all need to be thinking about the impacts of climate change as we make decisions about how and where we live. We need clear and consistent information regarding the hazards and risk scenarios our properties face. We also need to know what plans are being made to address the hazards and risks. This is where clarity of roles and responsibilities comes in: local and regional authorities must be able to prepare adaptation plans, and many already are. To do this, they will use the Para framework – examining options under the different headings protect, accommodate, retreat and avoid. The relevant authorities will need to prioritise the proposed adaptation activities and determine how they will be funded. The question of how to fund preventive risk reduction is particularly challenging. This will require a mix of central and local government and property and infrastructure owners. We are proposing that contributions to funding investments in risk reduction broadly reflect those who get the most benefit from it. This must be subject always to consideration of ability to pay, so that those who can't contribute aren't simply left to their own devices. The Government's historical approach to property owners affected by a significant event should change. After a long transition period (20 years), hardship should be alleviated with reference to need rather than to property values. That is, there would be no buyouts following an extreme weather event that has damaged property. The Government would retain its role in alleviating hardship. The point is that this can be achieved in different ways than underwriting pre-event property values. One option, for example, would see a beachfront mansion owner and an owner of a small house in a flood-prone area be assisted according to need. If that need is established then they would receive the same capped amount rather than a payment based on the respective value of their properties. This has no impact on the role of central and local government during and immediately after an event, in terms of the emergency response. This proposal also doesn't represent an abrupt shift in policy today – it goes hand-in-hand with a long transition. This period enables the creation and ongoing update of hazard and risk information, and a timeframe over which people can make decisions in the knowledge of the future state that will apply. Banks and insurers are already starting to take these hazards and risks into account. Banks have the bigger challenge – typical mortgages are 20-25 years, while insurance contracts are annual. Insurers can decide each year the level of risk they are willing to take on and the price at which they will provide the insurance, whereas banks make a lending decision for a much longer period. Changes in lending and insurance practices will likely be the first way that people will experience the impact of climate change on property markets. A bank may require a much larger deposit or decline to lend at all on a particular property; or your insurance premium skyrockets; or the most significant hazard facing your property, flood risk, is excluded from your policy following a significant event. The numbers involved are large. A recent assessment of climate change and flooding problems in South Dunedin illustrates the scale of the potential problem. Seven potential adaptation futures were reviewed in detail, ranging from continuing as is to large-scale retreat. The different plans affect some 5800 properties and estimated costs of the different scenarios ranged from $2 billion to $7.1b – that's $345,000 to $1.2 million per house. For context, the current Dunedin City Council capital delivery budget is $200m annually for the entire city. Climate change adaptation involves hard questions for which there are no easy answers. That we are now having this conversation is a great start. The water lapping at the door doesn't care what we believe, and transparency of information regarding hazards and risks does not change those hazards and risks – events will occur and losses will be felt whether we understand that information or not. The fact that some who receive that information will have difficulty responding to it is not a good reason for not providing it. The approach we take needs to be enduring beyond election cycles. We have limited resources as a nation; we need to make sure we are using those resources effectively and not wasting them on short-term measures when we are dealing with a long-term problem. It is inevitable that people will have different views of the level of risk, and some may choose to buy, or stay, at a place despite the knowledge of the hazards and estimates of the risk. That's entirely up to them, but that shouldn't require the country to underwrite that decision. The reflexive response from those unhappy with this approach essentially says: a person buying, or choosing to stay in, a property today with the knowledge that it is at a higher risk of the physical impacts of climate change should expect to be made whole by the Government (ie the whole community) in 20 years' time, if those risks come to pass. To which it's worth asking: why?
Scoop
3 days ago
- Climate
- Scoop
Hawke's Bay Shares Cyclone Silt, Slash Lessons With Flood-hit Tasman
The head of the silt removal programme after Cyclone Gabrielle is drawing 'eerie' similarities with Nelson Tasman floods. The head of the $228 million silt removal programme after Cyclone Gabrielle in Hawke's Bay is drawing 'eerie' similarities with Nelson Tasman region, as the flood-hit areas look ahead to their own recovery. Communities across the top of the South Island were facing millions of dollars worth of damage to roading infrastructure, farmland and properties, following the two recent floods that struck the area within a two week period, from late June. Riverside properties in Tasman were grappling with woody debris, silt and waste strewn across their properties. Cyclone Gabrielle smashed Aotearoa in February 2023 with a force of heavy rain which caused flooding damaging infrastructure, properties and land on the North Island's East Coast. Twelve people died during the natural disaster. Large amounts of silt, forestry slash and waste were swept across the whenua, prompting councils across Hawke's Bay to set up an immediate regional taskforce to deal with the material. Taskforce lead Darren de Klerk said watching the news, there were similar scenes in Tasman as there were in Hawke's Bay and Tairāwhiti following the cyclone. 'It's quite an eerie similarity, I think when you look at some of the woody debris and some of the silt and mixed product that we had to deal with,' he said. 'Obviously, productive land is another similarity in the fact that a lot of the highly productive horticulture and viticulture land has been infected.' De Klerk said after an emergency, the early stages of recovery were usually shrouded in uncertainty. 'In the early days, anyone dealing with this will find it quite overwhelming,' he said. 'Firstly, it's just understanding the level of involvement that either Civil Defence or the council has in this recovery.' De Klerk said it broke Hawke's Bay up into six zones, triaged properties by severity, and then mapped out sorting and disposal sites, in efforts to 'chomp the elephant' one bit at a time. Since its beginning, the team moved more than 2.5 million cubic metres of silt across more than 1100 properties, returning around 7000 hectares of land to productivity. It cleared one million cubic metres of woody debris across the coastline and rivers, and sorted through 12,500 broken orchard and vineyard posts. He said in Hawke's Bay, councils had to 'take a leap' to support their communities, before the first round of government funding was announced several months after the event, in May 2023. 'Essentially, you don't have a rule book,' he said. 'From a community point of view, I can guarantee you the people behind the scenes are working as absolutely as hard as they possibly can to find solutions.' He said it was working with Tasman officials to share insights and avoid 're-inventing the wheel'. 'One of the biggest probably learning is just how you manage your contractor army,' de Klerk said. 'Having a standby list of contractors available, so you're not having to work through the procurement and contracting of suppliers in the heat of the recovery phase. 'My thoughts are with them and they'll be trying their absolute best.' De Klerk said the work must be methodical, and open communication with locals was vital. He was now working for the Hastings District Council on its ongoing water and roading infrastructure cyclone recovery.
Newsroom
4 days ago
- Business
- Newsroom
Paying for the reality of climate change
The 100-year floods are rolling in on a regular basis; the rain doesn't let up; no one wants a cliff-top property anymore. Climate change is no longer just about things you can't see or touch. It's about running from rising water and bailing out the basement. 'I think there has been a lot of emphasis both in reporting and in people's understanding of climate change … and the science behind that and how it's getting worse,' says RNZ In Depth reporter Kate Newton. 'We're now starting to shift our focus because of these severe weather events that we're seeing more frequently, and at a greater level of severity, to what that actually means for us now, and the fact that climate change is no longer this far-off, distant prospect, but something that is affecting real people and real lives, at this very moment.' Today on The Detail we look at how we adapt to this new normal, and who will pay for it, after a report by an Independent Reference Group recommended essentially that the days of property buy-outs have a limited life. The reference group included economists, iwi, bankers, insurance and local government representatives and was set up by the Ministry for the Environment. Newton goes through the findings on climate mitigation and adaption, which she says are politically unpalatable, and extremely expensive. 'There's a whole lot that goes into it and every step of it is complex and every step of it is expensive. But we also need to remember that even if we do nothing, it's still expensive. 'I think the top estimates of costs involved with Cyclone Gabrielle was $14.5 billion – it's a huge amount of money. 'But you're looking at things like, even just understanding where the risk is, and how severe that risk is, and how it might change in the future – it's a huge amount of work.' The Government wants bipartisan support on decisions because future certainty is required but also, Newton points out, because of the bleak message it's likely to send – in the words of one critic: 'You are on your own'. But firm decisions are unlikely to come any time soon. 'It's something that's been a long time coming and I think [Climate Change Minister] Simon Watts is running into similar problems to his predecessor James Shaw, who tried for six years to pass a climate change adaptation act,' says Newton. The main issue with that failure was around the complexity of how we do it and who pays for it. 'This is one of those big thorny issues that if you're changing the rules and changing how people adapt every three or six or nine years, it gives nobody any certainty in the future.' Earth Sciences NZ (which is the merger of Niwa with GNS) has done a huge amount of modelling work around the country, mapping coastal inundation risks, and its next body of work due out soon is on inland inundation. Other bodies of work have pointed out that we need spatial planning to avoid destruction by weather in the future. That includes identifying areas of particular risk, and having a plan for them, whether that is creating a wetland or building a sea wall or stop banks, or if a retreat from an area should be mandated. But councils aren't required by legislation to do such work; and if the Government puts a cap on rates as it's discussing, it's likely they won't be able to. They just won't have the money. Small councils also have the issue that their planning departments might consist of one or two people, and the job is far bigger than that. As well, specialists who were doing such work have had job cuts – and those experts have gone overseas where their skills are in demand. Check out how to listen to and follow The Detail here. You can also stay up-to-date by liking us on Facebook or following us on Twitter.
