The Gisborne District Council has urged the Environment Court to order the Ministry for Primary Industries to clean up slash and sediment on Tokararangi Forest near Te Araroa, with two Ngāti Porou forestry companies, their directors, and a Korean-owned company named across the same three applications. That is according to the applications, reported today, 23 days after Forestry Minister Todd McClay named Doug Leeder as facilitator to reset the council’s relationship with the sector in a release that singled out the council’s “draft enforcement orders”.
“We’re not in favour of enforcement orders. We would have preferred a more co-operative approach,” Whaimutu Dewes said, with the chair of Ngāti Porou Forests and Ngāti Porou Whanui Forests saying the Ruatoria companies have co-operated from the start and asked for more time. They would have preferred an abatement notice, which a council issues itself, over an order from the Environment Court.
Ngāti Porou Forests manages and harvests Tokararangi for the ministry and has harvested Awatere Forest, which is owned by Sumitomo Corporation’s Summit Forests New Zealand. The council first raised non-compliance at Tokararangi in 2017 and said last week that its repeated requests for the ministry to address the slash had failed.
Harakeke Forest, a joint venture between Ngāti Porou Whanui Forests and Hansol NZ Ltd, an offshoot of Korea’s Hansol Homedeco, is 256 hectares of pine on Māori freehold land with 317 owners, planted after Cyclone Bola in 1988 and harvested between 2017 and 2020. The council says the venture never replanted as required by its consent, and that slash and sediment came off the block during storms early this year.
Dewes does not accept that the crews fell short, and says the standard the council now wants is “several steps further ahead, and more complex, than had been our understanding”. The High Court dismissed an appeal on 30 June by three Samnic Forest Management directors against orders that made them personally responsible for cleaning up the 940-hectare Waingaromia Forest north of Gisborne.
“It was not until directors began being included within enforcement action that the Council observed any material improvements,” Rehette Stoltz wrote to Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour on 15 May. The Gisborne mayor told him the council had taken the same approach in five forestry cases since Cyclone Gabrielle, which she says left 1.7 million tonnes of woody debris across rivers, land, and coastline.
