The Madcap Laughs

I am in Westport. We own three properties here. Westport is, as most of you know, on the mighty Buller River, but it also has a feeder river called the Orowaiti. Last weekend, with extremely heavy rains – one could accurately say biblical rains – both rivers flooded, but mainly the Orowaiti, and the damage to homes and livelihoods was extensive. We are here, helping in a small way with the clean up, but there is only so much that anyone can do.

So you can imagine my absolute horror when I read Andrea Vance’s disgraceful article at the weekend, implying that the floods were Mother Nature’s response to the Groundswell protest and that farmers will soon find themselves on the wrong side of history.

Do the people of Westport who have lost homes, jobs, businesses and animals really deserve the unhinged ramblings of a deranged keyboard warrior?

Last weekend’s flooding has been described as a ‘Once in 100-year event’. Clearly, Vance does not understand that this means that it has happened before, approximately 100 years ago. The last flood of this volume happened in 1926 when man-made global warming was not the sujet du jour. It was every bit as bad. An estimated 2 million gallons of water per second flowed down the Buller River, flooding farms, damaging roads and cutting off rail services.

But global warming, right?

As of Sunday, 90 homes in the Buller region have been red-stickered, meaning they are now uninhabitable. Lots more have suffered flood damage, and the tell-tale remaining signs of the disaster are in the piles of wrecked household goods sitting outside people’s houses, waiting to be taken to the landfill. These damaged items include chairs, sofas, TVs, mattresses and carpets. Lots and lots of carpets. But thankfully, for many of the homes that have lost belongings, the houses themselves are not deemed irreparable. There is just a long process to go through of drying out and replacing household items, not assisted in any way by the continual rain.

The people of Westport are a resilient lot and, for the most part, the town looks fairly normal, one week on. The real tragedy is that most of the worst affected houses are in the state housing area, where of course, most people don’t have much money and probably no insurance. This is nothing to do with climate change; it is generally agreed that no houses should have ever been built on this particular land, as it was previously a swamp.

Vance hasn’t done sufficient research to know that, though. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the town, like most places in New Zealand, has a chronic housing shortage so there will be nowhere for these people to go. The housing situation in Westport is worsened by the fact that a large number of the town’s inhabitants are renters, and the rental situation in Westport has become desperate over the last few years, due to landlords selling up. A few years ago there were lots of rentals available in Westport, but now there are none whatsoever. The economics that work for landlords in Auckland or Wellington simply do not exist here. We sold a rental property in 2019 because we needed to put in underfloor insulation. With a cost of about $2,000, and a rental at the time of $170 per week, we would never have recovered the cost, so we sold up.

Thought not.

Buller’s mayor, Jamie Cleine, has a plan to create a sort of village with mobile homes. He has the land and apparently can source suitable accommodation, but even a plan like this, worthy as it is, will take months to complete. The portable homes will need to be brought onto the site, hooked up to power, hooked up to water supply and drainage, carpeted and furnished. What do the homeless do until then? Sleep on park benches? Maybe Vance can come up with a solution since she seems so knowledgeable about the situation and how to solve it. I am sure that Jamie Cleine would welcome her expertise.

Andrea Vance attempts to swat away most of the farmers’ concerns with a wave of her well-manicured hand but, as usual, she is wrong. The Groundswell protests were organised before the ute tax was announced. She insists that the issue around SNAs is nothing significant, even though some farmers are in the unenviable position of having 80% of their land locked up and useless while they still have to pay rates. None of these things is of any concern to a climate harpie, of course. Clearly, she is one of the intelligentsia who thinks that we don’t need farmers as all food can be bought in supermarkets. If that is her logic, like many city dwellers, she is an uneducated fool.

I remember Bill English announcing during his time as prime minister that farmers had already fenced the equivalent distance between Auckland and Texas. That was over 4 years ago. Farmers continue to fence their properties, usually at a rate of 2 or 3 kilometres per year, but there is no acknowledgement of that. Nor is there any acknowledgement that it is not only rural rivers that need attention. Try swimming in some of Auckland’s beaches on a sunny afternoon. That brown colour on your skin as you get out of the water is not a suntan. But no. Let’s keep attacking farmers. They usually don’t fight back.

There is no correlation whatsoever between the Groundswell protest and the Westport floods. This is not Mother Nature having her little joke. If Mother Nature wanted to wipe out the whole of humanity tomorrow, then she would. Andrea Vance clearly does not seem to understand that.

Having propped up the economy during lockdown, the agricultural sector has become tired of being Jacinda’s favourite punching bag. Vance even omits to acknowledge that the Paris Accord allows countries to leave agriculture out of their emissions programmes because of a threat to food supply. Little details like that don’t worry Vance – not when there is a golden opportunity to kick the farmers in the guts when they are already down.

Once the farmers have been driven off the land and thousands of pine trees have taken over what was once fertile agricultural land, once food prices have become so high that many people cannot afford to eat, then maybe Andrea Vance will understand that we needed to have a more collaborative approach to the farming sector. By then it will be too late; our biggest producer and export earner will have been destroyed by people like Vance who take everything for granted… until it is no longer there. Then it will be her, not the farmers, on the wrong side of history.

In the meantime, the people of Westport continue to mop up their homes, look in vain for places to live and make the best of a very bad situation. They do not need the wild pontifications of a biased and uneducated harbinger of doom. In fact, they deserve much better than her disgusting, insulting commentary.

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