Protecting Pūtiki: The ongoing fight to stop Waiheke's Kennedy Point marina

Thursday, 23 December 2021

Protectors from the Protect Pūtiki on Waiheke are making a stand against the construction of Kennedy Point Marina.

From the sky above Waiheke, Pūtiki Bay is travel brochure-peaceful. Aquamarine water, golden sand, bright white boats that look like a circling flock of seagulls at a distance.

Look a little closer at either end of the bay hugging the last knobbly finger of land and you’ll see circles seemingly sketched on the water’s surface, a glimpse of the space Kennedy Point Marina promises to occupy.

At sea level, the black and bright orange buoys come into focus, marking out the construction zone and shielding two crane-topped barges that have recently been shunted from one of the bay to the other.

After 10 months of work, a handful of concrete piles sticking out of the waves are the main signs of progress.

Ten months after construction started, work has shifted to the other end of the bay.

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Piles driven into the seabed and the strings of orange and black buoys are the main signs of building at the bay.

There have been various interruptions: swimmers and kayakers stopping work, a week-long floating occupation on a pontoon, a pause to finalise the penguin protection plan, legal battles and lockdowns.

For their part in slowing the work, protectors face claims of $700,000 from the developers for compensation and damages.

Back in March 2021, the Calliope barge pulled into the bay carrying the tools and materials to lay the foundations of the marina. Hot on its heels, a collection of protectors: iwi, locals, environmentalists, whānau of the marae and people who whakapapa to Waiheke pulled to the island to enact kaitiakitanga, or guardianship, of the moana and whenua.

They gathered first under the name Protect Kennedy Point, a nod to the community group Save Kennedy Point, or SKP, which spent four years locked in legal battles against the marina. The campaigners and developers settled out of court in June, and SKP was disbanded.

The new guard soon became Protect Pūtiki. Led by members of Ngāti Pāoa, one of the iwi that holds mana whenua status on the island, the collaboration between Māori and non-Māori is one of its powers, spokesperson Emily Māia Weiss said.

The movement started being simply about “no marina in this bay”, Weiss (Ngāti Pāoa) said, but it’s expanded over time.

“So it's not just no marina, it's raised awareness around the health of our oceans, it's raised awareness around the state of the Hauraki/Tīkapa Moana, it's raised awareness around how colonisation is acting in 2021.”

Maikara Ropata says she can’t visit the bay any more because it’s too painful.

Maikara Ropata, of Waiheke’s Piritahi Marae, said the start of construction heightened her awareness of the wildlife in the bay and the cultural impact of the environment being disturbed.

Pūtiki Bay has huge cultural significance for Māori as the landing place of Te Arawa and Tainui waka and home to taonga species including kororā, little blue penguins, and matuku moana, the grey reef heron.

Ropata (Ngāti Toarangatira, Ngāpuhi) can’t bear to visit the bay any more.

“Hearing those piles going in, it just reverberates right through the bay, through the whenua, through us.

“It’s real for us. They don’t know, they don’t live here, they don’t know the physical impact it has on us.

“No-one may necessarily see the scars, but they’re there for every one of us.”

Emily Māia Weiss says summer will be a time for reconnecting and recovering after an intense year.

Construction isn’t a sign of defeat, Weiss said.

“At the start they got so little building done, people from an outside perspective started to feel like any work they did was an advancement for them and it was a disempowerment for us.”

“It's just really important to show people that more piles on the seabed doesn't lead to us abandoning the wildlife and telling the story of the mauri of the bay.”

After 10 months which have seen protectors camped on the beach, on the water, and in the car park - which was disbanded by police in alert level 4 - they’re taking some time away from their tents and looking for a place to set up on private ground.

Summer will be a time for reconnecting after a year that has taken a lot out of the protectors.

Mauriora, a kororā chick, was severely underweight when they were found at Kennedy Point Bay.

“It’s appalling to see the level of resilience that community members, that all of us are expected to have and build and respond to, literally for wanting to disagree with the marina,” Weiss said.

The 25-year-old describes how she deals with that: “On a personal level, it's constantly trying to ground yourself in the meaning, in the mauri of the bay and the beauty of the species and stay connected to the story of what you're doing from your heart, when they're trying to redefine you all the time into a criminal, into a public nuisance.”

Weiss has a clutch of trespass charges against her, as do a number of other protectors.

The developers maintain their actions against the protectors, particularly a court injunction barring 32 locals from the construction site, were necessary because of “ongoing, aggravated trespass activity” putting people at risk. The protectors are challenging the injunction in court.

Birds are brought to Native Bird Rescue from Waiheke and further afield.

“The company was left with no option but to take these legal steps to ensure public safety and better enable it to manage construction of the marina,” Kennedy Point Marina director Kitt Littlejohn said.

Littlejohn said the injunction had been effective in deterring people from trespassing on the construction zone. The delays in 2021 were mainly due to lockdowns and interruptions to international deliveries, he said.

Emily Māia Weiss said protectors will remain at Pūtiki for as long as it takes.

The marina is expected to be finished in May 2023, he said, six months behind schedule. In the first half of 2022, the wharf will be finished and marina attenuators installed, and in the second half of the year, the floating internal marina structures will start to be installed.

The protectors are planning hīkoi and doorknocking in 2022 to mobilise the community. They will continue observations of wildlife, building on the mātauranga Māori study in 2021, which gave a snapshot of kororā at the bay.

At the Native Bird Rescue centre on Waiheke, Karen Saunders hand-feeds a kororā chick defrosted anchovies.

The chick, found “really underweight” and “traumatised” at Kennedy Point, has been named Mauriora.

It is the second kororā that has come into Saunders’ care from the bay. The first, named Manaia, died soon after arriving at the centre. A pathology report said a dog bite was the cause, but Saunders was also concerned about the bird’s low weight. Sedimentation from construction could make it hard for kororā to hunt, and once the marina is built they will be forced to go further afield looking for food, she said.

The noise and vibration of construction could take a huge toll on kororā, she said.

“Stress literally does kill birds,” she said. Once their immune system is weakened, it’s easy for respiratory diseases to take hold.

She suspected the majority of burrows in the breakwater at Kennedy Point will have been abandoned due to the disturbance.

Once the marina is completed, boat strike will be a danger, she said, and even a palm-sized puddle of oil on the sea’s surface could be enough to strip a penguin’s waterproofing and cause it to drown.

Littlejohn said “robust procedures” were in place to protect the kororā during construction, and the company engaged an independent expert to review its penguin protection plan. Ecologists are regularly on-site to monitor the birds’ welfare and Auckland Council and the Depertment of Conservation also monitor the work, he said.

Weiss remains determined, as she has been since March, that they will still stop the marina.

She’s been amazed by how the movement has grown this year. It’s multicultural, multi-generational, unifying people in a way the developers do not, she said.

“They're standing there with their buzz points like, ‘we are exercising our valid resource consent, we legally acquired the rights to build here, this is now our private property’ … all of these stale, outdated stories that they're really trying to draw up people with, but who's there inspired by that?

“My generation is not going to shape the world towards privatisation any more, we’re not going to shape the world towards accepting colonialism, we’re not going to shape the world towards thinking the environment should move aside for the will of corporate interests.

“We’re going to be here at Pūtiki, and wherever we need to be, to call out blatant violence against our future, against our environment, against our cultural history, against our waka landing site and against our community.

“And we’re not going to stop, so they should expect that from us.”