Waiheke marina battle shows why we need mātauranga Māori

Friday, 30 July 2021

Those challenging a new Waiheke Island marina at Pūtiki Bay refer to themselves as ‘’’protectors’’, not protesters.

OPINION: We were on our way home after shopping for groceries, when my partner Greg saw a big police van driving the opposite way – a rare sight on Waiheke Island.

“Wonder where it’s going?”

We looked at each other. “Follow that van!” I declared.

Greg did a U-turn in Surfdale, and we took a right on to Donald Bruce Rd down to Kennedy Point Bay, where we were met by an astonishing sight. A seething mass of blue uniforms filled every footpath – some estimate between 80 and 100 police filled the bay.

The officers, their vans, helicopter, drone and police boats had all come to arrest four spindly protesters – or ‘’protectors’’ as they would prefer to be called, as they try to protect the creatures who live or hunt in this bay, from the matuku moana reef heron (endangered) to the kōrora (little blue penguins, a species in decline).

* Police arrest marina protesters, dismantle floating occupation at Kennedy Point

* Waiheke marina: Occupiers set up floating camp, one apparently kicked in the face

An endangered matuku moana reef heron photographed close to the construction site at Pūtiki Bay, Waiheke Island, by Mauri o te Moana.

As most New Zealanders know by now, the ‘’protectors’’ oppose the building of a marina with floating concrete pontoons larger than any previously made in New Zealand.

Some of the estimated 80 and 100 police at the bay.

I got out of our car. Just then, around 10 policemen ran out of the ferry terminal towards me and I tried to video them but ending up filming my socks instead.

“HOW DID WE GET TO THIS?” thundered a Waiheke Gulf News editorial headline that day, summing up how we all felt.

“The long and the short of it is that this is the same argument that has played out on Waiheke for decades – development versus conservation, and wildlife caught in the middle,” Gulf News’ James Belfield pleaded from the same pulpit three months earlier. “If the science hasn’t changed, the story hasn’t changed and the overwhelming opposition hasn’t changed, why are we still getting a bloody marina?”

The Kennedy Point saga is playing out against a background of increasingly bleak environmental news. A survey by marine biologist Craig Thorburn last month found just 23 kōura (crayfish) in 18,000 square metres of Waiheke reef.

A quarter of this area was described as a monotonous ‘’kina barren’’ (i.e. barren of anything much except kina). Bianca Ranson, a founder member of the national eco pressure group Mauri o te Moana, suspects that crayfish are functionally extinct in the gulf.

Ranson is a striking figure on Waiheke, well-known for her work as kaiwhakahaere (organiser) of Waiheke’s Piritahi Marae and the founding director of travel company Pōtiki Adventures.

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For a group only eight months old, Mauri o te Moana is making itself felt, monitoring biodiversity at Pūtiki and filming issues (the developer’s mussel buoys smashing against penguin homes in high seas, for example) affecting kōrora there.

They are one of a number of environmental groups on the ground here (there is no Conservation Department office on Waiheke), worried about the impact of marina construction work on kororā and other taonga species at Pūtiki Bay. Others are Forest & Bird, the animal welfare group Huha, and the World Wildlife Fund.

Mauri o te Moana members include the psychiatrist and author Dr Hinemoa Elder, Bay of Plenty researcher Te Atarangi Sayers, Darleen Tana Hoff-Nielsen and Ranson’s activist father, Mike Smith.

“We [at Mauri o te Moana] will support the voice and action of Māori working directly to protect the mauri of the moana and those who are asserting their rangatiratanga (sovereignty) within their rohe,” says Ranson. “We have a whakapapa connection to our taiao, (environment) to the moana (sea) and that relationship is tapu.”

Even though Mauri o te Moana members get up at 4am to monitor penguins at Pūtiki Bay (penguins which an expert working for the developer could not find), the group are far from “citizen scientists”, says Ranson, who dislikes the term when it is used to describe mātauranga Māori (knowledge).

“That sounds like someone with a hat and a clipboard, and all they do is count. Mātauranga Māori is very, very different to this. We have a holistic view. We care about not one or two species, but the biodiversity of the ocean – its mauri.”

A recent example of mātauranga Māori in action on Waiheke isn’t just the rāhui declared on Waiheke, but the hui it took to get there, to which the community were all invited. The resulting rāhui bans the taking of kōura, kūtai, (mussels), pāua, and tipa (scallops) within one nautical mile of the Waiheke shore.

Once it is (eventually) endorsed by the government, anyone pilfering these shellfish (if they are lucky enough to find any, jokes Ranson darkly) will be fined. The rāhui was placed by the Ngāti Paoa iwi.

“The government and Auckland Council should have done this a long, long time ago,” she says. And as for the Government’s much-trumpeted Revitalising the Gulf Plan, it is “just not good enough. The moana is on the verge of collapse”.

Pause to consider the most mind-boggling aspect of the Pūtiki issue – nobody knew about a regionally significant breeding colony of a declining species, in a ravaged sea, until four years after council approved a (wildly unpopular) giant marina attached to it.

It is the continued prioritising of consumerism over the health of the ocean, and situations like the marina at Pūtiki Bay, which have led to the formation of Mauri o te Moana, says Ranson.

A 2019 scientific article led by Niwa researchers noted, “Māori-owner companies are arguably unique in that they are driven not only by financial outcomes but, to a greater or lesser extent, by principles of kaitiakitanga (environmental responsibility), manaakitanga (capability building), and taonga tuku iho mō ngā uri whakatipu (guardianship of resources for future generations). Many hapū are not able to successfully challenge or defend their right as kaitiaki as they don’t have the access to western science tools.”

Aotearoa needs to embrace mātauranga Māori – not put a pin through it and store it, labelled, in a museum drawer.

Because that hasn’t worked.