Aaron Smale, "Tairāwhiti: Pine, Profit and the Cyclone" (Bridget Williams, 2024)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Aaron Smale, "Tairāwhiti: Pine, Profit and the Cyclone" (Bridget Williams, 2024)
Date: December 9, 2025
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Aaron Smale

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into Tairāwhiti: Pine, Profit and the Cyclone, an investigative work by seasoned journalist Aaron Smale. The book exposes the intertwined histories of indigenous land, monoculture forestry, and devastating cyclones on New Zealand’s East Coast. Originally a deep-dive investigative series, Smale’s work explores how historical land-use, corporate interests, and government policies created the vulnerabilities that catastrophic cyclones have repeatedly exposed—with profound impacts on land, sea, and the people who live there.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Aaron Smale’s Background & Motivation

• Dual Perspective: Smale has a 25-year journalism career with a focus on agribusiness and Māori affairs. With mixed European and Māori heritage (his grandmother was from Tokomaru Bay), he brings both personal and professional insight into issues concerning Māori communities and rural land use (02:54).
• Why This Story?: Working as Māori affairs editor at Newsroom, Smale saw mainstream coverage of cyclone events as superficial and transient. His family ties to the degraded area, its historical neglect by media, and the apparent cycle of disaster led him to “sink some time” into telling a deeper story (06:32).

2. Geology, Erosion, & Historical Land Use

• Long Timeframes: Understanding the devastation required going back “millions of years” to the land’s young geologic makeup—steep, soft, prone to collapse after European deforestation and sheep farming displaced indigenous forests in the late 19th/early 20th century (07:39–09:02).
• Cyclone Bola, Pine, and the New Monoculture: In the wake of the 1988 cyclone, pine trees were established as a government-subsidized remedy—intended to stabilize the soil, create jobs, and found a local industry. However, after 30-year growth cycles, clear-cutting left hillsides bare and created vast “slash” (forest debris), worsening future cyclone impacts (09:02–12:41).

“They only want…the trunk that’s the economic bit. And all the rest is kind of—sort of byproduct…that debris then gets carried down, and every time you have a storm, it gets carried down into the waterways…”
—Aaron Smale (12:41)

3. The Pine Industry & Corporate Dynamics

• Why Pine?: Pine, specifically fast-growing radiata, replaced earlier land uses due to its economic value as a softwood export. New Zealand became a global leader in plantation softwood, but Smale critiques this “all in on one thing” national tendency (13:39–15:22).
• Multinational Ownership, Local Impacts: Only a minority of forest land is New Zealand-owned; most companies are foreign multinationals, with some linked to poor environmental records in other countries. Local councils lack the resources to challenge them effectively, and fines are dwarfed by profits (16:34–19:22).

“They made $70 million that year...and so there’s this kind of, if you like, imbalance in power...They can get away with it really.”
—Aaron Smale (19:22)

• Local Economy & Māori Land: The pine industry’s benefits for locals are limited–jobs are periodic, and rural communities have been hollowed out. Māori landowners (notably Ngāti Porou, Smale’s ancestral iwi) take a longer-term view, in contrast to extractive outside interests (20:00–21:54).

4. Regulation, Government Policy, & Legal Struggles

• Policy Weakness: Current policy enforcement is weak—even when councils attempt legal action, forestry companies deploy well-funded legal teams, outmatching small rural authorities (24:14). The broader trend is towards further deregulation, worsening oversight.
• Environmental Fallout: The 2023 cyclone aftermath left beaches and river mouths choked with forestry debris and silt, decimating local fisheries and the sea as a “food cupboard” (27:05).
• Impact on Mental Health: The chronic, cumulative trauma suffered by Māori and local communities is evident, with Smale highlighting visible exhaustion and resignation in residents (27:41).

5. Reception and Impact of the Book/Reporting

• National and Local Reactions: Outsiders express shock and outrage at the revelations. For residents and subject-matter experts, Smale’s work is valued for joining the dots and centralizing the issues—providing a “weapon” or tool for advocacy (28:48–29:58).

“...the feedback I got was that, you know, it was just this useful tool and maybe even weapon for, for some to be able to—you know, knowledge is power—and just to have it all sort of collated like that…”
—Aaron Smale (30:57)

6. Wider Environmental Context: Climate Policy & Carbon Markets

• Emissions Trading and Tree Planting: New Zealand’s greenhouse emissions are unusually dominated by agriculture (especially dairy)—not transport. Carbon offset and trading schemes have incentivized more pine planting on marginal land, but actual emissions reductions are falling short (31:34–33:39).
• Missed Targets, Massive Costs: New Zealand is likely to miss net zero targets and will have to buy costly carbon offsets on the international market (“the bill could be up to 23 billion”). Politics further complicates genuine progress (35:10–36:59).

“How do you calculate what a tree’s worth in terms of mitigation? …Then what are the political decisions around how to manage all of that and what the targets are? ...Pretty hard to pin down.”
—Aaron Smale (35:10–36:59)

• Climate Change Knock-on Effects: With increasingly severe cyclones and typhoons in the region, Tairāwhiti is a canary in the coal mine, suffering first from climate and policy neglect that will soon affect others (37:48–40:01).

7. Connections to Global Issues

• Linked Challenges: Smale argues that the local realities on the East Coast are microcosms of wider, global tensions—immigration, climate-driven migration, and the shortsighted management of environmental and economic resources (39:11–40:19).

8. Aaron Smale’s Next Projects

• “Stolen Generations” Reporting: Smale has spent years covering the removal of Māori children by the state—a parallel, ongoing trauma to colonial and economic exploitation—with an upcoming PhD now expanding that work (41:00–44:49).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the futility of fines:
  "They made $70 million that year. And so...they can get away with it really." (19:22 — Smale)
• On government inaction:
  "...you look at the damage, you can still drive up there and there's just...this rubbish right from the shoreline right up...most of it ends up on the sea floor...the catch had declined by 70%..." (24:14–26:56 — Smale)
• On the emotional toll:
  “You could just hear the exhaustion in her voice and see it on her face...you could just see it, the toll it was taking.” (27:41 — Smale)
• On knowledge as empowerment:
  "...it was just this useful tool and maybe even weapon for, for some to be able to—knowledge is power..." (30:57 — Smale)
• On the politics of climate action:
  "...by the time the bill arrives, she'll probably be out of government. And the bill will fall on somebody else's lap." (36:10 — Smale)
• On global relevance:
  “It’s like the canary in the mine. And if we don’t take notice of what’s happening there, one day, it’s going to blow up in our face, I think.” (40:01 — Smale)

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Suggested Timestamps for Important Segments

• Aaron Smale’s introduction & personal motivation — 02:43–06:59
• Geology, land use history, and the rise of pine — 07:39–13:07
• Why pine, industry structure, and company behavior — 13:39–21:54
• Legal and government policy failings — 24:14–27:41
• Community impact and reception of the book — 28:48–30:57
• Emissions, carbon schemes, and climate policy — 31:34–36:59
• Global context & climate migration — 37:48–40:19
• Smale’s upcoming research on “Stolen Generations” — 41:00–44:49

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Final Thoughts

The episode provides a thorough and compassionate look at how cycles of land exploitation, government complacency, and multinational profit have compounded disaster risk and cultural trauma in one of New Zealand’s most marginalized regions. Smale’s book, reporting, and commentary emphasize the vital connections between environmental justice, indigenous sovereignty, and the urgent realities of a warming planet.

For those interested:
Tairāwhiti: Pine, Profit and the Cyclone (Bridget Williams, 2024)

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Transcript

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[Erin Smail]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Erin Smail, who's written a really interesting book that's based on an investigative journalist series of articles. And honestly, having read the book, I can see why it needed to be a book because one article is not going to do this talk of justice. Thankfully that has happened. The book was published by Bridget Williams in 2024 and takes us to, to, well, a specific place, but then a whole bunch of history around it, starting with what seems like a kind of one off issue, a particular cyclone or maybe a few of them, or particular pine forest. But clearly as soon as one starts to investigate, there's a lot more to the story. It's not just a cluster of trees on the coast of New Zealand. There's really a lot more going on here. So we're going to be talking about a book titled Tirafati and Pine Prophet and the Cyclone that is going to go very deep into what's happening now, what's happening in the future, and obviously the history that has taken us to this place. So, Aaron, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Erin Smail]

Thank you for having me.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to investigate this story and then turn it into a book.

[Erin Smail]

So my basic background is in journalism. I've been a journalist for 25 years. I think I've covered a number of issues, as most journalists do. One of the big areas that I've covered is early in my career was agribusiness. But for all of my career, I've covered indigenous issues, Mori issues.

I'm of mixed race, if that's the right term. But my parentage is British, European, if you like, New Zealander, and my grandmother was Mori, or indigenous Mori. So, yeah, I've got a bit of a dual perspective on things, but I have covered Mori issues for some time, and that can be anything that's across the board. So that's my basic sort of career path.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

You know, that's helpful to understand in this context, why this project.

[Erin Smail]

So at the time, I was the Mori affairs editor for a small news outlet called Newsroom. It's an outlet that sort of punches above its weight, I guess you could say, in terms of investigative journalism. That's kind of the forte of the outlet. And we'd like to go into stories a bit deeper, so you're given a bit more leeway to spend a bit more time on stories that other outlets and other journalists might sort of bounce on through and carry on with the next thing.

Now in 20. 21. 20. No, 23. Sorry, I just had to get my dates there. There were two cyclones that sort of hit the country, and they really hit quite hard in the northern sort of area of the country. Then north island and on the eastern side of that North Island. And there was two areas that got hit particularly hard, the Hawks Bay and the Ta Fiti, which is often. People just call it the East Coast. And I. It was trying to find that point of difference of, okay, it's getting saturation coverage, literally, from every media outlet. And it's that usual thing that happens with a. A big event like that, a big weather event. Everybody sort of helicopters in and people were helicoptering in. And it's quite often those sorts of stories are very visual. You've got people in sort of a disaster zone and then it's sort of over. Or supposedly it's over sort of a week later, everyone's sort of moved on. I spent a bit of time in the Hawke's Bay, spoke to a lot of people there.

At the time. Initially, the east coast, or Tai Rafati, was kind of Are very hard to get into. It's quite a remote area anyway, and the main road was blocked in a number of places. My grandmother was from a particular place, Tokamaru Bay, and that was blocked from both ends. The main highway had been basically overrun and flooded out on one end and the bridge had been blown out on the other end. And so that was kind of locked in. And I kind of, I guess, made a little commitment in my head that I needed to get up there. There was all this forestry debris everywhere, in the rivers, on the beaches, and that was the sort of image that kind of dominated. And it was covered obviously by other media. But it's like, well, what is this stuff? Where did it come from? How did we get here? That was kind of the overriding question I had. And I also felt like I had.

An obligation.

A duty almost to give this area some time and investment of my time, because I had family connections to the place. And it is an area that's kind of off the beaten track. It doesn't get a lot of coverage, media wise, it's one of the poorest areas in the country as well. So there are a number of reasons. I felt like, yeah, I need to sink some time into this.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And I did, fair enough, you clearly did. And went far beyond kind of helicoptering in and just looking at kind of the first day or the first weeks afterwards. And I think it's the sinking of time that I'd like to talk a little bit more about, because obviously the moment of a cyclone, there's kind of the clear what happened on the day it made landfall, what happened in the few days beforehand to kind of build up the storm and all that sorts of stuff. But to properly understand the damage that's going on here, we have to go further back in time than just those few days. In fact, how far back in time do you think we need to go?

[Erin Smail]

Well, one section of the book, sort of literally going back millions of years, because I didn't spend a long time there. But I interviewed a soil scientist, a guy, Mike Martin, who had lived there and worked there for a good 40 odd years. And I thought that that was quite important because if you look at like the. And for example, in the Hawke's Bay, there was a lot of water everywhere.

But in the east coast there was all this, what people refer to as slash. And I'll get to how what that is in a bit more detail in a minute. But you had all this debris from forestry that it seemed to be predominantly in that east coast area and it was different. And so with Mike Martin I spent. There was a good whole section, a whole piece in the series That I was given over to him and the whole science and the geology of the place because it's very, very steep and you know, it's just vertical in some places. And the other thing to know about it is that it's, the soil is very, very soft. And so the combination of the steepness of the terrain and that soft soil means it's extremely prone to erosion. And so Mike explained and ran through it. And you know, it's a very, geologically speaking, it's very young, that part of the country.

Still millions of years old, of course, but it's just being pushed up by sort of geological forces. There's a fault line that runs along that coast and so it's been basically pushed up out of the ocean. And it's not, if you go to some other areas in the country, it's, you know, far more solid. And I'm getting pretty basic here. But so that was quite important to understand the geology for a start. And what Mike explained, one of the things he explained is that, you know, European settlement, the late 19th, early 20th century, the indigenous forest was pretty much cleared within a 30 to 40 year time span. And the European settlers did what they knew, which was put sheep on there. In New Zealand, you know, the flat country tended to be dairy farms and the high country or the hill country, they threw sheep at it, but you had to put that into pasture. But immediately within, within a decade or two of clearing that indigenous forest, the hills started to collapse, they started to erode. And that became a problem, an ongoing problem for the next kind of, well, 50 to 60 years at least. And then in the 1980s, when Mike's first moved out up there, there was another cyclone, Cyclone Bowler. And that basically just blitzed the area and it just did massive damage to the point where people thought there's no future here for sheep farming. It's just too, the pasture, everything was gone, fences were gone. And, and so there was a kind of a move to. There had been some plantation forests of pine and small areas and, and those areas hung on. They weren't as badly affected by this erosion. And so everybody, well, a lot of people thought, hey, let's put pine in here. It'll create jobs, it'll create industry and it will stabilize the land. The problem was it did that, it did stabilize the land, but then the employment, once those trees were planted and that was subsidized by central government, it then basically you had nothing to do for the next 30 years because the pine forestry takes a good 30 years to mature. And then you harvest it. But nobody really thought, okay, 30 years from now, we're going to cut all these things down. And then what? And that's exactly what's happened. So 1988 was Cyclone Bola. And so through the 90s, you had. All these pine trees were planted, and many of the people I spoke to were kids at the time and had been involved in planting them. And so those trees in the Last sort of 10, 5, 10 years have come to maturity, and there's been this sort of wholesale kind of clearance of these mature pine trees, and it's just left those hills exposed once again, even more exposed than they were when Bowler hit. So that's kind of the sort of sequence of events that's kind of led up to Gabriel and was, why. And those trees that were harvested in the sort of last five to ten years, they only. They only want the companies that harvest the money, want the sort of trunk that's the economic bit. And all the rest is kind of sort of byproduct. And so I hope that didn't ding in your ear.

So that became all that debris and excess.

Material from the trees is left on the hillsides. And they. That. That debris then gets carried down, and every time you have a storm, it gets carried down into the waterways and then out into the ocean. So that was the sort of, I guess the sort of sequence of land use that led to the problems that they were having with what's called slash is the sort of colloquial term that's used for that debris.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, that's very helpful to understand, because if we just went back, even just to the 1980s, it's like, well, but hang on, how did we even get to that point? So, yeah, obviously going back millions of years might seem strange at first, but the way you've explained it, kind of, as you said, the sequence makes it so clear here. But I suppose one thing I'd love to talk a little bit more about is the pine tree aspect of it. Like, why pine trees? What were the implications of kind of choosing that kind of tree and having there just be all of that? Does it matter that it was pines?

[Erin Smail]

It's kind of an interesting question. I guess when you're in New Zealand, we sort of seem to have this habit of. And it's true across the world, really. But the sort of monoculture, if you like, of, okay, we're just going to do sheep, we're going to do. Okay, now we're going to do trees. And it's. And I guess There was a lot of, even if you go back to the Depression area, there was again, a lot of the Central north island was cleared of.

Indigenous forests. And then during the Depression there was a lot of people unemployed and that became this big thing. There's a huge area of plantation forests. Well, there used to be in the Central north island and that was all pine. Now the reasons for pine being chosen, I'm not sure completely about that, but it is a very fast growing species. So 30 years to maturity and then you harvest it and it's a softwood. And so that I think New Zealand, I'm pretty sure on this, New Zealand is the biggest exporter of softwood or plantation softwood at least. And, and we're the biggest exporter of dairy. So we seem to have this habit of just going all in on one thing. And, and pine just seemed to be the kind of panacea. And you have to remember a lot of the industry was kind of very, very much centrally run from central government. It wasn't quite a sort of communist state, but it wasn't far off. Lot of direction for this came from central government. And a lot of those decisions were made. You had science.

Government departments that sort of were quite hugely influential in terms of policy decisions about land use. And to be honest, you know, you look back and it's just wonderful to have hindsight, but you really sometimes have to wonder what were you thinking? You know, it was just, just to clear, just wholesale, clear indigenous forests without actually thinking, hey, you know, this might not be such a great idea. Because there were scientists in the sort of late 19th century that recognized this erosion. There was a Scottish scientist actually came out here and was noticing the slips and everything that were going on then. So it's not like it wasn't sort of recognized. It just, we'll carry on, we'll just keep doing it. But yeah, it's, it's. And there doesn't seem to be any exit strategy on this one, especially with pine. It just, we're gonna carry on doing it.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, Those are all very helpful pieces of context to add in. And it sounds like a lot of this pine is not even being used in New Zealand or like, is it lots of local companies, like, what's the company aspect of this?

[Erin Smail]

Yeah, that's a very interesting question. There's. Without naming them and putting everybody at risk of defamation, there's about a good sort of half a dozen major companies operating in tairavity. They have other forestry interests throughout the country. There was one that I gave some Special attention to unsaw, which.

They are part of a conglomerate owned by a Malaysian family. And they operate in all sorts of places. Papua New Guinea's one, I think Cameroon, but certainly West Africa. And they don't have a very good reputation, at least in the eyes of the likes of Greenpeace and other environmental groups. And so you've got a lot of these. And this is the other thing you have, I want to say, 30 years, you'll have these blocks of land, even if they're not owned, they will have them locked into these leases for three rotations. What that means is you will have, okay, one, you know, you plant a tree, 30 years later, you harvest it, that's one rotation. So you've essentially got some of these blocks are tied up for the next hundred years. And so anyway, these companies, they, in my view, this is one of the problems is that the, the legislation, and I know there's a question coming up about this, is, is far too lax. And is the, the, the local body councils that enforce the regulations, you know, they're sort of in this catch 22 because you've got that. They've got a very small rating base. The. These industries dominate in these areas. And so they are the big industry on the east coast. And so there's sort of this reluctance to kind of crack down on them because it's like, well, the margins are pretty thin anyway. We don't want to scare them off, but that just sort of gives them more leeway and they, this slash is being left on the hills. And, you know, a lot of them. For example, back in 2018, there was another storm that came through and the same problem.

Arose. There was all this rubbish ended up in the rivers and caused a lot of damage downstream. And the council took several companies, including Earl, to court and charged them under the legislation, the relevant legislation. But these guys fought it all the way. And it was only at the 11th hour that they sort of basically pleaded guilty to the charges, but then still tried to minimize it. Now they got fined. I think off the top of my head, it was around 300,000 for that breach.

They made 70 million that year. And so there's this kind of, if you like, imbalance in power in terms of they can get away with it really. And if they push the envelope and, and breach their regulations, what's going to happen? Not a lot in terms of the economic bottom line at least. And there's just, you know, these companies, I don't even know if half of the directors have even set foot in this country. And so that, you know, when you get down to the community level and you've got people in those communities that many of them work or have employment through, whether it's driving logging trucks or harvesting. But there's this very ambivalent attitude in the community. Yes, they provide work, but at what cost? Because this work is seasonal. And when I say seasonal, the seasons are sort of decades apart. So it's sort of in between those seasons, there's not much going on, and it's sort of gutted those whole communities. And I think in one part of the book, I talked to one of the elders who watched this happen where this thriving community in Tokamaru Bay, where my grandmother grew up, you know, at one point there was 5,000. Now there's a couple of hundred people there. And so that. It's just not just an environmental thing. There's all sorts of economic things going on, and each piece of the puzzle sort of has an effect on the other. So the. The companies. Yeah, there's. There's a number of companies that are New Zealand owns, but they are in the minority. And you also have the. So my grandmother was from the Ngati Parau tribe, which is the predominant tribe along that coast, and they have some fairly major forestry interests themselves, but they have a bit of a different business philosophy that, you know, they're there for the long term. They've been there. We've been there sort of hundreds of years, and, you know, we hope to be there a bit longer, but it's. So there's a whole different attitude towards how the land is managed and. And what the land means. It's not just a commodity. So there's all of these conflicting things going on, and unfortunately for the community, they bear the brunt of the.

You know, the downsides of that industry, if I could put it that way.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

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[Erin Smail]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

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[Erin Smail]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks fizzy taxes and fees, extra CMO. Yeah, no, that definitely makes sense and how all these things are connected. While we're on the subject of lawsuits and local council and things like that, is there anything further we need to understand about government policy and regulation or lack thereof in this sphere?

[Erin Smail]

Well, at the moment, and it's not directly related to this, but the current government is certainly pushing to loosen regulations around industry and I don't doubt that forestry will probably. Yeah, it's not an environment or you know, where you can expect that this is going to improve, put it that way. But yeah, I do think, I think the enforcement of it is certainly lacking. I know in one area, which is slightly south of Tavati, I was told that the council there, which is the Wairoa Council, they were going to sort of, I think they were suing one of these companies. And this company just wheeled out, you know, a whole sort of busload of lawyers to, to fight them. And they just simply haven't got the budget to sort of go down that track very, you know, on a regular basis. So that's, it's just an ongoing issue. And now that those lawsuits I was talking about, that was 2018, now I'm not aware and I've, I tried to keep tabs on, I'm not sure where it's got to, but you know, I don't know if there was any fallout legally from what happened in 2023. So it, you know, and yet you look at the damage, you can still drive up there and there's just. There was one point I went out to the mouth of the Waipu river, which is the major river in the area, and you could look in both directions along that coast and as far as the eye could see, there was just this rubbish right from the shoreline right up to the sort of, you know, it was, it's just kind of mind boggling. And that is only what's on the beach. It doesn't tell you what's. There's a whole lot that ends up, most of it ends up on the sea floor. And one of the things that I kind of looked into a little bit more was the impact on the sea life. And I went out with a cray fisherman, or lobster as you might call them, and he said in the last, in the previous five years, the, the catch had declined by 70% and there was a succession of storms. I think it was about half a dozen. And every time there was a storm, there would be more of this debris and silt and everything. And of course, you know, crayfish don't like living in that. And, and when the storms, there was one storm that washed all these dead crayfish up onto the beach and just for miles. And, and so those kinds of things, you know, that's another industry that's quite important.

In that area. And not just as an industry, but as a, as a way of life, if you like, you know, people.

There's a term that one of the people I spoke to, one of the locals, Kabatakari, which is basically food cupboard. You know, the, the, the, the ocean is referred to as a food cupboard. And people, you know, including my own family, will just, you know, it's like opening the pantry. What have we got in the pantry today? And.

That was quite common and it, but it's harder now. It's getting harder and Harder to. To, you know, live off the ocean because it's being destroyed.

And that. And you can just see the sort of ongoing stress in people's kind of demeanor. You know, what it's doing. It's a very grinding sort of trauma that's just going on and on. And again, that. Going back to your earlier question of why I felt the need to do this, and I was involved with a zoom call, and one of the locals was on that call, and you could just hear the sort of exhaustion in her voice and see it on her face. And she's a pretty strong. Pretty strong woman and fierce woman, actually. And you could just see it, the toll it was taking. And so, yeah, that's around about what was the question.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I mean, that. That definitely answered a number of questions, actually. And given the impact it's had on the people living there, I wonder if we can talk a bit about the impact of you reporting on this. Obviously, it was a whole series originally. It's a book now. What have some of the reactions been to have you, you know, spending this time there and investigating it and putting all the pieces together?

[Erin Smail]

I think the reaction from people outside the area and people not familiar with the area were just kind of flabbergasted, I think. Appalled, I think, would be a word I would use.

I think, for those that live there. I mean, many of them know this. This issue and these issues far deeper than I, because I don't live there.

But I think it's. There's a couple of people who I spoke to, and it's always a measure for me, you know, the people that are in the story, what do they think of the story when I say turn around and tell it? And they were very appreciative because I think for them, it just kind of. That they're fighting this. They're fighting it all the time in various ways. And I think it just was helpful for them to have all of that information and knowledge put into one place because, you know, there's obviously a lot of discussions about various aspects of it and people are living it, but then having all of that, some of that economic.

Analysis, some of the analysis around the emissions trading scheme, which I know we'll get to in a minute, and some of the drivers, I think, and what's pushing this along? What is the thing that's. What are the factors that are driving these decisions in Wellington, you know, because the east coast tied up at. Is a long way from Wellington and it's easy for politicians to ignore. And so to put this sort of thing together and then to have it in one place in a book. I think, you know, the feedback I got was that, you know, it was just this useful tool and maybe even weapon for, for some to be able to, you know, knowledge is power and, and just to have it all sort of collated like that, I think was, I think people, yeah, the feedback I got, people appreciated that. And these are people who know their stuff, you know, and know a lot more about some of these subjects than I do.

And, you know, that's, I guess that's what journalism is, is trying to join the dots and hopefully I did that.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah. I mean, even if people know one piece of it more than you do, like, again, it's putting the pieces together so that it's all, as you said, in one place, place. But I do want to, in fact, as you said, go to some of the kind of wider policies involving the environment in New Zealand. Right. The Net Zero carbon Act of 2019, the Emissions Trading Scheme, all sorts of things around the context of climate change. The things we've been talking about are not unrelated to that. Right, what's the connection there?

[Erin Smail]

Yeah, well, this just about did my head in, trying to get sort of comprehend all this, because these, each of these, each of those things you've just mentioned are hugely complex subjects on their own.

And. But then they all interlock and influence each other in ways that are kind of sometimes almost absurd.

For example, I mean, I think I mentioned earlier about how there was a lot of pine forestry in the Central North Island. A lot of that was government or crown owned. And then, I don't know, in the last 10, 20 years, a lot of that's just been, was harvested, but it wasn't replaced with pine trees, it was replaced with dairy farms on Crown land, no less. Now, New Zealand's famous for its sheep and. But sheep numbers have been declining pretty rapidly and steadily over the last 30 to 40 years. And a lot of the land that was formerly were formerly sheep farms and now dairy farms. The steeper land has gone into forestry. So you've got this kind of weird.

Equation going on because New Zealand's unusual in the fact that.

Most countries, you know, the greenhouse gas emissions are usually around cars or transport or industry. In New Zealand, it's agriculture. Nearly half of our emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, are from agriculture, I think 48% or thereabouts. And, and so that you can't, you know, you might be able to go and change from a petrol car to an electric car, but you can't readily change the biology of a, of a cow. So we've got all these cows that produce these various greenhouse gas emissions.

And then you've got trees which mitigate that. And so New Zealand signed up to this.

Paris agreement and then legislated to give effect to that.

And unusually, it was kind of.

Basically was a bipartisan piece of legislation. Everybody voted for it basically, apart from one, one politician. But now they're trying to sort of implement it and it's not working. There's various agencies that are saying we're going to miss the targets. Guys, what are you doing? And you know, then you've got the Minister of Finance literally today. So how does it work? Emissions trading scheme. You've got bad things that can, you know, contribute to greenhouse gases and then you've got other things like pine forestry that mitigates it and it's like a balance sheet and you can trade, you know, if you've, if you've got a debt over here, you're creating emissions, well, you've got to do something to mitigate that. And so there's this emissions trading scheme, New Zealand's version of it has been set up. But the targets to get down to net zero, we're not going to meet them. And that means we're going to have to go and buy carbon credits from somebody else. And literally today, in the last 24 hours at least the Minister of Finance got all defensive and said, no, no, we're not going to be spending billions of dollars on carbon credits. Well, treasury is estimated we could be on the hook for like up to 23 billion.

So it's now getting into this. I mean, you've got a number of things going on here. How do you calculate what is greenhouse gas emissions? For a start? How do you calculate what a tree's worth in terms of mitigation? What price do you put on that is a carbon credit or carbon debt, if you like. And then what are the political decisions around how to manage all of that and what the targets are? Because the targets keep shifting and agriculture keeps getting this free pass and this exemption saying, oh, they need more time to mitigate because you can't change the biology of a cow. Well, yeah, okay, but it's so, it's, I mean, you could say Nicola Willis is right that no, we aren't going to be paying out billions because by the time the bill arrives, she'll probably be out of government.

So. And the bill will fall on somebody else's lap. So there's all. And then of course You've got Donald Trump, he pulled out of the Paris Agreement, and then Joe Biden putting us back in. So where does it all end?

But this is probably, I think, you know, there was some really difficult subjects in the series. The, the science around erosion, that was a difficult one. But I think this one was probably the most difficult because it was trying to. There's all these moving targets in parts that.

Are human decisions and human calculations and politics and economics, and.

It'S pretty hard to pin down.

And when you get a politician just wants to chuck out a sound bite to deflect a question, well, it doesn't really help the debate and it certainly doesn't help the environment because the environment's still doing what it's doing in response to what human beings are doing. And, and it's quite demoralizing when you know this much about this particular subject and then somebody pops up and says something quite, not just ignorant, but stupid. He's just like, oh, what do I do? So, yeah, it's a live issue. It really is. And of course, I mean, look what's just happened in the last sort of week or so in Indonesia and Thailand.

You know, and I know, I know a few journalists and sort of Southeast Asia and some of the stuff they're observing about.

A lady I know in Philippines, you know, she said there's.

You know, I don't know if what they call them cyclones or hurricanes. No, typhoons. Yeah. You know, and, and, and she said that they, they're getting those kinds of storms in areas that they haven't had them before.

And so you start to see the connections between some of these economic decisions. But then at that high level, it just seems to be a disconnect, I find when I'm looking at the news in different parts of the world. And then you've got this little corner of the world down here, Tarafati, and it's just getting hammered. So. Yeah, it does. There's the politics of it, the economics of it.

You know, New Zealand sits on the edge of the largest ocean in the world and, and the east coast, Tarafity, when there's bad weather, it usually comes in from the east. And, you know, there's some quite frightening things. Our Pacific cousins, you know, some of them, their, their islands are going to disappear probably in the not too distant future for, because of rising sea levels.

And so there's going to be sort of all sorts of migrations are going to, based on climate change. And I just see it as one of the most pressing issues that you know, we've got this hostility towards, in Western countries, particular to. There's this growing hostility to immigration. But it's like, well, okay, if you don't want people landing in your. In your country, then you need to start thinking about the wider implications of your economic policy, your consumption habits, everything. Because it does, you know. And I point to the Pacific because that's where.

It'S this great big blue expanse that people just fly over most of the time. But there's a lot going on. It's like the canary in the mine. And if we don't take notice of what's happening there, one day, it's going to blow up in our face, I think. Yeah, sorry, that's a bit of a tangent.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

No, I don't think it is. Right. I mean, I asked you how these things are all connected and you've given us a whole explanation there of how they're connected and why a book that to many listeners might be like, well, I've never been to New Zealand. That's really far away. I don't know where that is actually is quite directly relevant to things that they are perhaps more familiar with. So I think that does answer my question and is perhaps a good place to conclude our discussion about the book. Kind of having zoomed all the way out to the global level, leaving me with just the question of what you might be working on now that this series is done, it's in book form. Is there anything you're currently working on you want to give us a sneak preview of?

[Erin Smail]

Well, this project, funnily enough, was just a bit of a side gig for the last sort of eight, nine years. I've spent not all of my time, but a good chunk of it covering what you might call New Zealand's stolen generations.

I did a story in 2016 about the removal of indigenous children. It wasn't only indigenous children that were being taken by the state, but it was something like 80% in the sort of 70s and 80s through into the 90s. And when you had a population where Mori were 12, 15%, and it played out differently than it did in Australia and say Canada and the U.S. but the numbers here are actually worse. We took more children from a smaller population in a shorter space of time.

Prior to that, it really only kicked off in the sort of 60s and 70s. Prior to that, there were what were called native schools, where they were like the residential schools in Canada, but they were day schools. My grandmother and some of my aunties and uncles went to a native school and were punished for speaking their language. When they moved to the city, it sort of switched. It was the welfare that kind of stepped in and started taking kids and putting them in welfare institutions. And there was a lot of really horrendous abuse that went on. And so for some reason, this has just sort of flown under the radar for a long, long time. And one story I did sort of blew it up the lid off it. And there was a Royal Commission of Inquiry which only just wound up last year. So I've been covering it for sort of a good eight, nine years. And yeah, there's just been a concerted effort by successive New Zealand governments to, and I don't use this word lightly, cover it up. And. And so the Royal Commission's kind of been a bit of a, I suppose, a bit of an end point in terms of how my journalism on that subject. And I've just recently started a PhD covering some of the same area, but sort of more asking, well, what is it about New Zealand that we've managed to keep this under wraps for so long? I mean, Australia had an inquiry back in the 90s into the stolen generations, and I interviewed the guy that kind of exposed it there, the historian Peter Reed, who coined the term. And I've spoken to people in Canada and other places, and somehow New Zealand seems to have really slipped unnoticed in the space. But if you look at the parallels, they are quite uncanny, if you like. And it just seems to happen in colonized sort of settler states where you take the land, take the culture. Oh, you guys are still here. Or take your kids and try. It's just this targeting of children as a way to reshape a culture or a people. So that's going to keep me occupied for the next couple of years.

I tend to, I don't know, some. I sort of stretch the boundaries of journalism a bit because, I mean, that series of on the slash on. On the forestry stuff, that was, I think, 25,000 words all up. And I have to really take my hat off to the editors at Newsroom, to Murphy and Mark Jennings. They've given me some pretty generous kind of time and space to sort of explore not just these subjects, but a number of others.

And so, yeah, I've probably almost hit the sort of, well, hit the limits long ago, I think, of journalism. So I thought, well, I might as well go off and do a PhD.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, best of luck with that project and endeavor. It certainly sounds like a very important topic. So I hope that all goes well for you.

[Erin Smail]

Thank you. And thank you for having me on your program.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, for any listeners who want to know more about what we've been discussing, the book is titled Pine Prophet and the Cyclone, published by Bridget Williams in 2024. Aaron, thank you so much for joining me.

[Erin Smail]

Thank you, Miranda.