Cyclone Gabrielle: PM Chris Hipkins to announce forestry slash inquiry on Thursday during Hawke’s Bay visit

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is expected to announce an immediate inquiry into forestry slash issues following Cyclone Gabrielle during a visit to Hawke’s Bay on Thursday.

Cabinet ministers met on Wednesday to discuss the terms of reference for the independent inquiry, which will be focused specifically on the issue of forestry slash and is expected to be completed within two months.

The inquiry will provide recommendations on how to tackle the issue in the short-term while broader land-use issues, as called for by thousands of East Coast locals in a petition, are expected to be covered as part of wider government reforms, including the Natural and Built Environment bill which will replace the Resource Management Act.

It comes after a major campaign from East Coast residents to investigate slash and wider land issues after Cyclone Gabrielle saw tonnes of woody debris, mixed in with silt and sediment, blanketed across landscapes, destroying critical infrastructure and polluting rivers and the marine coastal environment.

Images of bridges and roads decimated and surrounded by slash and silt in Tairāwhiti mirror those in the aftermath of Cyclone Hale just a month ago, and several other storms in recent years that have caused tens of millions of dollars of damage and brought the community to breaking point.

Forestry slash in the river seen during a flight over Gisborne after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / East Coast MP Kiritapu Allan

Experts say this issue is likely to only increase with climate change and cyclones becoming more frequent and ferocious.

After Cyclone Hale in January, the community rallied behind an independent inquiry into land use in Tairāwhiti and for Gisborne District Council to prioritise a review of land-use rules for the erosion-prone land that comprises 80 per cent of the region.

The issue was further crystallised after a young boy was killed in Gisborne after being struck by a log while swimming at a local beach.

Shortly after Cyclone Gabrielle struck Prime Minister Chris Hipkins promised an inquiry into the issue of slash, and now all five political parties have indicated their support along with the farming and forestry industries alike.

National Party leader Christopher Luxon has called for strong action saying it is a “great industry” they want to continue support.

“But it is the only sector I know that gets to internalise the benefit and to socialise the cost.

“We need to revisit practices. We need to revisit penalties and prosecutions, as a result.”

Slash is essentially woody debris left behind by the forestry industry after harvest which can wash into and clog waterways during heavy rain. In large storms, it can accumulate and end up taking out bridges and other infrastructure, along with smothering the land and the coast.

The issue is complicated though, with one in four households in the Tairāwhiti region depending on forestry for employment.

The forestry industry also argues a proportion of woody debris comes from native forests and farmland, often ripped out of the land in storms due to the infamously-soft East Coast terrain. A Gisborne District Council study in 2017 after Cyclone Cook in the Uawa/Tolaga Bay catchment found about 70 per cent was pine and about 30 per cent willows.

Another major issue is the amount of silt and sediment washing off hillsides still used for farming and highly vulnerable to erosion. Images have emerged of houses buried under metres of silt washed off eroding landscapes.

The issues were also unique to the region, which had about a quarter of the country’s most severely eroding soil, and historical in that they date back to when the native forests were cleared for farming by European settlers.

The folly of farming steep and eroding land was realised by the 1960s and the government started incentivising landowners to plant much of it in trees in an attempt to save it from washing away. More intensive work continued after Cyclone Bola in 1988, but these lots were sold off with the intention they would at some point be harvested.

The forestry industry has said that it has changed practices since 2018 when heavy rain and flooding in Tolaga Bay left tonnes of forestry debris strewn across farms, resulting in multiple prosecutions. Some of those planted forests in the most highly-erodable land are even off-limits for harvesting.

But East Coast residents and experts say more needs to be done, with options including ending the clear-felling of plantation forests, increasing use of slash traps, and even retiring more of the steepest and most-erodable land and reverting it to native forest.

Alongside addressing slash issues, a lead minister has been appointed for each of the affected regions, tasked with reporting back on the local recovery approach.

This includes making infrastructure more resilient to future storms and deciding where is safe to rebuild.

A new Cabinet committee - including the regional ministers - has been formed along with a cyclone recovery taskforce, structured similarly to Queensland’s floods taskforce, headed by Sir Brian Roche.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson has been appointed the new Cyclone Recovery Minister.

An emergency package of $250 million for roads and $50 million for affected businesses has been announced this week with the Government indicating much more support to come.