An artist impression of indigenous design elements on the new Sarjeant Gallery wing to support Whanganui cultural narratives.
Whanganui District Council says it “jumped the gun” by initially not consulting iwi on how to spend $6 million of Government funding.
But after a relationship “reset”, the council has since worked closely with local Māori to spend better-off funding from the now-abandoned Three Waters reform support package.
The money is being used on a set of priorities agreed between the council and hapū, including partnership projects, climate change, marae infrastructure and cultural narratives.
The priorities were agreed after a Whanganui River iwi entity raised concerns with the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) and councils over the lack of Māori involvement in local decision-making processes for the fund.
In 2021, Whanganui was offered nearly $24m of funding, which was widely described as a sweetener for councils affected by the previous Government’s Three Waters reform.
The guidelines for the fund included “really good guidance” on how authorities should involve iwi Māori in the local decision-making process, Ngā Tāngata Tiaki o Whanganui kaihautū (chief executive) Nancy Tuaine said.
“However, the funding agreement is absolutely void of this commitment so in reality local authorities do not need to give it any weight,” Tuaine wrote last September in an email to the DIA team responsible for the better-off funding.
“It’s only a guide – we get that excuse all the time,” Tuaine wrote.
Councillors put forward a plethora of early suggestions on how to spend the better-off funding, leaving chief executive David Langford to come up with a plan. None of the funding was earmarked for iwi projects.
Tuaine said Whanganui River Māori stepped in, asking the Ruapehu and Whanganui district councils to consider iwi and hapū views.
“If you want to address the matters of inequity and participation of iwi Māori in local [government], then build it into contracts and set real KPI related to setting decisions and implementation,” Tuaine wrote in her email to the DIA.
Langford told Local Democracy Reporting that councils were expected to invest the funding in new, additional services to replace some of what they would lose when Three Waters services were taken away from councils.
“As councils often do, we jumped the gun a little bit and got ahead of ourselves, but we had a quick reset with the hapū,” Langford said.
“We got in the room and agreed how we were going to work together. Once we got on the same page, the process went really smoothly.
“We discussed all of our different ideas for how the funding could be used, and through that process we agreed a set of priorities. They became our pou [pillars].”
The spending programme now benefited hapū and marae as well as the wider community, Langford said.
“It is such a good balance between the whole community’s needs being met rather than any one initiative being totally hapū or totally pākehā. It’s touching right across the community.”
The $6m from the first tranche of better-off funding has been spread across four pou: Active Partnership (to support the council and hapū working together on a range of projects including the new 30-year vision for Whanganui) $600,000; Adapting to a Changing World (responding to climate change issues impacting the community, including marae close to the river) $2m; Marae Infrastructure (supporting marae upgrades such as installing new septic tanks) $1.4m; and Our Cultural Narrative (supporting the redesign of the outside of the new wing of the Sarjeant Gallery) $2m.
Council earmarked nearly $18m of promised second tranche funding for further community work, including some of its initial ideas.
However, that money was scrapped in April when the original four-entity Three Waters proposal was replaced by the 10-entity Affordable Water model.
Earlier council plans included bigger climate change initiatives.
“Now we don’t have that $18m coming our way, we do need to reconsider how we fund those projects.
“Council is starting to put a lot more effort into how to find alternative funding.”
A lot of work was going on across the district in the meantime, Langford said.
“New roofs have gone on whare, other marae are putting decking and sunshades around the marae. Others are looking to see if they can put it toward housing on marae grounds and kickstart some of the development plans they have.”
The funding is available until 2027.
Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.