The September meeting referred to above was the ‘Hill Country Land Management Workshop’ (Carlyon, 2004) held on 30 September 2004, which was hosted by the regional council and organised by (among others) Greg Carlyon, the Manager of Policy. The timing of this event proved to be opportune, as also articulated by Alec Mackay:
It was critical that it was held within six months [of the flood], not before ... we didn’t
need it early, people are still in denial and if we had done it any later people would have forgotten (Mackay interview, 2010).
The workshop was held the day following the opening of the exhibition. The workshop proved to be significant for the regional council, because it gave them what they took to be a mandate
to act, to ‘fix things’ (Murfitt interview, 2010). Garrick Murfitt’s description of the workshop
was that it was about:
What are we going to do, what shall we do, because we all agreed that it’s really what
the people wanted, because in the end they will be paying, and they just wanted things
fixed ... and that’s when we came up with the whole farm plan (Murfitt interview,
2010).
The focus of the day, as outlined in the notice sent to participants prior to the workshop, was to
take time with community leaders to talk through the issues facing, and the
opportunities available to restore, the region’s hill country following the February
Storm [sic] (Carlyon, 2004, p. 1). The objectives for the day were as follows:
Agree to work together and provide regional leadership on this issue. Agree the way forward for developing a game plan around the future use of severely eroded land, and
Confirm future roles and responsibilities (Carlyon, 2004, p. 1).
Somewhat at variance with Garrick Murfitt’s viewpoint of the workshop, the organisers of the day consciously or unconsciously played a large part in orchestrating the meeting outcomes, through the selection of who was invited and who and what was presented to the workshop. From those attending, a large contingent had backgrounds in sustainable land management and soil conservation – and in many instances they were well known to each other.
The 36 so-called ‘community leaders’ listed as attendees in the workshop report (Lester, 2004b) included: seven regional council councillors, including the then chair, Chris Lester and the soon to be chair Garrick Murfitt, the acting CE and six regional council staff members, including three science staff and three staff with backgrounds in soil conservation; six provincial farmer representatives from Federated Farmers, including one with a strong history and interest in SLM; four people from the Farm Forestry Association, three of whom were farmers in the region and one from the national organisation; one person from the NZ Institute of Forestry; Alec Mackay, a land and environmental scientist from AgResearch and member of Sustainable Land Use Research Initiative40 (SLURI); two Landcare Research soil scientists both with associations to SLURI, including John Dymond; an engineering geologist from Geological & Nuclear Sciences, with expertise in landslides; two Wanganui District and one Tararua District Council staff members; the Manawatu District Mayor; and one local farming leader whose farm and home had been devastatingly affected by the floods and who was also (at that time) a Director of SLURI and a recognised advocate and experienced user of trees for erosion control and fodder for stock on his Taihape hill country farm.
According to the programme for the day, Federated Farmers presented ‘Observations on the
storm event’, and the Farm Forestry Association gave a talk titled ‘Forestry is an option’ (Carlyon, 2004, pp. 1, 2), and the regional council staff members presented an overview of the extent of the erosion, based on the quantified digital data and analysis completed by Landcare Research and NIWA, as earlier alluded to by Grant Cooper. Alec Mackay from AgResearch
presented a rationale for the adoption of a ‘sustainable development strategy’ with a ‘sustainable
land management policy’ at its ‘heart’, ‘delivered at the farm scale through whole farm planning’ (Mackay, 2004, p. 3).
Alec Mackay’s involvement in the September workshop was the result of a ‘fortuitous’
(Mackay interview, 2007) meeting between Greg Carlyon and Alec Mackay earlier in the year. This meeting would lead to the long-term and influential involvement of Alec Mackay in the development, design and promotion of SLUI. Mackay recalls how he and another soil scientist, as representatives from the soil science community, gave a presentation to resource managers of regional councils in mid-2004, in which they gave the managers ‘an earful about the appalling
job they have done’, claiming that the managers had ‘completely failed in the protection of land as a resource and the life supporting capabilities of it’ (Mackay interview, 2010). His
recollection is that some in the audience reacted angrily but, in contrast, Greg Carlyon agreed
with the criticism directed at them: ‘I agree with you totally –it is just too hard’ (Mackay
40 Sustainable Land Use Research Initiative (SLURI) is a national government-funded research
programme for maintaining and managing New Zealand’s soils. It is a collaboration between three Crown Research Institutes, AgResearch, Landcare Research and Plant and Food Research (SLURI, 2010).
interview, 2010). As a result of this meeting and ongoing interactions, Mackay was invited to participate and present at the September workshop, where his call for the use of whole farm plans, as a way of achieving sustainable land management on farms, was, not surprisingly, taken up and became the central mechanism for change within the regional council’s SLUI.
Broad agreement was reached at the meeting on a number of issues that would inform the future development of the policy initiative developed by the regional council. The points agreed to at the meeting clearly reflect the focus of the presentations made on the day and included the potential role of forestry and whole farm plans, as mechanisms for achieving sustainable land
management on erodible hill country, albeit with conditions. Both options were ‘familiar’
(Cooper interview, 2007) to council staff members and many farmers present, since farm plans
and forestry were tools employed historically by the regional council and the region’s previous
catchment boards, for soil conservation work on farms. The issues agreed to at the meeting included:
The areas of accelerated erosion are of greatest concern and need attention; ... that
whole farm plans are a useful tool for working with landowners in priority sites; ...
forestry is an important tool for erosion control. However it is not a panacea for all ills. ... Hill country landowners do not want blanket afforestation or wholesale retirement of land. ... The economics of land-use change must stack up. ... [and] Landowners do not want a lot of rules imposed on them. In general, councils are using voluntary
approaches, however there are environmental bottom lines that need to be stated (Lester, 2004b, p. 1, bold as in original).
The workshop attendees agreed that ‘[the regional council] is to take the initiative to move this issue forward. It will ‘shoulder tap’ key groups and individuals to be involved in a steering
group (overall governance) and appropriate Working Groups’ (Lester, 2004b, p. 2). ‘Who is
going to pay for this?’ was also a concern that emerged from the meeting and it was noted that there was a need to ‘raise the urban and general public awareness of the funding needed.’ However, it was also stated that ‘fund-raising proposals need to be developed’ (Lester, 2004b, p. 3). Furthermore, a caution was noted that, although central government could be sounded out
for funding, ‘outside funding can also mean outside control, and this is not desirable’ (Lester, 2004b, p. 2). Also agreed on was the need for ‘some groups who were missing from the workshop ... to be included in future work’ and this included ‘river engineers and lowland
communities’ (Lester, 2004b, p. 3). There is no evidence to suggest that this action was in fact followed through, since membership of the groups formed to take the initiative forward did not include representatives of these other groups.
The regional council had a clear strategy when it included the members it did in the steering group or Governance Group41. The ‘whole strategy’, as described by McCartney, was to establish a network of trusted linkages into the hill country community, through people who
were influential and respected in the community and thus, through them, gain farmer ‘buy in’
for the initiative that was to be developed, from those who would need to implement the policy on the ground (McCartney interview, 2007). He explained further:
To say to the [provincial] presidents of Federated Farmers, ‘Is this a good idea?’ and get
their commitment to it, and say ... ‘How do you think we should approach it? Then they
give us their views, from their stakeholder or vested interest perspective and that’s the way you get buy in, so when they go out and talk about sustainable land use they do so in a way that is positive rather than reacting to something that [the regional council] might produce (McCartney interview, 2007).
A Federated Farmers’ representative involved with the regional council in SLUI expressed it slightly differently:
We were asked to shoulder tap and ask other farmers that we thought might be useful ... useful people that would be more conducive to what they wanted to sell (Rainey interview, 2007).
The participation of representatives from the region’s district councils was also identified by
McCartney as ‘important tactically because they are another step potentially closer to their communities and they need to be in support’ (McCartney interview, 2007). Part of the job of
this Governance Group, highlighted by a regional council staff member on the group, was to
lobby central government, ‘back through Feds, Landcare Trust to whoever they can link
through’ (Cooper interview, 2007). The Governance Group was established and met for the first
time in December 2004. Membership of this original group of 19 also suggests that it too was strategically orchestrated. Members, as listed in the written evidence submitted by Greg Carlyon to the hearings committee for the Proposed One Plan (Carlyon, 2008), included three regional council councillors, including the chair, Garrick Murfitt and David Meads (both farmers), and three managers from the regional council, Alistair Beveridge, Grant Cooper and Greg Carlyon, in addition to the new chief executive, Michael McCartney. Four Federated Farmers
representatives were on the group, three of whom were hill country farmers and current provincial presidents from within the region. The group also included the mayor of the Manawatu district council, the chief executives of both the Rangitikei district council and Landcare Trust, two regional hill-country farmer members of the Farm Foresters Association, an agricultural economist, a farming leader who was also a hill country farmer, and Alec
41
Mackay from AgResearch. Noticeably absent was any representation from Federated Farmers or the Ruapehu District Council.
According to Greg Carlyon’s evidence presented to the Land Hearing for the One Plan, the
Governance Group at its first meeting ‘agreed the purpose and general content of the land use
package – the Sustainable Land Use Initiative was formed – along with the Working Party
participants, deliverables and timelines’ (Carlyon, 2008, p. 5).
The original working party had a core membership of 12, seven of whom were also on the Governance Group. Membership included five managers from the regional council, Alec Mackay from AgResearch, two provincial presidents of Federated Farmers who were also hill country farmers, a local Farm Forestry Association member and farmer, an agricultural economist, a staff member from the Tararua District Council, and an agricultural consultant (Carlyon, 2008).