Mount Maunganui landslide: Tauranga needs experienced leaders, not famous names

I was there last week. It was quiet. Eerie almost. It’s not the same.

My visit coincided with the release of the first of what will be many reports into the disaster. Retired High Court judge Paul Davison, KC, was appointed by the council to conduct an external review of the disaster.

The former judge presented his findings. He was forthright and direct. And he placed the Tauranga City Council squarely in his frame of blame.

Of course, a city council can’t stop land from sliding. However, as it turns out, this city council had been warned many times that the land was unstable and that any movement was a danger to the people using the area, including the campers. Those warnings ran right up to the morning of the disaster.

But no one did anything. Until it was too late.

Tauranga City Council has a long road ahead. The Davison Review is damning. And it’s only the first one. There will be other reviews and inquiries; the Government is running its own, as are the Police and WorkSafe. Each will be emboldened by Davison’s words. They’ll all tell a similar story. Preventable disaster.

I’m a person who believes in accidents. Sometimes, bad things happen and it’s nobody’s fault.

Mother Nature makes things happen. She throws massive waves, howling winds and torrential rain at us from time to time. Sometimes the earth moves too. Most of the time we’re defenceless in the face of nature doing what it wants to do. We will never beat nature.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t prepare for it to the fullest extent possible.

The Mount Maunganui landslide was one of those things. Nature doing what nature does. There was probably little that could have been done to stop it. But, given the warnings, there was plenty that could be done, to get the people out of the way.

Six people died. Davison told us that they didn’t have to. And the finger-pointing started with immediate effect.

For context, it makes sense to review some of the history of this council. A council characterised by underqualified councillors, people staying too long, and deep division.

It seemed that, after years of unrest, the people of Tauranga finally saw sense in 2019 when they elected a former local, Tenby Powell, as mayor. Powell grew up in the city, went to school there and left to pursue his career. But he came back home to make a difference.

Powell has credentials. A successful military career, which he managed to run in parallel with a successful business career, gave Powell the skillsets to make a contribution to the city. His arrival attracted the ire of those long-serving councillors whose personal agendas he sought to disrupt. The divisive issues of a decade were laid bare in a few short weeks. Long-serving councillors, including a former mayor, were reluctant to let go.

Powell made some early and steady progress. But a prostate cancer diagnosis, just 12 months into his term, forced him to step aside. But this was no ordinary mess and the usual succession plans did not apply.

At the end of 2020, Powell recommended that the Government appoint a commissioner to take charge of the disunited council. The council was suspended because of severe governance issues, and former National Party MP Anne Tolley was appointed as chair of the commission to run the city.

The return to local body elections in July 2024 saw a new council elected. The commissioner’s term ended and local body elections gave the people democratic control of their city once again. But the people of Tauranga hadn’t learned.

Some of the same old councillors were re-elected. And the people of Tauranga voted for a famous name instead of substance in choosing new mayor, and decorated Olympian, Mahé Drysdale.

Drysdale has had a magnificent sporting career. He has won multiple world titles and Olympic medals. He’s a two-time Olympic champion. He’s a national hero. And rightfully so.

After retiring from professional sport in 2021, Drysdale, a qualified accountant, became a financial advisor, joining Hobson Wealth and then Forsyth Barr. He’s a decent person and, according to those who have met him, a genuinely nice guy.

I don’t mean any harm to Drysdale, but with due respect to him, his career as a professional athlete, and a few years as a financial advisor, does not equip a person, any person, for the rigours of leading a rapidly growing city with a population approaching 200,000 people. It does not equip a person to lead people, manage accountability with senior executives and other stakeholders, or preside over a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Of course, Drysdale is not responsible for the slip at the Mount. But the fact that a person with his limited experience is at the helm of a city of this size, is reflective of the issue we have with our local bodies.

Part of the problem is the lack of interest in local body politics which extends from voter apathy to the quality of candidates. Just 39% of those eligible voted in Tauranga in 2024. When apathy kills people, we need to do something.

But candidate quality is a critical factor too. Experienced executives in New Zealand will understand the importance and priority attached to health and safety. The topic features in every agenda we see. Issues are highlighted and discussed, and teams are encouraged to report new areas of potential harm.

I would venture to suggest that, if an experienced company director turned up to a local council as a councillor or a mayor, they would be looking for the health and safety reporting very early in their custodianship.

So I’m trying to understand why that hasn’t happened in over 25 years at the Tauranga City Council.

Since 1999, the council has received a range of reports and other advice detailing the landslide and rockfall risks affecting the campground.

And yet not a single mayor – according to interviews in last weekend’s Herald – have any idea about it. The CEO, himself in the seat since 2018, claims to have known nothing of it. The phrase “hasn’t reached my desk” is being trotted out at will.

Something is deeply wrong. This is a massive failure of governance at every level. If the Tauranga City Council was a board of directors, they would be rushing to their D&O Insurance policies in a hell of a hurry, and likely be preparing for a 10-year fight to clear their names. They’d also be preparing to resign all other directorships.

Meantime, we have the incumbents at Tauranga telling us that they are the best people to implement Mr Davison’s recommendations. I think not.

The role of a person leading an enterprise is to ensure that the systems, processes and environment are created to ensure that priority matters get to the right people. Nowhere are those systems and processes more important than in the facilitation of health and safety.

Those systems and processes are built through experience and the ability to ask good questions. That experience will tell you where to look. The reports don’t “find their own way to your desk” unless you ensure that trusted people and processes can be relied on to prioritise issues, resolve them and communicate the outcomes.

A landslip without warning is an accident. If people get caught, it’s a tragedy.

A landslip with warning is an accident that we should have been prepared for.

So, the fact that people died at Mount Maunganui that day is a failure at multiple levels. It is very clear that the governance structure that we should expect of our local authorities has failed. It’s a failure of councillors, commissioners, mayors and the executive team responsible for leading the organisation.

It should be a wake-up call for our local authorities. The risks attached to the operation of a city are more substantial than most businesses. And yet most businesses, it would seem, treat such risks more seriously.

In my mind, at the heart of the issue is the experience and capability of our elected officials. How do we fix that?

Perhaps Local Government New Zealand could ask the Institute of Directors to run a modified version of its excellent Company Directors Course for new councillors at the start of each electoral cycle. It would be expensive. And worth every dollar.

Perhaps society can put aside the apathy that surrounds local body politics and push forward the many well-qualified and capable citizens who are part of their communities. Former business owners, school principals, semi-retired company directors. People who understand leadership in dynamic organisations.

Perhaps we need to make it easier, and less onerous, for experienced and capable people to contribute to council activities or to coach elected officials.

I heard the CEO of Tauranga City Council speaking on Newstalk ZB after the Davison report. He’s been in the role for eight years. Plenty of time, one would think, for the implementation of suitable processes around the safety of the citizens he represents.

He was asked if he was considering resigning. He replied that he was the best placed person to implement the recommendations from the inquiry.

I don’t understand what would make him think that. These problems are well established. It’s time for fresh eyes.