Mana Taiao Tairāwhiti spokesperson Manu Caddie said their “main message” to the council was that it did not have to “pander to the industry”.

“They are not as powerful as you think,” he told the councillors on Thursday, at the first meeting of the year.

Eastland Wood Council, which represents forestry in Gisborne and Wairoa, said that comment was “highly emotive” and it was “not the case” that the council appeased forestry.

The group was “deeply engaged with the council and trying to make meaningful, sustainable change in our industry”, chairman Julian Kohn told Local Democracy Reporting.

Mana Taiao Tairāwhiti (MTT) organised a petition three years ago, following the devastation of ex-Tropical Cyclone Hale, which has been signed by over 12,000 people and sparked the Ministerial Inquiry into Land Use report. Cyclone Gabrielle hit the region just weeks later.

On Thursday, close to the third anniversary of the cyclones and the presentation of the petition to the council, MTT held a hīkoi of around 35 people and presented the council with a “Petition progress score card”, a briefing paper, and four requests for more action.

Protesters speaking with Local Democracy Reporting said they wanted more action on land-use changes.

Member of MTT Tui Warmenhoven said marching again felt “like deja vu”.

“We’re lobbying the council directly to say we want action faster.”

Mere Tamanui said she had been displaced after Cyclone Gabrielle and was there for her “whakapapa and whānau connections to the whenua”.

She spent two years, “mucking through the silt”, but ended up moving to another farm in a different Tairāwhiti town for work.

“The detachment from our home has been pretty significant on our wellbeing emotionally ... It’s taken its toll.”

Tracking the progress since the petition, at the council meeting, Caddie noted, to the council’s “credit” it had invested in the Transition Advisory Group (TAG), a cross-sector group to create guidelines to assist in transitioning highly erodable land, and the group had “built consensus” on the Transition Business case.

It brought together “really diverse, disparate interests” from forestry and farming, members of the community, environmental perspectives, and the council and MPI, Caddie said.

However, “within the last week you’ve been told there’s no support from central government,” he said.

MTT asked the council to up its “advocacy game” in requesting support for the transition programme business case to all MPs and ministers.

During the hīkoi, attendee Renee Raroa told Local Democracy Reporting that the community had done a lot of groundwork for planning solutions.

She still wanted to see the resourcing achieved to put the thinking into action, despite the central Government “not coming to the party with funding”.

Caddie said at the meeting there was “some better practice now” as a result of council action since the petition.

Part of these actions, Caddie said, was enforcement orders, which had “probably been the most effective” measure to change forestry practice in the last 10 years. However, “unfortunately, this is also an expensive process”.

As part of the group’s requests, MTT wanted the council to require all existing forestry consent holders to commission independent risk assessments on their blocks.

Additionally, they wanted the council to stop allowing consents for planting and clear-fell harvesting in red and orange zoned land.

Kohn said in recent years, the industry had been doing risk assessments, along the lines of what had been indicated in enforcement areas, and in line with what the draft regulation changes to the National Environmental Standards indicate might be required in the future.

“As a result of the enforcement orders, and as a pragmatic change by forestry companies, we are already doing risk assessments as part of our consenting process.

“We have not been doing independents; we do it with our own staff, but we do have advisers and consultants come along and provide us with advice when appropriate.

The vast majority of land in the district was red zone, Kohn said.

“If you don’t plant something in this land, then it will end up in the streams and the creeks and the rivers and our moana, which we’re all trying to avoid.”

He said the debate about what to plant on the land, whether it should be radiata, another exotic species or natives, was a whole other conversation.

However, there was mutual agreement that in the Overlay 3B (LO3B), and Indicative Transition Zone (ITZ), which was land identified as a high priority for transition, vegetation cover needed to transition out of radiata into “some other form”, Kohn said.

He said they were not disagreeing “in principle” with the TAG conversations about converting 100,000ha of erosion-prone land in Tairāwhiti to permanent native vegetation cover.

“We’re completely on board with that, and we have been doing that for a few years now, because as part of our consent conditions we are required to plant something else in those gullies ... but we do have concerns around how it is enacted.”

The hīkoi started at Young Nick’s Statue at Waikanae Beach at 9am and presented to the council at 10am, and then moved on to National Party MP for East Coast Dana Kirkpatrick’s offices.

LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.