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The Detail is a daily news podcast produced for RNZ by Press room and is posted on Stuff with permission. Click on this link to subscribe to the podcast.
We’re already in the middle of a financial crisis, but there’s another slow-burning crisis lurking in the background, the cost of which could dwarf the impact of Covid-19.
New Zealand is a long, thin country, most of us live less than an hour from the beach, and the sea is rising rapidly.
Even the best scenarios suggest a minimum sea level rise of 50 centimeters by the end of the 21st century. It could measure up to three meters.
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And that would spell doom for the tens of thousands of properties that dot the New Zealand coastline.
The problem is that those properties represent tens of billions of dollars in assets, much of which is owned by banks.
So are we on the verge of a massive, coordinated government buyout?
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The impacts of coastal erosion in the Napier-Hastings area are most evident in Haumoana.
And if so, is it fair to ask minimum wage earners, some of whom will never pray to own a home, to rescue the vacation homes of millionaires?
Today in The detail, Emile Donovan talks to Stuff senior political reporter Thomas Coughlan and Victoria University professor Tim Naish about the idea of a ‘controlled retreat’, the idea of gradually migrating people from the coast, and how the government could execute it responsibly and fairly.
At best, nearly 70,000 properties will be uninhabitable and unusable by 2100.
Of these, about 44,000 are houses, which provide shelter for more than 100,000 people.
In the worst case, you can double those numbers.
So how do you move what is, at the very least, the population of Hamilton to a different part of the country?
“The government will come up with a plan whereby it will buy a lot of people,” says Thomas Coughlan, a senior political reporter for Stuff.
But that brings its own set of difficulties: If the government has to buy tens of thousands of people within 30 years, who is going to pay?
Is it fair to ask bartenders earning minimum wage and supermarket workers to pay taxes to buy multi-million dollar white elephant properties with no resale value?
“It is very difficult to legislate. You can’t have a clause in a law that says, ‘If you’re a rich jerk and you buy a house by the sea, they don’t rescue you.’
“Did we rescue people who knew better? Do we use everyone’s money to rescue very rich people?
“Do we take money from people who will never have a house to allow someone who already has many houses to buy a few more? It forces people to make very uncomfortable political decisions.
“It will force some of the most difficult political decisions on a government in our lives.”
Environment Minister David Parker has already pledged to provide, by the end of this term, a law outlining how managed withdrawal could work.
Meanwhile, the price of beachside properties continues to rise, as does the ocean itself.
