Cover Story
Fight for the beaches
by Tim Watkin
As our coastline is being sold off and developed, even the minister fears we’re losing access to those classic summer places.
It’s here on the left, the Tutukaka Estate,” says Wade Doak, pointing to a pair of large stone walls and a long driveway that heads up into the hills. On the roadside, real estate signs promote the glories of buying one of only three remaining lots, including a one-hectare slice of headland. “Ocean views”, “water, water everywhere” and “countless white sandy beaches”, the signs promise in letters black and bold. It’s a day to believe every word – the sky is blue and the sun insistent.
Doak, a diver, author and documentary maker, offers a wry grin. “It’s a funny thing. All these things that the real estate people appeal to are the values that we seek to defend. That’s what they’re selling, and thereby destroying.”
Call it our coastal conundrum. With a growing population, changing lifestyles and buoyancy on both the housing market and economy, increasing numbers of New Zealanders are looking to realise their dream of a place by the beach. For that place that their children and their children’s children can come back to; a place of pilgrimage. But every new arrival makes the pristine coastline we go in search of less pristine.
Each of us has a piece of New Zealand we regard as ours – not the part of it we occupy, but some remote beach or farm, mountain or bush reserve. – from Smith’s Dream, by C K Stead
Doak is among those who argue that unless we rein in development, the remote coastal getaway that Kiwis so revere will be trampled and lost. What’s more, plant life, bird habitats and archaeological sites will be trampled along with it. Others say it’s selfish of those already living the idyllic coastal life to deny them a piece of paradise. For now, it’s the developers who are winning. An Environmental Defence Society (EDS) report last year describes “an increased desire for lifestyle properties and an increased ability to pay for them”. The result: “The intrusion of large built structures into the natural character of important landscapes, thereby destroying the key element that made them important in the first place.”
As coastal property prices rise, more subdivisions are going in and farmers are carving up more land for wannabe bach or crib owners. It’s getting crowded on the coast.
Too crowded for Doak, who arrived on the Tutukaka coast north of Whangerei in 1968 with diving buddy Kelly Tarlton. The pair rented a house at Matapouri for $1 a week.
“From Wellington Bay to Ngunguru to Tutukaka, it’s all becoming one big suburb,” he says, sighing as we park the car and walk up the hill.
Doak, his wife Jan and fellow conservationists Pat Heffey and Akke Tiemersma want me to see the view from the top. A pencil-thin strip of land that underlines the beauty of the estuary and hinterland: Ngunguru sandspit. The 118ha spit is owned by development company Landco. Although its spokesman, George Hulbert, insists the company won’t have even “initial thoughts” about what it plans for the land until early next year, the locals are nervous and vowing to fight to protect it. The spit, the bays where it meets the land, and Whakairiora mountain on its flank, are untouched. There are rare congregations of trees, ample birdlife and walking paths that pre-date colonisation.
“Before we know it, those trees will be replaced by reflection off ranchsliders and car lights at night,” says Heffey, who’s known as Mrs Sandspit.
Standing on that hillside, the conservationists ask questions echoed in many coastal towns. Do we want to replace open space with gated communities? With some towns struggling to remain viable year round, do we want mansions for “snowbirds” who fly in from overseas for a few weeks a year, and land-banking, where people buy plots as an investment but don’t build or live there? And they talk around the big question: how much is too much?
The Ngunguru skirmish is merely one of many around our coastline. “There are 100 similar groups of people, backs on the ropes, all fighting the same battle,” says Doak. “It’s being fought all round the coast. But these people haven’t got the strength to stand up to the financial might of developers. So unless we can identify this development as a national issue, it’s going to be hard to stop.”
The squeeze is greatest in the north, where the population pressures and opportunities for profit are greatest. Whangaparaoa Peninsula and Omaha Beach have already succumbed. But the list of communities taking up pitchforks to see off eager developers is long.
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