"They Gave Them a Permit to Destroy It - The Waiaua River swimming spot" - 21 May 2026
Mōrena Aotearoa,
This essay examines the destruction of the Waiau River swimming hole near Ōmarumutu because it directly affects Māori whānau, local tamariki, and the public accountability of Bay of Plenty Regional Council over environmental decision-making in te rohe o Whakatōhea.
A Taiaha in Bureaucratic Clothing
Picture this.
You are a taniwha. You have guarded this bend in the Waiaua for generations — watched the children of Te Whakatōhea swim in the shallows, watched elders sit on the bank while their mokopuna played, watched whitebaiters and flounder fishers read the current the way their tīpuna taught them.
You are the memory of the awa made flesh. You are mauri made visible.
Then one day the bulldozers arrive. They do not ask your name. They do not ask anyone's name. They have a piece of paper
— a "permitted activity" under the Bay of Plenty Regional Council's Natural Resources Plan — and that piece of paper has erased you. The swimming hole is gone.
The landing is gone. The shade is gone. The water is too shallow now for anything except the quiet grief of people who used to gather here.
Loss of swimming hole a blow to communityBeacon Media Group
This is not a metaphor. This is Motu Road and Jackson Road, te rohe o Whakatōhea, and it happened while we were watching.
Who Is Te Whakatōhea, and Why Does This River Matter?
Before I go further, let me tell you exactly whose river this is.
As recorded by Te Ara — The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Te Whakatōhea exercised mana over a 35-kilometre stretch of the eastern Bay of Plenty, and their territory was defined entirely by its rivers and the food they provided
— the Waiōtahe, the Waiōweka, the Ōtara, the Waiaua. Their tūpuna Tūtāmure built pā at Waiaua, including the iconic pyramid-shaped Mākeo behind Ōmarumutu marae
— the very kura where children from this community attend today.
The awa were not scenery. They were food sources, transport routes, sacred boundaries, and living tūpuna.
As Te Ara confirms, "all of Te Whakatōhea's fortified villages were sited along the coastal platform to defend the marine resources."
The Deep Dive Podcast
Legally Erasing the Waiaua River Swimming Hole
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Listen to a lively conversation between two hosts, unpacking and connecting topics in the sources of this essay. I apologise in advance for the AI's very harsh pronounciation of reo. Please dont shoot me, :).
Then, in 1865, 144,000 acres of Te Whakatōhea land — including the coastline from Maraetōtara to the Waiaua River
— was confiscated under the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863, as documented by Te Ara.
The sub-tribes were jammed into the Ōpape native reservation. That theft is the foundation upon which "adjoining landowners" now claim management rights over the awa that Te Whakatōhea never ceded.
So when Bay of Plenty Regional Council tells you this earthworks was a matter between them and the landowners, understand what that means: the landowners hold land taken from tangata whenua in an act of colonial confiscation, and the council handed them a "permitted activity" to reshape the river without public notification, without community consent, and without genuine hapū authority.
As Te Ara records, Te Whakatōhea have been in pre-settlement negotiations since 2016. This riverbank destruction did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in a context of ongoing dispossession.
What Happened: The Verified Facts
As reported by Beacon Media Group's Eastern Bay App on 17 February 2022, resident Grant Kelly said he was "shattered" after earthworks on the Waiaua River left the popular swimming hole destroyed, the river too shallow, and the shaded picnic spot
— where adults watched their children swim — gone entirely.
His words: "There is no public river beach access and no swimming hole anymore in the Waiau Stream."
The site was used by swimmers, school students, whitebaiters, flounder fishers, and paddleboarders, as Beacon Media Group reported.
These are not abstract uses. These are the living practices of mahinga kai — the gathering of food and the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next.
For western readers: imagine if the council allowed someone to fill in the public beach at Mount Maunganui because it was technically on a privately managed stretch of coast, and then told the public there was no notification requirement.
That is functionally what happened here.
Bay of Plenty Regional Council's Coastal Catchments Manager Charles Harley confirmed the earthworks did not require resource consent because they met "permitted activity rules," as Beacon Media Group reported. He said the council had been liaising with landowners before work began. He also said the council engaged with Te Whakatōhea — but he did not say Te Whakatōhea approved, endorsed, or consented to the works.
There is a vast difference between being informed and being empowered. The council chose to paper over that difference.
The Legal Fraud in Plain Sight
Bay of Plenty Regional Council's own earthworks guidance states that a resource consent will "generally" be needed to work in any river, stream, lake, or wetland, and that permitted activity conditions include requirements to avoid untreated sediment entering watercourses, blocking river flows, or causing erosion.
The council said the work met those conditions. The community says the outcome is a destroyed swimming hole and a too-shallow channel. Someone is lying, or no one is checking.
The same council publishes its Engaging Māori policy stating it is obliged to "engage in more integrated approaches of co-governance, co-management and partnerships with iwi." The council's own cultural consultation guidance says engaging with tangata whenua is "mandatory," that tangata whenua have a legal right to be involved in decision-making, and that only tangata whenua can identify their relationship with special places.
And yet the verified public record shows a community blindsided, a hapū informed rather than empowered, and a riverbank permanently changed without public notification. This is what the white supremacist neoliberal state looks like in practice: not jackboots and flags, but permitted activities and council officers using planning instruments to sanction the destruction of taonga while keeping their hands clean.
Three Examples for the Western Mind
Example 1: The Tikanga of Mahinga Kai — What Was Actually Destroyed
For western readers who do not yet understand why a swimming hole is a political issue: in te ao Māori, as explained by LEARNZ, the awa is a tūpuna — a living ancestor. Māori identity is linked to awa through whakapapa descending from Ranginui and Papatūānuku. The swimming hole at this bend in the Waiaua was not simply a pleasant summer spot. It was a site of mahinga kai — the gathering of food, the passing of river knowledge, the physical act of connection between tamariki and the living water of their tīpuna.
Quantified harm: When a swimming hole is destroyed, you do not just lose a swimming hole. You lose the site where a parent teaches a child to read the current. You lose the place where a grandparent names the fish. You lose the lived, embodied link between a generation and their awa. As documented by Te Ara, Te Whakatōhea's entire territorial identity was structured around their awa. The earthworks did not merely remove a recreational amenity — they severed a connection that cannot be quantified in dollars.
Solution: Bay of Plenty Regional Council must immediately release its full compliance record — the exact permitted activity rule relied on, the pre- and post-work monitoring data, and documentation of what engagement with Te Whakatōhea actually involved. It must then commit to a restoration programme co-designed with hapū, including riparian planting and the restoration of public river access at this site.
Example 2: The Whanganui River — What Happens When Māori Rights Over Water Are Respected
For those who want to understand what genuine acknowledgement of Māori relationships with water looks like, consider the Whanganui River. As National Geographic documented, in 2017 the New Zealand government acknowledged the Māori worldview that the Whanganui is a living entity and granted it legal personhood — an "indivisible, living whole" with "all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of an individual." As Parse Journal explains, taonga can be considered animate and alive because they instantiate ancestral hau (life breath), mauri (life force), and mana (spiritual power) in the present.
Quantified harm: That legal framework exists at the national level. But it has not filtered down to the way Bay of Plenty Regional Council administers a "permitted activity" that lets a landowner gut a river bend without public notification. Meanwhile, as NZ Herald reported, Tātau Tātau o Te Wairoa Trust has begun High Court proceedings seeking recognition of customary title over freshwater river beds — following Ngāi Tahu's 2020 claim. The legal tide is turning. Regional councils that continue treating freshwater as a resource for landowners to manage are building on sand.
Solution: Bay of Plenty Regional Council must apply a Te Tiriti o Waitangi lens to every permitted activity that touches any waterbody in the region, require hapū sign-off before any earthworks near mahinga kai sites, and fund independent monitoring — not self-reporting by landowners — of all post-work environmental conditions.
Example 3: The Pattern — This Is What Bay of Plenty Regional Council Does to Māori
This is not an isolated incident. As Ngāi Te Rangi CEO Paora Stanley publicly called out in 2025, Bay of Plenty Regional Council has repeatedly failed to uphold its promises to mana whenua. The failure to consult community and hapū before these earthworks is part of a documented pattern of regional government treating Māori engagement as a box to tick rather than a Treaty obligation to honour, as the council's own Engaging Māori policy confirms they are legally required to fulfil.
This government — the white supremacist neoliberal coalition of Luxon, Peters, and Seymour — has been systematically dismantling every mechanism that gave Māori any power in these decisions. As I documented in Te Ara Utu: The Toll Road to Nowhere, this is a government that looks at the most deprived regions in Aotearoa and sees opportunity, not obligation. And as I exposed in When the Whenua Bleeds: Contaminated Land, Contaminated Water, Contaminated Futures, the degradation of Māori waterways is a crime scene the state keeps signing off on with planning documents.
Quantified harm: Under this government, fast-track consenting reforms have reduced public notification requirements and hapū engagement across a wide range of resource activities — a deliberate policy to accelerate extraction at the expense of community and Treaty rights. The Waiau earthworks happened under an earlier framework, but the direction of travel is toward more permitted activities, less notification, and less hapū power. The swimming hole is gone. The next one will go even faster.
Solution: Restore mandatory public notification and genuine hapū consent requirements to all permitted activity rules that affect waterbodies. Make the destruction of mahinga kai sites a notifiable environmental incident requiring independent investigation and mandatory restoration. Fund Te Whakatōhea and all hapū directly to monitor their own awa.
Implications: What You Are Being Asked to Accept
I have lived in this rohe for fifteen years. My two boys have attended Ōmarumutu Kura. I went to that riverbank myself after the earthworks. What I saw was a changed river — shallower, stripped of its landing, stripped of the shade where you could sit and watch your tamariki in the water. The community gathering place is gone. It has been changed forever.
You are being asked to accept that this is normal. You are being asked to accept that a permitted activity rule — designed to allow minor maintenance — can be used to erase a community swimming place without public notification, without community consent, and without any obligation to restore what was lost. You are being asked to accept that "engaging" with Te Whakatōhea means informing them, not empowering them.
I do not accept that. Neither should you.
The model being applied here — landowners first, community second, hapū last — is the model this neoliberal government is entrenching at every level of the resource management system. It is the same model that destroyed Māori health infrastructure, as I documented in Dismantling Māori Health: A Colonial Legacy Resurrected. It is the same model exposed in Colonial Amnesia in the House. It says: your rivers, your health, your land, your children's futures — all are subordinate to the property rights of those who hold the title.
The title was taken. The land was confiscated. The swimming hole is gone. The awa endures. So do we.
Rangatiratanga Is the Taiaha
The Waiau swimming hole is a microcosm of everything this government does to Māori: it uses procedure to make dispossession look like management, it uses "engagement" to disguise the absence of genuine consent, and it uses the language of environmental protection to cover outcomes that destroy the very things Māori have always protected.
The taiaha is evidence. The taiaha is citation. The taiaha is a whānau standing at a ruined riverbank and saying: we see what you did, we know what it cost, and we are not going anywhere.
Ko te wai te ora ngā mea katoa — water is the life giver of all things. You do not permit the destruction of a life giver with a planning certificate. You answer for it.
A Koha for This Mahi
A whānau stood at a destroyed riverbank and refused to be silent. This essay exists because of them. Every koha to the Māori Green Lantern is a signal that rangatiratanga includes the power to fund our own truth tellers — the kind the Crown will not fund, the kind that stands beside people at the water's edge and names what was taken.
If you believe tamariki have the right to swim in the awa of their tīpuna, that "permitted activity" should never mean "permitted to destroy," and that hapū must be empowered — not just informed — then this is the mahi your koha makes possible.
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Kia kaha, whānau. The awa remembers. So do we.
*Views expressed constitute honest opinion on matters of public interest under the Defamation Act 1992 (NZ) and Durie v Gardiner
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