NZ Engine

Source: Radio New Zealand

Papers show that Health New Zealand faces the “extreme risk” of not having enough of the workers it needs to push through the government’s order to decentralise rapidly.

Health Minister Simeon Brown last November ordered the agency to “rapidly devolve decision-making to its four regions and 20 districts” to improve healthcare.

A new devolution committee has been set up and last month was presented a report assessing the “current state” across the board.

RNZ has seen papers from the report.

“People capability is an extreme risk,” it said.

“Workforce has the lowest capability rating identified across regions and their districts with critical resourcing gaps.”

The “most common” gaps were around staff to handle infrastructure, procurement, health and safety, planning, finance and analysis.

Brown had pushed for speed, but the assessment said there was “a feeling that basics need to be in place first”.

“The transition back to a devolved model too quickly may remove the current controls and undermine the effective oversights that have been put in place.”

That included around finances, it said.

Health NZ told RNZ on Monday it was working to address the workforce gaps and capability issues identified.

The papers showed gaps in devolution resources in areas where the centralised agency in the last two years cut jobs and accepted hundreds of voluntary redundancies.

“The highly centralised organisation structure has led to a loss of experience” in making organisational, operational and strategic decisions in districts, the assessment said.

Even at national senior leadership level there were big gaps – “all interim apart from one role”.

‘As quickly as possible’

The government two years ago castigated Health NZ for loose financial controls, sacked its board and under a reset the new commissioner Lester Levy embarked on a $2 billion savings plan.

The goverment then embarked on rolling back large parts of the centralisation reforms of 2022.

“We want a nationally and regionally planned system, but one that has strong clinical input and buy-in at the hospital level,” said Brown last November.

He gave HNZ a New Year’s Eve deadline to come up with a devolution policy in his letter of expectations.

“This reinforces my expectation that regional accountability, production planning, and local decision-making is embedded as quickly as possible,” his letter said.

“Local districts and regions should be empowered to manage within their allocated budgets, including hiring decisions.”

On Monday a spokesperson for Brown said the government had had to stabilise and turn around a system Labour had restructured during a pandemic “without a plan”.

It “cannot simply be switched off” and must still deliver more care to more patients, faster, and a key to that was moving health decisions closer to communities, they said in a statement.

The report – the second one done on devolution by consultants Deloitte – offered a glimpse of how devolution had been going.

The senior doctors’ union, the ASMS, in principle supported devolution but warned against districts having to take on more responsibility without the resources.

“The chatter that we’re picking up from around our regular set of meetings with the districts is a massive concern that this is just pushing responsibility onto districts without any realistic means of achieving what needs to be done in terms of providing health care,” said executive director Sarah Dalton.

‘Carefully managing the transition’

The assessment said some areas like in strategy and finance showed progress.

But it varied alot. What it called ‘People and Culture’ would be hugely impacted by devolution and was rated the worst, with ‘low’ assessments across all six measures; it was especially weak in the South Island and central North Island from Taranaki to Bay of Plenty.

“Regional and district finance and operational capacity remain concentrated at national level and many local teams are under-resourced in financial management,” it said.

The solution? “Build capability across the organisation.” The districts had lost key roles, now they needed them back.

A chart showed 12 categories – such as budgeting, analysis and auditing – and rated nine of them as less than fully effective. Three were only partially effective – the second-to-lowest rating – including HNZ’s savings programme and its internal audit programme.

Among the other gaps was technology. Key devolution changes were predicated on AI that was not yet in place, and so manual “workarounds” persisted.

Health NZ executive national director of strategy performance improvement Jess Smaling said the current state assessment report was to support “carefully managing the transition back to frontline decision making”.

It came only after HNZ had addressed the first priority of fixing the financial crisis and improved performance, she said in a statement.

“We are committed to ensuring our districts are ready, able and most of all supported, to have more autonomy over their clinical decisions and operational budgets.”

‘Not driven by … cost savings’

Health system commentator Ian Powell had long called for devolution but said that required the right capabilities.

“And we’ve lost that through short-sighted restructuring.”

He did not see signs in the assessment that the topdown command culture was being overhauled. “That’s the missing bit.

“Overwhelmingly on the management side of Te Whatau Ora, both regionally and nationally, there’s a high level of job insecurity, and that is a terrible environment to actually to have to work in, and it guarantees a destabilised organisation.”

Health NZ Te Whatu Ora subsumed all 20 of the old district health boards – DHBs – almost four years ago. Its establishment cost tens of millions of dollars including large sums in consultant fees.

Brown in his letter of expectations to the board chair late last year said it was “clear to me that Health NZ is too centralised”.

“Too many decisions are made by people who are removed from the problems that frontline clinicians are trying to solve.

“While the final devolved structure may result in a smaller national office than in recent years,

this change is not driven by restructuring or cost savings.”

The driver instead was to embed local clinicians in budgeting and planning services, and set up straight lines of accountability everywhere, Brown said.

But the papers the committee looked at last month indicated that districts might struggle with budgeting.

“Staff churn and the absence of robust costing systems and processes has created knowledge gaps, making it difficult to form an accurate bottom-up budget based on cost of services delivered, paticulary in H&SS [Hospital and Specialist Services].”

It talked about reducing some of the risks by adopting a devolution “timeframe” that allowed regions and districts to get critical activities in place to take on more autonomy.

‘Trade-offs and risks’

It sounded other notes of caution, too.

“While there is a desire to accelerate the devolution process, HNZ recognises that there are trade-offs and risks involved,” said Deloitte’s assessment.

This could lead to “lack of control, poor decision-making, duplication of effort, inconsistent reporting and accountability gaps”.

The solution was good planning.

But this appeared a long way off.

“The desired end state has not yet been clearly defined, including the [transition] from a national to a regional structure,” it said.

The “scope, sequence and pace” of devolution all needed defining.

Dalton said while 2022’s centralisation had caused “chaos” by distancing clinicians from decisionmaking, devolution had to be resourced and the minister would be wise to taihoa.

“I mean, it really does smack of trying to come up with what looks like some quick wins in an election year, and that’s no way to run a health system.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

The government has announced that hospitals will get hundreds more staff and extra beds as the health system prepares for winter pressure.

Health Minister Simeon Brown said Health New Zealand would invest an extra $25 million to boost hospital capacity and staffing across the country ahead of the colder months.

The funding would provide up to 378 additional full-time staff across nursing, medical, allied health and support roles and 71 extra winter hospital beds.

The beds would be added at four hospitals – 25 at Waikato, 20 in Christchurch, 14 at Middlemore in Auckland and 12 in Wellington.

The government said $16.8 million, around two-thirds of the funding, would going to the most pressured areas including Capital Coast and Hutt Valley, MidCentral, Auckland’s Te Toka Tumai, Counties Manukau, Waikato and Christchurch.

It’s also funding up to 567 short-stay beds in aged residential care to help free up hospital space, and is expanding the “Hospital in the Home” services to allow patients to leave hospital sooner.

Brown said emergency department visits continued to rise as the population grows and ages, putting increasing pressure on hospitals during winter.

“Despite these challenges, Health New Zealand has seen emergency department performance improve since the reintroduction of the government’s health targets, with more patients now being seen sooner, reversing several years of declining performance,” he said.

“While hospitals undertake seasonal planning each year as part of normal operations, winter demand still places significant pressure on services and frontline staff. That’s why strengthening capacity early, ahead of the winter months, is critical to ensuring patients receive timely care.”

Brown said he had made it clear to the Health New Zealand Board that he expected a plan to prepare hospitals for winter to be in place early.

“This gives New Zealanders confidence that the system is getting ready to support them heading into winter,” he said.

“Hospitals will still face high levels of demand this winter. But by planning early, expanding capacity, and supporting our frontline teams, we are giving them the tools, resources, and flexibility they need to better manage pressure, reduce delays, and deliver care for New Zealanders.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

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A little bit of eggshell still clings to the slick feathers of the newly hatched brown kiwi chick.

Only a few hours old, it is already able to crouch on its small strong legs in the little heated chamber that will be home for its first two days of life at the National Kiwi Hatchery. Its round belly is full of the yolk that was part of the large egg – food to sustain it for the first few days while it learns to forage for bugs.

A safe start in life

Kiwi chicks are precocious, explains National Kiwi Hatchery manager Emma Bean. This means that, in contrast to human babies who need a lot of post-natal care, kiwi chicks tend to leave the nest, and warmth of their dad’s brood patch, within a week.

Emma says, “Whilst everything’s instinctive, they’ve essentially got chopsticks on their face that they need to just hone their skills, so they know what they’ve got to do… and they just need dad for a couple of days to keep them warm while their feathers dry off and fluff up and they learn to thermoregulate.”

In the hatchery this transition is facilitated by hutches with an angled heating plate, and food sources for the new chicks to search for.

Initially the chicks lose weight, as they use up that yolk. Once they have regained their hatch weight, they are microchipped and then graduate to crèche – either at a project site or at the onsite purpose-built facility at the hatchery.

At this stage, it’s a well-oiled machine.

Started in a shed at Rainbow Springs in 1995, the National Kiwi Hatchery celebrated its 30th anniversary last year, having moved to its new location and facilities in 2023. In total over 2600 North Island brown kiwi chicks have been hatched so far.

The hatchery is part of Operation Nest Egg, a conservation programme that takes kiwi eggs from the wild, then hatches and raises them during their vulnerable first few months of life, before returning them to where they came from.

The goal is to grow the chicks to a ‘stoat-proof’ weight of 1kg. Without this, or effective predator control, the survival rate of a kiwi chick in the wild is about 5 percent. Released at match-ready weight their chances increase to 65 percent.

Combining conservation and eco-tourism

A bus load of visitors pulls up and starts to unload in front of one of the small buildings that make up the hatchery, here for an hour-long tour. Inside they are greeted with information about the different kiwi species, the impact of predators, and facts about kiwi mating, eggs and embryo development.

A key attraction is the nocturnal house – where night and day have been switched and behind a pane of glass a pair of kiwi are up and about looking for food amongst the rotten logs and leaf litter that has been provided for them.

But it is the sight of the chicks that is often elicits the most emotion, says tour guide Rebeca Bothamley, “I’ve noticed when they see a chick or an egg they get really excited … I’ve had a few people cry when they’ve seen a couple chicks.”

The one-hour tour costs $75 per adult with a behind-the-scenes exclusive tour priced at $1250 for up to four people. If visitors want to sponsor a chick and name it, that’s $2787 – the estimate of how much it costs to hatch and rear a kiwi here.

Only a fraction of this is charged to the conservation projects, says Emma. As a Ngāi Tahu owned charitable trust, the idea is that conservation and eco-tourism go hand-in-hand, with the visitors’ contributions supporting the cost of the mahi.

‘The cherry on the top’

While the ultimate conservation goal is a future where Operation Nest Egg is no longer needed, that is not likely any time soon, says Emma. Plus, she sees the advocacy and education aspect of the hatchery as an important part of their work.

It is not the only captive kiwi rearing facility, with others spread across both the North and South Islands, some working with different kiwi species.

The National Kiwi Hatchery collaborates with about 15 different conservation projects around the North Island that monitor males to find nests and eggs, and control predators in their project areas to help kiwi survival after release.

Across their three decades they’ve learned a lot, says both Emma and long-time kiwi keeper Carole Dean. When Carole started in 1998 there was a lot of initial trial-and-error and learning on the job.

“We just had so much passion to learn and get better and obviously share that knowledge as we learnt it with other facilities.”

Today they know more about the development, physiology and embryology of kiwi, which enables them to make better decisions about things like when and how to assist a hatching chick. Plus, they have learned a lot about the husbandry, Carole says, in their onsite kiwi creche.

“What we do now compared to how we did it 15 or even 10 years ago, we’ve come in leaps and bounds with looking after our enclosures and keeping it really healthy up here to maintain healthy birds.”

When she started, there used to be a bit of sadness when a kiwi graduated back out to the forest because “they were such important little creatures to us” but these days, Carole celebrates when they are ready, “Get them out …they need to go home and be a real kiwi in a real forest.”

The ‘cherry on the top’ for her is the fact that chicks that have hatched with them are reproducing, and Carole has since been looking after second and third generations of hatchery chicks.

“That’s really cool … job done”.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Police are seeking help from the public after a woman went missing in Auckland.

In a statement, police said 65-year-old Jane was last seen in Saint Johns on Monday afternoon.

She had brown hair and was wearing a white patterned T-shirt and black leggings.

“Police, and her family, have concerned for her wellbeing.

“Anyone with information is asked to contact police as soon as possible.”

People can call 111, 105 or report any information online using reference number 260316/7192.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

It’s being billed as the data centre that changes everything – but hopefully that doesn’t include the price of your power.

It will be the country’s second biggest user of electricity after the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter.

A $3 billion data centre in Southland that, as the marketing says, “changes everything”….

“…delivering the most significant upgrade to New Zealand’s digital infrastructure in a generation. We’re doubling national data capacity and opening up a high-growth gateway to Asia-Pacific’s booming cloud and AI economy.”

Multiple resource consents have been granted by three local authorities to get Datagrid’s huge AI data storage project in Makarewa off the ground, and to land a high-speed internet cable from Australia coming up at Oreti Beach near Invercargill.

But where will all the power come from? The likely answer is the Manapōuri hydro-electric power plant, which also powers Tiwai.

But if there’s a shortage, say in a drought, what will the data centre’s requirement for constant electricity do to the market – and our power bills?

That’s what niggles Newsroom’s South Island editor, David Williams, who speaks to The Detail today after six years of keeping tabs on the project.

Datagrid has told him it won’t be answering his questions until it issues a news release later on – possibly this week.

For its international clients, the fact that the centre will be using clean energy is a big selling point, but is there enough of that energy to go around?

“It’s not like a data centre can just power down,” says Williams.

“The advantage of Tiwai is that they can say, ‘ok, well, we’re not going to put on this particular potline. We will close down for a while, and that’s part of our contract, and we’ll get paid by the country if you like, to shut down because that’s good for New Zealand Inc.’

“Data centres need continuous power. If they power down… that’s why they have these backup generators… if they power down, it’s actually damaging to their units or their processing centre. It needs to be a constant supply.”

Fast Track approval has just been given for a large Contact Energy wind farm just 50 kilometres away from the centre’s site, so that could be a piece of the puzzle.

Williams says this is “not your usual Southland development, I would have thought”.

“The scale of this is quite something.”

Not only does it involve building six data halls, but it is also flanked by 12-metre-high noise control barriers over 9.5 hectares on a 48-ha property. There will be 84 emergency generators, each with a 10,000 litre diesel tank and a 15m high exhaust stack.

The construction phase will offer the most lucrative economic return to the region, with up to 550 workers expected to be on site, but once it’s finished, it will only require about 50 staff to keep it going.

The main transmission line practically runs over the top of the site, and Datagrid will build its own substation and upgrade the grid exit point.

Williams says the company has done well to consult with neighbours, iwi, and anyone else affected, all of whom seem to be on board with the mitigations it’s planning.

Southland mayor Rob Scott has told him, “these people have done it right”.

“They’ve talked to people, they’ve consulted the community, but more importantly, they’ve listened,” he says.

“They’ve taken account of the things that they’ve said, and they’ve tried to change things.”

Measures included noise mitigation from the 24-hour hum of servers and concerns answered over water, required in great quantities for cooling.

“Most of the people who live around them have given their written approval for what’s going on,” he says.

Williams says given the Amazon data centre debacle in Auckland, where billions of dollar’s worth of building and employment were promised but never eventuated, people are right to be sceptical. But he says this project has emerged differently, starting small and getting bigger.

“But I do note,” he says, “with this particular project, the consent approval announcement was not made by the Prime Minister. So maybe that’s a good sign.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Doctors say the new AI scribe rolling out in EDs around the country is saving them up to 10 minutes per patient, and is particularly helpful for slow typers.

The tool, known as Heidi, was trialled in Hawke’s Bay Hospital’s ED, before the government announced it was being rolled out to all hospitals earlier this month.

The senior doctors’ union, ASMS, said in an update to members there had been no reported resistance from patients and senior medical officers had reported it eased cognitive pressure.

Health New Zealand (HNZ)’s director of digital innovation and AI, Sonny Taite, said clinicians were consistently reporting it reduced the time associated with clinical documentation, allowing them to focus more on patient care.

“Early qualitative feedback from senior medical officers indicates this has helped ease documentation pressure during busy shifts, and there has been no reported resistance from patients to its use in emergency settings.”

But with formal evaluation work ongoing, Health NZ was not attributing specific time savings percentages or quantified burnout outcomes at this stage.

Emergency physician Dr John Bonning said doctors in EDs were finding it “very helpful”, with its main benefit “speeding up those that are slow typists”.

It would normally take 15 minutes to see one patient and write up their notes, Bonning said, but one colleague had reported writing notes for three patients in 11 minutes – less than four minutes per patient.

Bonning himself had trialled the software a couple of times and was planning to incorporate it more into his work, and feedback among his colleagues had been mostly positive, with only about 10 percent deciding it was not for them.

“We do ask [patients’] consent before every use,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever had anybody say no, because it helps you do your job, and it helps you be more efficient.”

The app could summarise a handover with a paramedic, for example, which could then be turned into a referral letter or later on, a discharge note.

The notes could be quite wordy, and did need to be “very carefully edited, and occasionally it hallucinates and puts in false information, but not too much”, Bonning said.

Hallucinating, or adding false or illogical information to a response, is a known phenomemon among many types of AI. Tech giant IBM described it as “similar to how humans sometimes see figures in the clouds or faces on the moon”.

HNZ’s Taite said feedback from 40 clinicians surveyed showed a need to “further improve accuracy and reduce editing effort, which would enhance trust and preserve time savings, particularly for senior clinicians”.

“Many also saw clear gains from smoothing workflow and device integration and better tailoring functionality to the realities of ED consults. Alongside this, there was interest in clearer guidance, templates, and training to support safe, confident use while reinforcing clinical reasoning and governance.”

Security features include encryption, two-factor authentication

Following hacks at both MediMap and ManageMyHealth in recent months, security is a topic front-of-mind for many in the health sector.

Taite explained Heidi operated as a secure cloud service and had been assessed against Health NZ’s privacy, security, and contractual requirements. “Appropriate safeguards are in place as part of the rollout,” he said.

Yass Omar, head of legal and regulatory affairs at Heidi, explained all data within Heidi was encrypted and de-identified, and the app used two-factor authentication.

Data was stored in the cloud, rather than in the device, unless it was waiting for an internet connection – and in those cases, it was stored in the app’s secure sandbox (that is, an isolated part of the app not accessible to anybody else) before being uploaded straight to the cloud once it reconnected.

The information collected by listening in to conversations was transcribed and summarised in the app, and then able to be copy and pasted into the patient’s notes in the hospital’s own IT system, where patient notes had always been stored.

“So you can imagine that [someone] finds an unlocked phone, they see the Heidi app, they press on it, it prompts them for 2FA [two factor authentication], they can’t pass that. And then the next step would be, oh, can I find some files? No, because they’re not actually stored on the phone.”

Heidi had worked with NAIAEAG, Health NZ’s AI group, to make sure its security features were up to scratch, which Omar said was “an exceptionally high bar” to meet in terms of security.

None of the information fed into Heidi was used to train its AI. “Everything we do is about data minimisation,” he said. “We don’t collect any more data than we have to.”

Currently the encrypted, de-identified data was stored in a cloud-based server in Australia, but opening a server in New Zealand was on the cards.

“That’s something that is high in our priority for 2026,” Omar said. “The only thing that limits us is the availability of suitable infrastructure. At the scale that we are, we can’t just kind of use any cloud provider. We have to find ones that can cope with the volume of traffic that we push through.”

Study shows trust in AI will be difficult to repair if broken

According to a new paper, titled “Maintaining patient trust as artificial intelligence’s role in healthcare grows” by Rosie Dobson, Melanie Stowell and Robyn Whittaker, trust around AI could be built and maintained through transparency and good governance – “but if broken or lost, it will be difficult to repair and will have wider implications”.

Through interviews with patients and healthcare workers, the researchers found a few common threads when it came to their concerns:

• The primary benefit of sharing AI data should be to the New Zealand public – not private companies or those overseas
• Strong data protection needed to be in place
• Patients needed choice and to give consent on when to share their data
• AI should not replace the “human touch” of health professions
• There should be Māori representation in work to develop AI tools, and governance over their use
• Universities and New Zealand-based organisations were seen as more trustworthy AI development partners than commercial companies or overseas institutions

The authors recommended there be a culture of transparency, with health well-educated on how their tools work so they could explain it to patients. There also needed to be good governance, with the input of patients and healthcare workers.

GP says patient diagnosis the next step for AI in healthcare

Richard Medlicott, Wellington GP at Island Bay Medical Centre, said the future of AI in healthcare was as a tool for advice, not just a scribe.

Right now, among GPs, AI tools listened to consultations and made notes, which could then be copy and pasted or even automatically fed back into the GPs own patient notes system.

His practice used IntelliTek Health, a company which Medlicott himself had a stake in, rather than Heidi, but any AI software would have the effect of reducing ‘cognitive load’.

“At the end of a consultation, we might have to remember three or four things that were talked about in that fifteen minutes, and then get them all down,” he said.

“I find that quite fatiguing, and the use of scribes over the last two years has been really helpful in that regard.”

He said the scribe also meant he was verbalising more during consultations – “oh, your chest sounds clear, or your tummy’s nice and normal, no signs of an enlarged liver” – for the benefit of the scribe, but which patients appreciated.

And for doctors who preferred to type notes throughout the consult rather than afterwards, it meant they were more present in the conversation rather than at the keyboard, which patients said they appreciated.

It was saving GPs anywhere between two and five minutes per consultation, he said.

The future of AI would move beyond clinical scribes. Around the world already, AI was being used to look at medical records and give medical advice.

“I think we’ll get there, but AI sometimes hallucinate terribly, and just get things wrong,” he said. “That is the next stage, it’s happening now, but it is higher risk than AI scribes.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

A controversial plan to pump millions of litres of partially-treated sewage into the Christchurch coastline is leaving community leaders feeling uneasy and sceptical.

Earlier this month, Mayor Phil Mauger floated the idea of pumping around a third of the city’s sewage into the ocean in an effort to lessen the stench from the fire-damaged wastewater plant at Bromley.

The sewage would be partially treated and have chlorine added before being pumped out via the existing outfall pipe into Pegasus Bay.

The announcement came days after the Canterbury Regional Council issued an abatement notice to the city council over the plant’s “objectionable and offensive odour”, which had worsened over recent months resulting in almost 6000 complaints since late January.

The proposal had been met with fierce criticism in some quarters, with Fisheries Minister Shane Jones labelling the idea “ridiculous”.

The city council had until this week to comply with the abatement notice, including providing details on how it would mitigate the stench.

The Waitai Coastal-Burwood-Linwood community board was briefed on the plan on Monday.

Wastewater treatment plant operations manager Adam Twose told members the “multi-million dollar” plan was under consideration because recently-introduced wastewater regulations were more relaxed.

“Under the new wastewater standards, there’s the option to go a lot looser. So you’re allowed to discharge more contaminants to the environment,” he said.

The proposed sewage bypass would not meet the plant’s existing resource consent conditions, Twose said.

There also remained several unresolved matters, including total cost, timeframes and environmental impacts.

At the meeting, board chair Paul McMahon admitted he felt uneasy about the proposal.

“Given the potential environmental impact and lots of other unknowns. But I do think that it needs to be investigated fully,” he said.

The briefing also raised further questions over the plant’s overall resilience which had been operating at maximum capacity, meaning essential site maintenance had been put off.

Twose said if pressure on the plant was not eased, odours could become more frequent and more severe.

“[Our plan] was to see how long we could keep everything going until the new activator sludge was going in. But it’s become obvious that we need to act,” he said.

Councillor Yani Johanson also questioned whether the plan was viable.

“Is there a risk that we spend all this time and effort looking at this option and we don’t get progress on it to fix the problem ahead of when the new solution’s in place.

“If we spend a whole bunch of money doing something that’s not going to be ready in time, what have we achieved.”

The city council was planning to replace the plant’s fire-damaged trickling filters with an activated sludge reactor.

The project was due to completed in late 2028.

The regional council’s director of operations Brett Aldridge said it had received the city council’s plan.

“Our wastewater specialist will work alongside [Canterbury Regional Council] staff to assess the information provided with urgency to ensure it meets the expectations set out in the abatement notice. Depending on the complexity of the material submitted, this may take some time to complete.

“If the plan submitted today is not satisfactory, Christchurch City Council may face additional enforcement action from the regional council.”

Greens’ local government spokesperson Mike Davidson said the city council could be locked into a long-term committment for what was essentially a short-term fix.

“I think the council are genuine in trying to make it temporary, but it will give them a 35-year consent.

“We’ve seen things that were supposed to be temporary last very long, you just have to look at how long this debacle has taken to get to this point.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand