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Publishing • Production • Communications

The Politics of Stupid

Writer's picture: Grant McLachlan - ColumnGrant McLachlan - Column

Oscar Wilde famously said: "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life." In Snells Beach, life imitates scenes from the films Zoolander and Hot Fuzz.


Here are scenes from Zoolander, which form the basis of the film:

In a nutshell:

  1. A person with a public profile is accused of being stupid;

  2. His friends died doing something stupid;

  3. He sees that as an opportunity to raise awareness of stupidity;

  4. His solution is stupid, unnecessary, and makes the problem worse; and

  5. The only benefit gained is maintaining his stupid public profile.


All along, the solution was obvious: The existing education system sufficed.


What problem?

The Department of Conservation run a dotterel recovery programme, updating their 1993 programme in 2004. The birds nest above the high tide mark on the sand near dunes:

The greatest risk to dotterels are black-backed seagulls (which are unprotected), followed by cats, rodents, mustelids, human activity and habitat encroachment, and dogs.


Here is a screenshot from the programme explaining how the birds behave and how best to provide an environment for them:

Pretty straight forward, huh?

 

Here is the signage erected throughout the country:

All that was required for Snells Beach was the following:

  1. Restore and protect the dune vegetation between the reserve and the beach;

  2. Use the dune protection to restrict access points to the beach;

  3. Rope off nesting areas where disturbance will be minimal;

  4. Erect signs informing people to walk dogs below the high tide mark away from nesting areas; and

  5. For Wardens to monitor for five years and conduct proper research before expanding the protected zone.


None of the above was done in Snells Beach.

The Zoolander Method

What triggered the epidemic of stupidity in Snells Beach started with Greg Sayers moving to Annette Cook's house next to the Sunburst Avenue boatramp. At the time, Greg was on the Hibiscus & Bays Local Board and had dreams of also being elected to the Rodney Local Board.


Greg's new neighbours just happened to be a clique who ran the local ratepayers' association, who abused the organisation as a platform to inflict their nimbyism. When Greg moved next door, all their Christmases had come at once.


Greg's neighbours were the only people calling for the ban of dogs from the beach to protect wildlife. Forest & Bird and council biodiversity officials did not consider the area worthy of such rules:

 At the last moment and without public consultation, Greg chaired the committee that decided to impose special rules for the area north of the boatramp immediately outside his home, without declaring the obvious conflict of interest.


There wasn't a dotterel minder programme in Snells Beach. There was, however, a dotterel minder programme in Big Manly Beach in Hibiscus & Bays Local Board. Greg, whose family home was in nearby Arkles Bay, didn't call for similar rules for Big Manly Beach.


The dotterel minder programme in Big Manly Beach followed best practice. Snells Beach didn't.


What started as an attempt to be neighbourly, instead divided the community. That stupid decision unleashed a barrage of stupid incidents. Here's a map, which can be enlarged:



Stupidity Normalised

Michele Mackenzie is an amateur bird photographer who looked for ways to boost her public profile. Her friend owned land at the northern end of Snells Beach and planned to destroy the habitat of protected shorebirds. When her friend instead sold the land to developers, those developers also planned to destroy the habitat. It was only then that Michele saw an opportunity to get herself on the front page of the local newspaper:

Michele wanted people to stay at least 50 metres away from dotterel nests but posed right next to a nest that she relocated further away from shelter and closer to potential threats. She also surrounded the nest with obstacles to hinder an escape.


The reason for the front page article was so Michele MacKenzie could gloat that she had successfully pressured an ambitious council biodiversity official, Megan Young, to ban dogs from the northern end of Snells Beach.


Michele and Megan shared similar goals to bring attention to themselves:

Megan Young. Source: NZ Herald
Megan Young. Source: NZ Herald

Megan made the decision and then looked for the evidence to support it. Admitting that the reason why she made the decision in the first place was due to pressure from Michele Mackenzie, she asked colleagues how to go about putting the ban in place. Council ornithologist Tim Lovegrove didn't think that 1-2 dotterel pairs was significant enough to warrant a dog ban so suggested that she look for evidence of other protected birds, adding that she chat with her friend, Jacinda Wooly. Wooly was the council biodiversity official who processed the planning application for the development that allowed the destruction of the habitat.


Clutching at straws, Megan finally found an unpublished 2001 thesis by Andrea Lord that relied on a 1995 Forest & Bird-funded study. which recommended buffer zones around dotterel nests:

This study was given so little weight by the Department of Conservation that changes to the dotterel programme did not incorporate the study's recommendations.


Without visiting Snells Beach, Megan asked Michele for photos. Michele replied with cropped and outdated photos taken outside the relevant area. Based on this 'evidence', dogs would be banned from the 800 metres of beach near the dotterel nests. Since 2019, each year Megan would copy-and-paste that 'evidence' into each 'temporary' dog ban from August until April.


Realising that there was no evidence that her 'temporary' dog bans over six years were effective, she then asked for experts to find evidence. To avoid public scrutiny, she pressured the Rodney Local Board to make the temporary bans permanent 365 days a year, rather than during migratory and nesting periods:

Stupid people are now expecting the same stupid decision made year after year will become the norm.


Pack Stupidity

The dog bans were never about protecting wildlife. The motivation came out of the adrenaline and sense of achievement gained from gaining attention and inflicting control on other people.


When a seal sunbathed on Snells Beach during a Covid lockdown, amateur conservationists descended on the area in droves to rope off a perimeter and then accosted dogwalkers nearby.

Meanwhile, they took no notice of a toddler crawling around a dotterel nest nearby:


Michele MacKenzie and Megan Young gained supporters. Forming the Snells Shoreline Conservation Community, an incorporated society allowed the funnelling of ratepayers money into their coffers. The more problems that could be identified, the more money they received.


The greatest threat to the dotterels were people. The developments at the northern end encroached on habitats and the silt killed food sources. Self-described public relations guru Jacquie Russell and Professor of Sociology Alan France moved into the new housing developments and hypocritically went about blaming everyone and everything else for the plight of the dotterels.


Meanwhile, Megan Young evaluated the success of the dotterel programme not on any conservation outcome (such as the fledging of chicks) but rather the number of volunteers involved in the programme and the amount of publicity the programme received.


One stunt to gain attention was to stack sandbags in an exposed area away from where dotterels usually nested, relocate dotterel eggs to the top of the mound, and film predators. Here is Michele caught in the act:

NZ Dotterels fake wing injuries to deter predators.
NZ Dotterels fake wing injuries to deter predators.

The whole stunt was obviously staged. The cat, named Loki, disappeared on four occasions for days from the opposite end of the beach, only to return wanting to play with anything egg-shaped. It was obvious to the owners that the cat had been coached. After a fifth disappearance, Loki was picked up at a local vet. The person who dropped off the cat wanted to remain anonymous. Days later, these two articles appeared on Stuff and TVNZ's Breakfast:



The amateur conservationists filmed themselves disturbing protected wildlife in order to gain publicity to support restrictions on others. How stupid can you get?


A monument to their stupidity

To cap it off, Megan Young now proposes building a monument to encapsulate her stupidity.


Despite the Boathouse Bay development destroying the NZ Dotterel's habitat, Megan Young now proposes building a bird sanctuary immediately south of the offending development on a neighbouring esplanade reserve. She wants to remove picnic tables and footpaths on an esplanade reserve whose particular purpose under the Reserves Act 1977 is to provide public access from neighbouring developments to the beach. In its place, Megan proposes clearing the area as a bird sanctuary, erecting information panels promoting her cause, but essentially restricting public access. Boathouse Bay essentially gain a bigger front lawn and a buffer from the public walking nearby:

 The southern boundary of the proposed bird sanctuary invites a potential nesting area right next to a bridge that predators cross. That area is the same area that volunteers relocated nests so to film predator attacks.


What is stupid about all these proposals is that they were all avoidable. Boathouse Bay proposed in their original resource consent application to build a habitat for the NZ Dotterels away from the public:

But the developer changed their minds and Auckland Council didn't require the developer to follow the consent they issued, nor did they enforce the Resource Management Act when environmental destruction resulted:

The estuary where NZ Dotterels once nested.
The estuary where NZ Dotterels once nested.

The Department of Conservation didn't enforce the Conservation Act or the Wildlife Act when the habitats were destroyed.


Auckland Council's stupidity in not enforcing the law has resulted in stupid alternatives that negatively impacts everyone else and the wildlife the proposals are designed to protect.


Hot Fuzz mentality

I started to research and write about the antics at Snells Beach. It turned out that there was a long and established pattern of stupid people demanding stupid rules.


The day after I wrote this article, I was followed by the mother of a senior police officer, assaulted, had a camera thrown at me, and I was charged with assault and robbery. I filmed the incident, presented it as evidence, I was acquitted, and local police obstructed complaints into the conspiracy.

You couldn't make this shit up. It was all there, recorded in court. When the idiots involved in the conspiracy perverted the course of justice three times in front of the judge, the judge made this comment:

These idiots built their own police station and then ran it for years unsupervised. Days after I was acquitted, it was closed down. I showed the evidence to 1News:


The whole Snells Beach hierarchy was just like this scene out of Hot Fuzz:


Stupid people seeking attention for stupid ideas deserve ridiculing. It's not bullying. It's common sense.




All of the facts mentioned in this article are from official information responses detailed in my book Unleashed: Sex, rackets & vigilantes in New Zealand's most corrupted community. The documents are also provided below.






Documents


The 1993 NZ Dotterel Recovery Plan:


The 2001 unpublished thesis quoting the 1995 dotterel study:


The 2004-2014 NZ Dotterel Recovery Plan:


Emails between Megan Young and her boss, pushing for a permanent ban:


Megan Young's presentation to the Rodney Local Board:



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