Why does the press conference now come before the disaster?
- Grant McLachlan
- Jun 10
- 11 min read
Prediction is the riskiest science in public life — but the political rewards for fronting a forecast have never been higher.
On Tuesday morning, hundreds of Wellingtonians along the capital's south coast were ordered out of their homes before 9am, under a state of emergency declared the night before the swell arrived. The waves came — eleven metres of them, driven by gusts of nearly 100 kilometres an hour — and by late evening residents were cleared to return home. As emergencies go, it was short, sharp and, unusually for the genre, exactly as advertised.
Two months earlier the genre looked rather different.
As Cyclone Vaianu bore down on Hawke's Bay in April, four councils declared local states of emergency before midday — and the mayor of Wairoa, whose district was devastated by Cyclone Gabrielle, refused to join them.
“We're becoming woke as a country when it comes to states of emergency,” Craig Little said.
His stand poses the question this column pursues: when the science of predicting disasters is irreducibly uncertain, who decides when to sound the alarm — and what do they get out of sounding it?
Contents
The wolf at Owhiro Bay
Wellington's emergency was, on its own terms, a success.
Mayor Andrew Little told Breakfast that around 350 houses were at risk from a swell forecast at eight to nine metres — well above the 5.5-metre benchmark of the last big surge in 2020. The council shut coastal roads to all vehicles, including emergency services, for the most dangerous window, and the waves peaked at 11 metres before locals were allowed home that night. The warning was issued, the wolf turned up, and nobody died.
Yet the episode also displays the new template of New Zealand emergency management: the declaration now comes in anticipation, the cordon precedes the wave, and the political principal fronts the cameras before anything has happened.
Whether that is prudence or performance depends entirely on whether the wave arrives.
On Tuesday it did.
The structural problem is that nobody — not MetService, not the National Emergency Management Agency, not any minister — can reliably tell you in advance when it won't.
The mayor who would not declare
Craig Little's April stand was treated as a gaffe. It deserves to be read as doctrine.
Wairoa's Civil Defence controller had assessed that Cyclone Vaianu, forecast as a Category 2 event expected to bring wind and swell rather than rain, did not meet the activation criteria — and the council declined to declare, holding the power in reserve in case conditions worsened.
The Prime Minister hit back, saying he would happily wear the woke label across an event that produced ten local states of emergency, if it meant nobody died.
Little's reply, in an NZ Herald op-ed titled “'Cry wolf' declarations risk diminishing future states of emergency”, is the most coherent statement of warning doctrine a New Zealand official has produced in years: a declaration should be the last tool in the toolbox, and constantly reaching for it pushes communities further from genuine preparedness. This from the five-term mayor of a town whose residents were woken at 6am by an emergency mobile alert ordering evacuation as the Wairoa River rose in June 2024.
He is not against warnings. He is against their devaluation.
More rehearsals than performances
Consider the Emergency Mobile Alert system, the channel through which the modern warning arrives.
It was launched with a first nationwide test in November 2017 and has been tested nationally every year since, apart from 2020 and 2021, when the tests were cancelled because of the pandemic.
Coverage has climbed from under six in ten people at the first test to 92 per cent by 2025. In all that time the system has been activated nationwide for a real event exactly once: the alert sent to four million phones on 25 March 2020, as the country entered the Level 4 lockdown.
Most New Zealanders' lived experience of the emergency tone is of a rehearsal, not a performance.
That asymmetry is not an indictment — a channel built for rare, life-threatening events should be quiet — and regional alerts have done real work in floods and tsunami evacuations. But it sets up the central economy of the warning business: alarm is a finite resource.
The tone is engineered to frighten; every activation spends down a stock of public attention that tests alone cannot replenish.
The question is who controls the spending, and on what evidence.
The moon and the fault line
The evidence is shakier than the confident pitch of an alert suggests, and nowhere more than in seismology.
The idea that the Moon loads the Earth's crust as it loads the sea is not fringe science: tidal triggering of earthquakes has been investigated since the nineteenth century, and in 2016 University of Tokyo researchers reported in Nature Geoscience that very large earthquakes tend to occur near times of maximum tidal stress — the 2004 Sumatra, 2010 Maule and 2011 Tohoku events among them. New Zealand promptly supplied the eeriest data point in the file: the magnitude 7.8 Kaikoura earthquake struck at 12.02am on 14 November 2016, the very date of the closest supermoon to Earth since 1948.
And yet the same literature contains careful studies finding little or no correlation at all, and the extra tidal stress a supermoon adds over an ordinary full moon is marginal. GNS Science's settled position is that no one can yet scientifically predict earthquakes, even as aftershock probabilities can be usefully forecast; a famous 1997 paper in Science was blunter still, titled simply “Earthquakes Cannot Be Predicted”. A statistical correlation at planetary scale yields no time, no place and no magnitude.
It is precisely the kind of science that tempts people toward a certainty it cannot supply.
The Ken Ring lesson
New Zealand knows exactly what happens when somebody supplies that certainty anyway.
In 2011, weather almanac author Ken Ring — armed with the same lunar reasoning — predicted another major earthquake for Christchurch on 20 March. Three weeks after a quake that killed 185 people, the prediction sent terrified families fleeing the city in droves. The Prime Minister's chief science adviser, Sir Peter Gluckman, said there was “no added risk of a quake on March 20 or any other day”; geologists, engineers and a cabinet minister with a doctorate in geotechnical engineering pointedly lunched at the Sign of the Kiwi on the Port Hills that day.
Nothing of consequence happened.
Ring was a freelancer and easy to ridicule. The harder lesson is institutional: the mechanism of his harm — evacuation without event, fear without fact — is identical to the harm of official over-warning, and the cost is paid in the same currency, public belief.
False certainty about disasters is expensive no matter whose letterhead it arrives on. The only difference is that the state's version carries a coat of arms and a ministerial podium.
Disaster as a career path
And the podium pays.
Disaster has made careers for as long as there have been cameras: Walter Cronkite's breaking of the Kennedy assassination became one of broadcasting's defining moments, and Rudy Giuliani walked out of the September 11 attacks as “America's Mayor”.
New Zealand's most instructive case is Bob Parker, the broadcaster turned Christchurch mayor who was trailing in the polls before the September 2010 earthquake and re-elected overwhelmingly after fronting the response. He fronted countless media briefings after February 2011 in a high-vis orange parka so famous it acquired its own Facebook page, with a replica auctioned for the earthquake appeal.
Kiri Allan, four months into the Emergency Management portfolio, became a household name in a single morning in March 2021, fronting Beehive press conferences — “when it is long or strong, get gone” — as tsunami evacuations emptied the East Coast.
None of this was sinister.
In every case the podium followed the event: Cronkite reported a death that had occurred; Parker fronted a city that had already fallen; Allan narrated evacuations triggered by real earthquakes.
The authority each accrued was earned against facts on the ground — and checkable against them.
The podium moves in front of the storm
Jacinda Ardern is the hinge between that old model and the new one.
Her response to the Christchurch mosque attacks was the old model perfected — tone after tragedy, when tone was the only instrument available, and the world's cameras judged it pitch-perfect.
Covid moved the podium in front of the harm.
The daily 1pm briefings — the “podium of truth” — were required viewing and, in the first phase, masterly; but the honeymoon soured into battle fatigue, suspicion and backlash, and by the time of the Royal Commission Winston Peters was rebranding it the “Podium of Evasion”.
The durable lesson her successors absorbed was not caution. It was that the pre-emptive podium works.
Watch the staging, because the staging is the message.
The standard political stand-up puts a leader at the lectern with colleagues crowded into shot, nodding.
The disaster stand-up has adopted the identical choreography with one substitution: the nodding heads now belong to a top police officer and a senior official.
Kiri Allan fronted the March 2021 tsunami response flanked by the National Controller and a GNS seismologist; Ardern's Covid lectern made a national celebrity of the Director-General of Health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield.
The trouble is constitutional, not cosmetic.
The Public Service Act 2020 makes acting “in a politically neutral manner” the first principle of the public service, and the Policing Act 2008 requires the Commissioner of Police to act independently of any minister in maintaining order and enforcing the law.
Yet every time a commissioner or a chief official stands silently in a minister's shot, that statutory neutrality is being spent as a stage prop — the official's professional credibility transfused, on camera, into the politician beside them.
The fusion is completed by the wardrobe.
Bob Parker's famous orange high-vis was never an official costume at all: it was an Antarctica New Zealand expedition jacket he had negotiated to keep after a trip to the ice, pulled from the back of the cupboard when the first quake struck for its colours and its pockets.
It merely looked the part — but the lesson it taught was learned all the same.
Kiri Allan took the next step, fronting flood zones in a jacket carrying the emergency management livery itself.
Mark Mitchell — who holds the Police and Emergency Management portfolios simultaneously — now wears the branded kit at virtually every disaster appearance.
A politician dressed in an agency's uniform, flanked by that agency's officials, is no longer borrowing the civil service's impartiality. They are wearing it.
The press conference used to follow the disaster. Now the disaster is expected to follow the press conference.
Hence the current settings.
The Minister for Emergency Management and Recovery now personally declares states of local emergency from Wellington — Southland's was proclaimed by Mark Mitchell at 9am one morning — and fronts morning television as weather crosses the country.
In January, Chris Penk was added as Associate Minister to coordinate recovery from the Tauranga landslides and the January storms, so a single portfolio now offers two ministerial faces, with the Prime Minister frequently making a third.
The incentive now runs entirely one way: no minister has ever been punished for a warning that came to nothing, while every minister fears the inquiry that follows a warning not given.
Mitchell's own inquiry into the North Island severe weather events, in which fifteen people died, found the emergency management system “not fit-for-purpose” — findings that, fairly read, cut toward more warning, not less.
The political system heard that message at full volume. Craig Little's counter-message barely registered.
The unloseable bet
Vaianu, in fact, produced not one media moment but two.
On the Saturday came the declarations and the warnings. By midday Sunday, Mark Mitchell and Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown were back at the lectern — this time for relief.
The cyclone had tracked east of its expected path and the intensity prepared for had not arrived; Brown thanked Aucklanders for preparing and, invoking the Anniversary Weekend floods and Cyclone Gabrielle, pronounced the shortfall “good news, not bad news”.
The warning press conference and the relief press conference: same storm, twenty-four hours apart.
Retail politics sorts its practitioners into those who under-promise and over-deliver and those who over-promise and under-deliver.
Disaster warning abolishes the distinction, because the warning is a bet that cannot be lost. If the storm hits, you warned. If it misses, your preparedness “worked” — and the counterfactual can never be tested.
Brown is the system's most instructive convert. The independent review by former Police Commissioner Mike Bush found a “system failure” of leadership in the first hours of the January 2023 Auckland floods, in which four people died and the state of emergency arrived only after the city was already under water; Brown conceded he had been “too slow to be seen”.
He has not been slow to be seen since.
That asymmetry is the whole game: the only press conference a politician is ever punished for is the one not held.
Which is why Craig Little's restraint — vindicated by events — earned a Prime Ministerial rebuke, while the over-warner collects two news cycles for the price of one storm.
The Bay of Plenty ledger
If warning has become theatre, the disasters that matter are the ones no podium saw coming — and one coastline keeps the ledger.
The Rena ground onto Astrolabe Reef in October 2011 with no warning of any kind: nobody died, yet New Zealand's “worst maritime environmental disaster” and costliest shipwreck dominated the national news for months as oil and containers came ashore on Bay of Plenty beaches.
Whakaari erupted at 2.11pm on 9 December 2019 with 47 people on the island; 22 died, the story led front pages around the world, and the official recovery review later described the media interest as “relentless”.
Here the warning system failed in the opposite direction: GeoNet had raised the volcanic alert level three weeks earlier, and the boats kept going.
And in January this year a landslide at a Mt Maunganui holiday park killed six people, with the Government inquiry asked to consider, among other things, whether a warning was missed.
Three catastrophes, one coastline, and not a single anticipatory press conference among them — because the events that actually kill people and despoil coastlines are precisely the ones the warning apparatus cannot see.
Compare the ledger.
The unwarned disasters earned weeks and months of saturation coverage because the events themselves were the story.
The forecast swell earns a 48-hour cycle in which the warning is the story — and a politician can be its protagonist.
Media volume follows the disaster; political volume now precedes it.
The Bay of Plenty's dead were not failed by a shortage of press conferences.
The village stops coming
Aesop's point was never that the boy lied; it was what the village did about it.
The dilemma is genuine and symmetrical.
False negatives kill — that is the lesson of Gabrielle, and of the fifteen deaths the Government's own inquiry records.
But false positives erode the only thing warnings run on, which is belief — and belief, unlike a press release, cannot be reissued.
Little put it plainly: cry-wolf declarations diminish the states of emergency to come.
Three repairs suggest themselves.
Declarations should be the last tool in the toolbox, not the first — Wairoa's published reasoning shows what a disciplined activation threshold looks like.
Warnings should be fronted by forecasters and controllers, whose authority is technical, rather than by politicians, whose authority is electoral.
And the accountability press conference belongs after the event, when claims can be checked against facts, not before it, when nothing can.
The science of prediction is uncertain and will stay that way. The politics of prediction is the part within our power to fix.
The boy who cried wolf was not punished for lying — he was punished by being believed less on the day the wolf was real. No emergency alert, however loud, can fix that.
