"The Green Ring Burns: How Dana Kirkpatrick's Log Ship Celebration Buries the Truth About Tairāwhiti" - 8 April 2026

Two ships left Tūranganui-a-Kiwa last month. A National MP cheered. Nobody asked who owns the forests.

The forestry industry generates $202 million for Tairāwhiti's economy. The public spends $1.2 billion a year cleaning up what that same industry destroys. That's a 6:1 loss ratio — and Dana Kirkpatrick is on Facebook calling it a milestone.

The logs were raw. The profits went offshore. The whānau downstream are still repairing Cyclone Gabrielle damage while the Crown offered them less than 20% of what they needed.

This is the white supremacist neoliberal project: take the land, plant the land, harvest the land, send the bill to the people you took it from — and call their survival resilience.

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