Latest news with #South Island
RNZ News
9 hours ago
- RNZ News
Kaikōura steps up astrotourism as it dims the lights
The Milky Way Galaxy over the Kaikōura Ranges. Photo: LDR / Brooke Unger Kaikōura is stepping up its efforts to become a year-round destination, nearly a year on from obtaining dark sky sanctuary status. Colette Doughty, Kaikōura Dark Sky Trust co-ordinator, said new web pages have been created to offer a self-guided stargazing experience for locals and visitors. Anyone planning a visit to Kaikōura can check out the 'discover, dine, stay' page, she said. ''It is aimed at people looking to have an experience, whether coming from out of town, enjoying telescopic tours or staying somewhere with a dark sky focus. ''We are getting more and more people emailing and asking 'what can we do?' 'Where can we stay?'.'' Vistors and locals can also find information on self-guided stargazing and tips on light pollution and protection. While the town tries to attract more star-gazing tourists, the number of cruise ship visitors are expected to fall by half this summer. Just [ five cruise ships] are scheduled to visit Kaikōura during December, January and February, down from 11 last summer and 16 in summer 2023/24. New astrotourism ventures have started up including Moana Skies, which offers stargazing experiences, astrophotography experiences and a number of local businesses are getting on board. The Kaikōura district obtained international dark sky sanctuary status in September 2024, on the back of the Kaikōura District Council's new lighting rules in the District Plan. The motivation behind the dark sky bid was to protect the endangered Hutton's shearwater birds / tītī, as the birds regularly crash land in the town after becoming disorientated by street lights. The Kaikōura Dark Sky Trust displayed ''the good, the bad and the ugly'' of lighting at the Kaikōura A&P Show earlier this year. Photo: LDR / David Hill / North Canterbury News Doughty said the trust is working with local businesses and groups to help them source dark sky approved lighting on new builds and when replacing light bulbs. Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency has also been changing the street lights on Beach Road / State Highway 1, to the northern end of the town. The trust is working with schools so they can incorporate appropriate lighting into their 10-year upgrade programmes, and talking to retailers about what light bulbs they have in stock. ''It is a slow process to get little changes. We are not expecting immediate change, just when things are broken or need replacing,'' Doughty said. ''There's still local people who are perhaps not aware of the new lighting rules and the benefits of good lighting.'' She said people could save money by installing energy efficient lighting, using light shielding or a timer and turning lights off when not in use. To help educate the community, the trust has prepared a lighting box to demonstrate ''the good, the bad and the ugly'' of lighting, which it takes to local events. The trust is preparing a separate application for international dark community status to Dark Sky International for the town and peninsula, which was not able to be included in the dark sky sanctuary bid. For more information, go to LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
RNZ News
2 days ago
- Climate
- RNZ News
Top of the South Island bracing for drenching
After three extreme weather events, people at the top of the South Island are bracing for a fourth drenching in a month. Locals in Nelson and Tasman, have spent the last two weeks cleaning up after the last devastating flood. To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
RNZ News
17-07-2025
- RNZ News
How a local website was hijacked and filled with AI-generated 'coherent gibberish'
Crazy stories, none of them true. Photo: RNZ The headline states: "This valley is no longer safe for overnight stays - and DOC isn't explaining why." The story that follows conjures a scene from a horror film. Something odd has been going on in Whakataki valley east of Mount Aspiring National park, it is claimed. "Today, it's officially been closed to overnight stays - and the Department of Conservation isn't saying exactly why." A former hut warden, identified only by their first name, is quoted. An anonymous DOC worker adds: "There's more going on than we can talk about right now." As intriguing as it all sounds, none of it is true. This story is among a growing number of invented stories published to harvest views at the domain The website exists to give people information about an Auckland entertainment precinct but the news section is full of weird, bogus stories like this one that don't seem to belong. There is a Whakataki, but it's in the North Island not in Fiordland, like the story suggests. Another article claims DOC has put steel barriers across the entrance to Echo Hole, which it says is a cave tucked into a limestone bluff, in the South Island back country. According to DOC, there are numerous caves in Waitaki, but none called Echo Hole. The photo used in the story appears to be generated by artificial intelligence (AI). It shows a cave surrounded by rain forest. "The Waitaki district in the South Island is quite a dry district. It doesn't really have rain forest," DOC's manager of visitor safety and standards Andy Roberts told RNZ. DOC staff stumbled across the stories online earlier this month. All come from the same website, and many follow a pattern of taking a real place name, but applying it to the wrong part of New Zealand and making up a story. In several of the stories, DOC is cast as unforthcoming about reasons for supposed closures, and often the discovery of taonga is mentioned as a possible theory. None of the stories related to DOC are true. What is going on at Rod Ballenden, who runs the site, says it has been "hacked". The news section was added to the site and is being populated with the articles, which are all crammed full of digital ads. They are still trying to remove the stories but it's proving difficult, Ballenden says. Cyber security expert Adam Boileau says he suspects the domain name may have not been renewed by the site owner. Expiry details are public, and people look out for ones soon to expire. "They can basically snipe the domains that expire out from underneath their original owners." What is a little more unusual in this case is that the original website was left intact, and just a fake news section added. "I think in this case, because it's someone who's trying to leverage the existing reputation. They want that value to continue. Keeping the original services and making the original site owner not notice that anything's happened is a kind of a good way to preserve their investment." Boileau, who is technology editor at the 'Risky Business' podcast, thinks the site owner may be able to lodge a dispute with New Zealand's domain name registry to wrest ownership back. "All this feels like, you know, it's just every day on the shady modern internet. This is just what happens." Technology expert and author of Fake Believe: Conspiracy Theories in Aotearoa , Dylan Reeve says we may never know who is behind the hack, and whether it was a New Zealander, or someone offshore. The likely motivation for the hacking was to make money off the advertising appearing on the stories. "It's just filthy with ads," he says. The content also appears to be tailored to repeat search terms and he notes content from it is appearing in Google AI suggestions at the top of search results. "The fundamental thing going on here is revenue harvesting," he says. "It's just coherent gibberish designed to attract attention with headlines and some vaguely plausible paragraphs of content. But it's nonsense. I would be shocked if it wasn't AI generated," Reeve says. The automation may go beyond article text and image generation. There may be "automation flow" in use, Reeve says. This might include a tool which scrapes discussion website Reddit for popular topics, then uses these topics as a prompt for an AI tool to write the article and create an image. "This can all happen completely autonomously and you can just be pumping those out three a day, or three a minute." Along with numerous articles about the Department of Conservation, there are articles about petrol prices, real estate and grocery prices. "It's all successfully click bait-y, in a way that is sort of attached to the zeitgeist of New Zealand interests." Most of the stories include some mention of cultural issues and mention iwi, a taonga, remains, and occasionally a rāhui. Reeve thinks the choice of a divisive element to stories is intentional. "It's probably seen that divisive topics are successful and get a lot of attention." In some cases comments following the story express anger: "Totally ridiculous. As long as people are respectful to the area. Why can't we make the most of OUR country? We pay for it. It doesn't belong to Māori, just because they think they were there first. There was another tribe of people way before they got here." It's not clear whether the comments are from real people, or are fake. In some stories the same, or remarkably similar comments are repeated, suggesting some or all of the comments are also fake. A common pattern is for a comment starting with the word "honestly" and a reply starting with the word "exactly". University of Waikato research fellow Hemopereki Simon says discourse suggesting Māori aren't the indigenous population of the country isn't new but used to take place in books. In recent times these views have shifted online, particularly on social media. Simon has recently studied racism in Twitter discussion on the Three Waters proposal. "When I say this stuff is out there, it's out there," he says. If the comments are generated by AI, Simon is not surprised at the tone. "AI will ultimately, to some degree, promote some type of racist tropes." DOC's Andy Roberts has some advice for people who stumble across fake news stories about the conservation estate. "One of the things you'll notice in these stories is they never quote an actual DOC person. So when DOC puts information out in a press release, there'll always be a person that's behind that story." Official notices about closures are always published on the DOC website, and Roberts urged people to visit the official site to ensure they are getting correct information, rather than rely on second-hand sources. Closures do occur, but there is a high bar for this to happen. This could be due to a real safety risk, or occasional track or hut repairs.
RNZ News
17-07-2025
- General
- RNZ News
Farmers and council at odds over management of Tasman's flood-hit Upper Motueka River
Damage at Tapawera hop farm New Hoplands in the Tadmor Valley Photo: RNZ/Nathan Mckinnon A group of Tasman farmers and the district council are working to find a balance between managing the mighty Motueka River with the environmental impacts of gravel extraction. The district's farmers and growers were dealing with the trail of destruction left by the flooded upper Motueka and Wangapeka Rivers, following two serious flooding events within two weeks at the top of the South Island since late June. A private stopbank at the Tapawera bridge burst during the one-in-100-year floods in late June, dragging swathes of woody debris and river rock through nearby properties. This included at Dion McGaveston's 200 hectare sheep and beef farm, which he told RNZ looked " more like a riverbed " after the event. McGaveston and around 30 local farmers had been dealing with the Tasman District Council for years on ways to mitigate bank erosion and flood protection in the area. Damage at at McGaveston's Tapawera farm. Photo: SUPPLIED/Dion McGaveston Hop farmer Dean Palmer, of the Upper Motueka River management committee, said locals wanted high amounts of gravel removal, ideally around 200 cubic metres each year, then a shift to more sustainable levels . "Our main issue is the way it's being managed," Palmer said. "We've met several times, going back 10 years, and all the land owners will say, 'it's all the gravel and the river needs to be extracted to give it flood flow capacity'. "When a flood comes, there's no capacity to carry water down the river and it all carries in our margins and therefore scours big pieces, takes farm land, wrecks fences." Read more: A 2022 council report showed 649,000 cubic metres of gravel had built up since 1988 - most of it within the five years to 2022, said Palmer. "It's 100,000 [cubic metres] of additional gravel in there every year, and we've only been taken out [around] 20,000 per annum," he said. He said extraction volumes at the site were 8200 cubic metres in 2021, 12,200 in 2022, 37,300 in 2023 and 36,000 permitted in 2024 - but only 24,000 cubic metres were extracted. "Those numbers are a mere fraction of the 650,000 build-up that was there in 2022," Palmer said. He said that caused some of the problems locals were facing. "Too much, too late. We've been driving this for so long and it's so frustrating, the lack of traction we've got," Palmer said. "It's no surprise to anyone that we have way too much gravel in the river and therefore there is no capacity to carry the flood." Damage at at McGaveston's Tapawera farm. Photo: SUPPLIED/Dion McGaveston Tasman District Council rivers and coastal structures lead David Arseneau said it was working with the group to widen the river and plant vegetation to help catch debris during floods. It had extracted 50,000 cubic metres since 2022, with a further 30-40,000 cubic metres planned this year in efforts to manage erosion damage, he said. "We carry out this work under a global resource consent that requires us to maintain the riverbed within a Mean Bed Level Envelope (MBLE), which was established based on our historical river cross-section surveys," he said. "This prevents over-extraction while also enabling any extraction required if too much gravel accumulates. "As well, the consent has conditions around endangered or vulnerable nesting birds that impact work in the Upper Motueka River, as they require the braided river gravel beaches for nesting and nest during the summer months which is also the ideal time for extraction." However, Arseneau said extraction work was not a silver bullet flooding solution, as it was widely believed to be. "We do not extract gravel to provide a target flow capacity in the river channel itself, that is, to prevent flooding of adjacent property," he said. "The reason for this is that you would need to extract such an enormous amount of gravel from the river to have any noticeable benefit during the kinds of floods we've just experienced. It just doesn't provide enough flow capacity [measured by the channel's cross-sectional area] to make a meaningful difference. "As well, if you extracted that amount of gravel from the river you would be left with a narrow, entrenched canal with riverbanks that are constantly being eroded, requiring continual maintenance and expensive bank protection." Arseneau said stopbanks were needed to control large floods. He said recent surveys via LiDAR showed a "concerning" loss of riverbed material at the site, where the river corridor had constrained over time, so it was not able to carry out significant extraction under its consent. "The results of these surveys in the Upper Motueka River are concerning for us, showing significant loss of riverbed material from year to year. Over the entire Upper Motueka River managed section, there was a loss of 345,000 cubic metres of material from 2022 to 2023, and a further loss of 142,000 cubic metres from 2023 to 2024. "If we're looking just at the section of river from the Tapawera Bridge to the Wangapeka River confluence [the area in which Dion and Dean's properties are located], we've lost 147,000 and 77,000 cubic metres over those two periods, respectively, and the Mean Bed Level is such that we cannot carry out significant extraction under our consent." While Palmer said the council could earn royalties from contractors for the high quality extracted aggregate, Arseneau said there was "depressed aggregate demand from the industry" due to economic conditions and the long transport distance. This winter, the district council will re-assess how floods have changed the rivers using LiDAR. The Government announced a new half-million-dollar support package to support rural communities in Nelson and Tasman on Wednesday. It included a $300,000 contribution to the Mayoral Relief Fund for the rural sector, $100,000 with Federated Farmers to the Farmers' Adverse Events trust and $100,000 with Horticulture New Zealand. It followed $100,000 announced in June , a fifth of which went to the Top of the South Rural Support Trust. Farmers and growers in need of assistance should contact their local Rural Support Trust branch on 0800 787 254. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
10-07-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Southern councils suffer setback in partnership plan to deliver water services
Clutha District Mayor Bryan Cadogan would have preferred not to vote for any of the available options. Photo: supplied The Clutha District Council is on track to partner with local councils to deliver water services - if updated figures still stack up - despite one backing out. Councils have until early September to submit plans to the Department of Internal Affairs for delivering water services. Four southern councils have worked towards a jointly owned, council-controlled organisation - the Southern Water Done Well model. On Tuesday, the Waitaki District Council did a surprise u-turn, leaving the partnership and instead opting to manage its services inhouse for at least two years. The remaining district councils - Gore, Central Otago and Clutha - have scrambled to work out what they would do, with all of them due to adopt their new water services delivery model within seven days of Waitaki's vote. On Thursday, the Clutha District Council received quick modelling that suggested the councils involved would still garner reasonable savings by remaining with the partnership, but more detailed analysis was warranted. Councillors faced two main options during their meeting: They voted to stick with the partnership model, but the result was far from unanimous, and many voiced their reluctance, disappointment and frustrations with the process, the options and the short timeframe. Others raised concerns about losing local control or voice over its water services, no longer having economy of scale now Waitaki had backed out or going against public opinion. Almost 400 submissions were received, when the council went out for consultation, with more than three quarters supporting an inhouse approach. Clutha District Mayor Bryan Cadogan said he would have preferred not to vote for any of the options on the table, as none of them provided the relief he wanted for ratepayers. "There is no 'El Dorado' here," he said. "We're picking the best of some bad options. "I've not only been frustrated, I have been sickened by the structure and the obscene timeframes that we've been shackled to. These are the cards we have been dealt." New water rules had heaped pressure on them in recent years, particularly the number of rural water schemes that were now subject to drinking-water standards, Cadogan said. "In five years, this beautiful council of ours has been dragged... unmercifully to about $100 million of debt and ungodly rate rises. "That is the inhouse scenario. without the slight shielding umbrella that a [council-controlled organisation] gives and some of you say you want more of that. We can't take more." Chief executive Steve Hill said the updated modelling suggested that councils could still save money and ratepayers would likely be financially better off, if they stayed with the partnership, but he acknowledged the savings would be lower with the Waitaki District Council's exit and more work was needed for more detailed figures. The Department of Internal Affairs told councillors that its initial assessment suggested shifting to a three council collaboration was "likely to be OK", based on the work the councils had already done, but it could not give the same level of assurance or confidence, if they chose an inhouse model. Council would be assessed on the plan received in September and councils could face intervention, if they did not submit a financially sustainable, longer-term plan, the department said. If a Crown specialist was put in place, the council would lose control over its own destiny to deliver water services and would face more scrutiny over its finances, as the specialist would look at different funding avenues to develop a sustainable plan. The aim is to have the updated analysis on the advantages and disadvantages of the jointly owned company ready for a Clutha District Council meeting early next month. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
