Mt Maunganui landslide: Christopher Luxon defends not travelling to disaster zones on Thursday

Friday, 23 January 2026

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says he didn’t want to be a “burden or distraction” to emergency services by coming to flood-hit areas too early.

Luxon travelled to the Coromandel and the Bay of Plenty by helicopter on Friday morning, where six people remain unaccounted for after a landslide at Mt Maunganui campground on Thursday morning.

Heavy rainfall has smashed the upper North Island this week, leading to the deaths of two people in a separate landslide and a man being swept away in a river.

Asked by media whether he should have travelled to the area on Thursday, when he had no public events, Luxon said he timed his visit as to not be a distraction.

“Yesterday, I spent most of my time on the phone talking to all the mayors across the five regions that we have across the country that are impacted with local states of emergency,” Luxon said.

“It's just picking the right time when actually I don't become a burden or a distraction for the resources that actually I want focused on rescue.

“I don't want to get in the way of actually the work that needs to happen immediately. I've come as quickly as I possibly can.”

Luxon had to cancel a planned appearance at Rātana Pā’s annual celebrations on Friday, a decision he conveyed to the church leaders on Thursday.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins, speaking from Rātana, said this was the right call.

He declined to comment on Luxon’s reaction to the disaster while rescue operations were under way.

Luxon said central government agencies stood ready to send funding to councils in disaster-hit areas and were already working with them.

“There's no stopping of funds flowing out from central government.”

PM heckled by climate protesters

Luxon was briefly heckled by climate change protesters in Thames on Friday morning.

'It's a disgrace what you're doing with your climate policy, Prime Minister. It's an absolute disgrace, and we are suffering for it,' one woman said to him, according to the NZ Herald.

Hipkins said it was clear that climate change was leading to “once in a century” storms happening more quite regularly and anyone who didn’t acknowledge that had their “head in the sand”.

He criticised the Government for its dismantling of the $6b National Resilience Fund his Government set up after Cyclone Gabrielle.

“We set up the $6 billion fund to ensure that communities were more prepared and more resilient - that included things like fixing up roads, bridges, some of the flood protection infrastructure that we know needs a lot of work. The current government took that funding away. They can really answer to the consequences of that,” Hipkins said.

About half the fund was already allocated when it was dismantled, with $3.2b returned to the centre.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis said at the time that she was not ending funding for disaster resilience - just making sure it had to go through the regular funding process as everything else did.

Resilience was part of the Government’s $1.2b regional infrastructure fund launched in Budget 2024.