Cash for storm-hit regions as PM stands by scrapping $6b resilience fund
Tuesday, 27 January 2026
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Cabinet will today be asked to sign off on immediate funds to help the regions damaged in last week’s wild weather to recover.
Emergency Management Minister Mark Mitchell will make the request at the Cabinet meeting that will be held ahead of Parliament sitting for the first time this year.
Already a housing service has been stood up to support people who have been displaced in areas that included Northland, Coromandel, Bay of Plenty and Tairāwhiti.
Six people died after a devastating landslide in Mt Maunganui, two people died in nearby Pāpāmoa and one person was swept away near Warkworth.
Ahead of the Parliamentary reboot, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Labour’s Chris Hipkins have been trading barbs over the cancellation of the $6 billion resilience fund set up after Cyclone Gabrielle.
Luxon says he stands by the decision to dismantle the fund set up by Labour.
Then-Finance Minister Grant Robertson set up the fund in 2023 to address vulnerabilities in NZ’s infrastructure to extreme weather, with a focus on transport, energy, and telecommunications infrastructure.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis wound up the fund in Budget 2024 when roughly half of it had been spent, returning $3.2b to the Government coffers, arguing not against resilience funding but for spending such money through normal Budget processes.
Luxon said on Monday he stood by this decision despite the extreme weather events last week, which cut off power for about 16,000 households and shut down multiple state highways and well as causing the deadly landslides in Tauranga.
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“What we have done is we're spending the money, but we're putting it through the normal budget processes, which is entirely appropriate from a financial control point of view,” Luxon said.
He noted that the Government had continued to spend serious amounts of money on resilience, including a $1.2b Regional Infrastructure Fund - which covers both resilience and economic growth projects - and over $1b to rebuild for areas impacted by the 2023 floods.
“It's just a process issue. The money's getting spent, but it's just having it all parked off in lots of different funds isn't the way to deal with it. We want to be able to run a normal, good budget process so that we can actually make sure the money's not just a marketing exercise,” Luxon said.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins criticised the Government for cutting the funding.
“We set up the $6b 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.
“This is a Government that have dragged their heels on issues around climate change, on issues around national resilience, and ultimately, we are two years behind where we should be.”
Hipkins said he was wary of any claims that any individual event could be have been changed due to the funding but said it would have helped the coutnry be better prepared in general.
The Post asked Regional Infrastructure Minister Shane Jones how much of the $1.2b fund had gone towards resilience projects as opposed to economic growth projects.
It was difficult to ascertain an exact figure as many projects tick both boxes or are still being finalised, but the office said close to $470m of resilience projects had been announced so far - including $200m of flood resilience funding.
Willis told The Post that the core of the decision was a belief that normal budget processes were needed to balance infrastructure needs against each other.
“Our belief is that investment in road, rail, telecommunications and electricity infrastructure should be weighed against investment in other infrastructure such as schools and hospitals,” Willis said.
“Unfortunately, no amount of money will guarantee that a road, transmission line or rail bridge won’t be affected by a severe weather event somewhere in the country. We live in a geologically diverse country.”
She also noted that the Government introduced legislation requiring local governments to create adaptation plans for at-risk areas.